Doctors worried RFK Jr. will tout vaccine-skeptic views after he is picked for HHS secretary
With the recent pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, the environmental attorney's views on vaccines have been thrust back into the spotlight.
Kennedy has been a prominent vaccine skeptic, arguing that more research of vaccines is needed, although he has claimed in interviews that he has "never been anti-vaccine."
Vaccine researchers tell ABC News that his recent comments don't align with his past campaigns and that, if confirmed, he could convince vaccine-hesitant parents to not vaccinate their children.
"He's really not a vaccine skeptic; I'm a vaccine skeptic," Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center, an attending physician in the division of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Food and Drug Administration's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, told ABC News.
"Everybody who sits around the table at the FDA vaccine advisory committee is a vaccine skeptic, right? Show us the data, prove that this vaccine is safe, prove that it's effective, because then and only then will we authorize it, or recommend authorization or licensure," he said.
Offit argued that Kennedy is a "vaccine cynic," adding, "He thinks that we're not getting the right information, that there's an unholy alliance between the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA with the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] to hide the real data, and he's going to find the real data, which is utter nonsense."
Claims that vaccines cause autism
Kennedy has previously claimed that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine -- a myth that was born out of a now-debunked paper from the U.K. in 1998.
The fraudulent paper has since been discredited by health experts, retracted from the journal in which it was published, and its primary author, Andrew Wakefield, lost his medical license. More than a dozen high-quality studies have since found no evidence of a link between childhood vaccines and autism.
Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said he's worried that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy has spilled over into hesitancy towards childhood vaccines.
There have been more measles outbreaks this year than last year and a five-fold increase in whooping cough cases this year from the year before, according to CDC data, which Hotez says is a sign that more parents may be increasingly vaccine-hesitant.
According to the CDC, there have been a total of 277 measles cases reported in 30 states in 2024 -- more than four times the amount last year -- with 16 outbreaks this year compared to four outbreaks in 2023. An estimated 96% of measles cases this year were not fully vaccinated. Additionally, whooping cough cases are at the highest levels this year since 2014, according to CDC data.
This comes as vaccinations among kindergarteners dipped in the 2023-2024 school year for the fourth year in a row – failing to meet the 95% threshold goal aimed to prevent a single infection from sparking an outbreak. The last time that threshold was met was pre-pandemic, during the 2019-2020 school year.
"Now you put someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation's most prominent, well-known anti-vaccine activist at the top of the food chain, at the top of Health and Human Services," Hotez said. "I don't see how these things improve any. If anything, they could start to decline even further. …So, I worry about further erosion in the number of kids getting vaccinated in the U.S."
Claims about the COVID-19 vaccine
Kennedy also spread vaccine misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic including claims that Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation were trying to profit off a COVID-19 vaccine.
During a December 2021 Louisiana House of Representatives meeting discussing a proposal to require schoolchildren to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, Kennedy falsely called the vaccine the "deadliest vaccine ever made."
Health officials say COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective following clinical trials that involved tens of thousands of people, and have since helped save millions of lives.
Offit says he is worried that, as the head of the HHS, Kennedy would help select directors of the CDC, FDA and the National Institutes of Health who are not qualified, and could similarly espouse vaccine-skeptic views.
"My worry is that he is not going to pick technically competent people," he said. "My worry is he's going to have a role in selecting ideologues who are not well-educated about infectious diseases or vaccines, and maybe who lack government experience as well."
Both Offit and Hotez said it will be important over the next four years for doctors to have conversations with vaccine-hesitant parents to educate them on the importance of vaccinating their children in case they are swayed by vaccine-skeptic rhetoric from Kennedy.
Offit said he is already getting emails from pediatricians about parents who are hesitant to vaccinate their children because of Kennedy's past comments.
"Over the last few days, I've gotten emails from pediatricians, one particularly in Connecticut that comes to mind, where they're saying, 'Parents are coming in, and they're saying they don't want to get vaccines, in part because of what [Kennedy] said. What should we do?'" Offit said. "So, I think that's where the rubber meets the road. It's certainly a lot more work for clinicians than it used to be."
