Trump’s anti-health secretary strikes again

Kennedy's latest move imperils children in America and around the world.

By Jeff Nesbit

While America watched President Trump bomb Iran (and joke about renaming Pete Hegseth his “Secretary of War”) and the GOP Congress continued its insane push to destroy Medicaid so Trump’s wealthy friends could receive their tax cuts, two pretty terrible things also happened that are likely to jeopardize the lives of children in America and around the world.

Those two awful things were the handiwork of Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, at this incredible juncture, should obviously be renamed America’s “anti-health” secretary.

First, Kennedy announced (in a falsehood-riddled video statement to international public health leaders gathered at a global event in Brussels) that the United States will no longer contribute funding to Gavi, a global alliance that helps buy vaccines to treat the world’s poorest children, according to a report from Politico, which broke the story.

The reason, Kennedy said, was that Gavi was ignoring safety. That’s a lie. All vaccines are tested for safety. Vaccines have saved the lives of millions of people, especially children. But that didn’t stop Kennedy from continuing his decades-long conspiracy campaign against vaccines by using his post in the Trump administration to end successful vaccine programs.

What is true is that, should the Trump administration follow through on Kennedy’s statement and deny U.S. funding for vaccines through Gavi, tens of thousands of the world’s poorest children will be sickened by some of the deadliest infectious diseases known to humankind. Some of them will die as a result.

“Secretary Kennedy's statement to Gavi, the vaccine alliance, is literally sickening,” Tom Frieden, the former director of President Obama’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote on X.

“Sickening because millions of children’s lives are in the balance because of Mr. Kennedy’s fringe beliefs and misinformation on vaccines,” Frieden wrote. “Sickening because the U.S. is turning its back on women and children at risk of death and disability. And sickening because it reflects the invasion of anti-vaccination falsehoods into life-and-death programs.”

Atul Gawande, who was head of global health at the U.S. Agency for International Development, posted on X, “This is a travesty and a nightmare. The US was a founder of @Gavi. It lowers vaccine costs for the world, has vaccinated 1B children, and averted 19M deaths. This pull out will cost 100s of thousands of children's lives a year — and RFK Jr will be personally responsible.”

Other public health leaders were just as appalled by Kennedy’s ridiculous, unfounded claim that Gavi had somehow ignored safety by making life-saving vaccines available to save the lives of some of the world’s poorest children.

Kennedy’s decision to have the United States renege on its pledge to support Gavi is “terrible but totally predictable,” wrote Ashish K. Jha, President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 coordinator. “Gavi helps poor kids around the world get vaccinated against polio and measles and other life-threatening diseases. This is just mind bogglingly awful.”

Gavi, of course, defended itself. “Gavi's utmost concern is the health and safety of children,” the group said in a statement responding to Kennedy’s assertion.

Other global public health leaders similarly rebutted Kennedy’s anti-vaccine stance. “Gavi prioritizes saving lives, and it's done with incredible scientific rigor,” said Bill Gates, whose philanthropic foundation co-hosted the Gavi summit with the European Union. “We're constantly looking at safety.”

But Kennedy’s anti-science, anti-vaccine promise to de-commit U.S. funding to Gavi might not have been the most terrible action last week by Trump’s anti-health secretary.

His second act last week was to make certain that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s main advisory committee on vaccines somehow came to the tortured, anti-science conclusion that the entire childhood vaccine schedule needed to be reconsidered.

Some quick background. During his Senate confirmation hearings, Kennedy promised to the Senate health panel chairman Bill Cassidy (R-La.) that he would not do anything to undermine the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the gold-standard panel that recommends vaccine standards and practices. Much of the U.S. and global medical and public health establishment has relied on ACIP for vaccine recommendations for decades.

Kennedy reneged on his promise to Cassidy and fired all 17 of the ACIP panel members. He replaced them with several known anti-vaccine conspirators. The first ACIP meeting with Kennedy’s new ACIP members was held on Wednesday, and its first action out of the box was to cast doubt on childhood vaccine recommendation schedules.

One of the two new ACIP co-chairs, Martin Kulldorff, announced within the first few minutes of the meeting that the panel was calling into question the entire childhood vaccination schedule and would start a review of vaccines that have been approved and safely used for years. He also announced that ACIP would look at the cumulative effect of vaccine shots given to children during their school-age years.

In a move that’s clearly designed to cast doubt on the safety and effectiveness of the entire childhood vaccine schedule, Kulldorff said the ACIP review will literally go back in time and look at shots that have been approved for seven or more years. He cited the hepatitis B shot given to infants at birth and the combination measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox shot, two immunizations that have been targeted by vaccine skeptics.

Calling into question the entire childhood vaccine schedule is not just incredibly dangerous and contrary to the long-established safety and efficacy profile of these childhood vaccines, but it’s also going to cause immense pain and angst for millions of parents.

And what Kulldorff—who said at the ACIP meeting that he had been fired from Harvard for refusing to get a Covid-19 vaccine because he had said he “already had (herd) immunity” from infections—was doing with the review is simply parroting conspiratorial, anti-science nonsense that has circulated among anti-vaxxers for years.

“These are anti-vaccine talking points and have been for decades,” Paul Offitt, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told STAT.

Other public health leaders were even more direct about what Kennedy’s deliberate manipulation of ACIP means as part of his anti-vaccine conspiracy campaign.

“It’s deeply concerning to me that—within minutes of the meeting starting—the new ACIP chair immediately sought to cast doubt on the safety and effectiveness of childhood vaccines,” Richard Besser, who served as acting CDC director, told The New York Times. “Vaccine experts regularly study the childhood vaccination schedule and have repeatedly deemed it to be effective and safe. I’m worried that this is a harbinger of even worse things to come.”

Both actions by Trump’s anti-health secretary—the U.S. decommitment on Gavi that will threaten the world’s poorest children and the ACIP review of long-approved vaccines safely and effectively delivered to tens of millions of American children—sadly leads to just one inescapable conclusion.

Almost nothing that emerges from Trump’s HHS can be trusted. Kennedy is blatantly foisting years of anti-science, conspiratorial nonsense into critical HHS agencies like CDC. And it means that the American people will need to look for scientific and medical guidance from places other than the department that Trump’s anti-health secretary leads.

Jeff Nesbit was the assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS during the Biden administration.

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