Doctors are concerned that RFK Jr. vaccine-skeptical views after being picked as HHS secretary

With the recent selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, the environmental advocate’s views on vaccines have returned to the spotlight.

Kennedy has been a prominent vaccine skeptic and has argued that more research on 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 are inconsistent with his past campaigns and that, if confirmed, he could convince vaccine-hesitant parents not to vaccinate their children.

“He’s really not a vaccine skeptic; I am a vaccine skeptic,” Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center, attending physician in the department of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and member of the U.S. Government’s Food and Drug Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Related Biological Products, told ABC News.

“Everyone sitting around the table at the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee is a vaccine skeptic, right? Show us the data, proof that this vaccine is safe, proof that it is effective, because then and only then will we authorize it, or recommend authorization or licensing,” he said.

Offit argued that Kennedy is a “vaccine cynic,” adding, “He thinks 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 complete nonsense.”

Claims that vaccines cause autism

Kennedy has previously claimed that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is a myth that originated in a now debunked article from Britain in 1998.

The fraudulent article has since been discredited by health experts, withdrawn from the journal in which it was published, and its lead author, Andrew Wakefield, lost his medical license. Since then, more than a dozen high-quality studies have 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 worries that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy has turned into hesitancy toward regarding vaccines for children.

According to CDC data, there have been more measles outbreaks this year than last year and the number of whooping cough cases has increased fivefold this year compared to the year before. Hotez says this is a sign that more parents may be becoming increasingly hesitant about vaccines.

According to the CDC, a total of 277 cases of measles have been reported in 30 states in 2024 – more than four times as many as 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 this year are at their highest level since 2014, according to CDC data.

This comes as vaccinations among preschoolers fell for the fourth year in a row in the 2023-2024 school year – falling short of the 95% threshold target designed to prevent a single infection from causing an outbreak. The last time that threshold was met was before the pandemic, during the 2019-2020 school year.

“Now you’re putting 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 care and human services,” Hotez said. “I don’t see how these things are improving. They could decline even further. …So I worry about further erosion in the number of children getting vaccinated in the US”

Claims about the COVID-19 vaccine

Kennedy also spread misinformation about vaccines 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 tried to capitalize on a COVID-19 vaccine.

During a December 2021 meeting of the Louisiana House of Representatives discussing a proposal to require schoolchildren to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, Kennedy incorrectly called the vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever created.”

Health officials say COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective after clinical trials involving tens of thousands of people have since helped save millions of lives.

Offit says he worries that Kennedy, as head of HHS, would help select directors of the CDC, FDA and National Institutes of Health who are unqualified and could similarly embrace vaccine-skeptical positions.

“My concern is that he’s not going to pick technically competent people,” he said. “My concern is that he will play a role in selecting ideologues who are not well informed about infectious diseases or vaccines, and who may also not have government experience.”

Both Offit and Hotez said it will be important over the next four years that doctors will have conversations with vaccine-hesitant parents to educate them about the importance of vaccinating their children in case they are seduced by vaccine-skeptical rhetoric from Kennedy.

Offit said he’s 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 been getting emails from pediatricians, especially one from Connecticut that comes to mind, 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 doctors than it used to be.”