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Insider accounts reveal the scale of the health secretary's ambitions to curb childhood immunizations and unearth a link between vaccines and autism.
A U.S. health secretary prepared to spend billions to seek a link between vaccines and autism. Vaccine skeptics shaping policy. A proposal to eliminate the entire federal immunization schedule for American children.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has brought a series of once-unthinkable public-health proposals to the highest levels of the Trump administration since becoming health secretary early last year, according to Reuters interviews with 16 current and former officials with direct knowledge of the discussions.
The officials, from the U.S. health department and White House, shared details of internal discussions on condition of anonymity. Their first-hand accounts of Kennedy’s previously unreported efforts reveal a tenacious activist who has pushed through some of the biggest changes to U.S. vaccine policy in decades – and who sought to go much further than previously known to dismantle the status quo.
"He's an anti-vaccine activist. That's who he is. That's who he's been for 20 years. To expect that as secretary of Health and Human Services he'd be anything other than that is wishful thinking," said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a long-time immunization adviser to the CDC.
Kennedy’s efforts to cast doubt on the safety of shots for common diseases are making it harder to curb outbreaks, including the biggest U.S. resurgence of measles in more than three decades, Offit said.
“He scares people about vaccines, which only causes them not to get them,” Offit said. "We're screwed.”
The Department of Health and Human Services did not make Kennedy available for an interview. Provided with details of Reuters’ reporting, spokeswoman Courtney Spencer disputed key details as untrue or inaccurate, including the plan to eliminate the entire childhood immunization schedule. Spencer didn’t respond to a request for clarification about what was incorrect.
Kennedy has been unable to implement several elements of his vaccine agenda in the face of resistance from different corners of the government, including within the health department and the White House, the Reuters reporting found. Furthermore, one of his most ambitious changes to public health - removing vaccines for six out of 17 diseases from the recommended childhood vaccination schedule - has been put on hold by a federal judge in response to a lawsuit from the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups.
Despite the setbacks, Kennedy has pushed through major changes in his time at the health department, which oversees national health agencies including the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The reforms include winding down mRNA vaccine development, withdrawing funding for an international vaccine alliance and tightening access to COVID shots. Many health experts have said his use of his position to elevate concerns about vaccine safety has sown confusion about which immunizations, if any, parents should give their children.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/inside-rfk-jrs-push-dismantle-decades-us-vaccine-policy-2026-07-14/
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Inside RFK Jr.’s push to dismantle decades of U.S. vaccine policy