President Trump has long touted his record of fulfilling his sweeping vision for America using the mantra “promises made, promises kept.” Unfortunately, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., doesn’t view that phrase as something worth modeling.
Before and during his confirmation hearings to be HHS secretary, Kennedy vowed to keep vaccines available to those who want them. Ten months into his tenure, it’s clear Secretary Kennedy never intended to keep that commitment to those who confirmed him or to the American public.
Since assuming the role of HHS secretary, Kennedy has fired the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and appointed memberswith a long history of vaccine skepticism. While downsizing or shaking up HHS needn’t be a bad thing, it is a problem when the new guard is intent on taking away patient choice.
As the Taxpayers Protection Alliance has previously documented, the new ACIP appointees have madeCOVID-19 booster shots harder to get among a wide swath of adults. Meanwhile, Secretary Kennedy has pushed the government to endorse tenuous links between the COVID vaccine and the deaths of young people as a likely pretext for more restrictions.
These efforts to tighten access to popular and demonstrably safe vaccines restrict Americans’ freedoms and will expose millions of households to preventable illnesses.
The continued push to undermine confidence in childhood vaccines should be particularly worrisome for future generations. Americans are already seeing the results of anti-vaccination efforts being pushed at the highest levels of state and federal government. Across the country, measles—which hospitalizes one in five infected children under age 5 after having been declared eradicated in the United States 25 years ago—has surged to levels not seen in many decades.
Because of Secretary Kennedy, this resurgence of once-eradicated diseases could harm even more children. First, his reconfigured ACIP panelrecommended delaying combined vaccinations against measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella (MMRV), for children under age 4, who previously were eligible for a combined vaccine beginning at 12months of age. As the American Academy of Family Physicians rightly points out, bureaucrats are actively denying parents the option to vaccine their young children in one comprehensive inoculation.
Then, on December 5, ACIP overturned decades of precedent and overruled the consensus of the medical community when it removed the universal recommendation on administering the hepatitis B vaccine to newborns. The key presenter at last week’s meeting in favor of changing the vaccination schedule was Aaron Siri, whose expertise on childhood vaccines, as noted by Sen. Bill Cassidy(R-La.), is limited to being a trial lawyer who has gotten rich suing pharmaceutical manufacturers.
The CDC claimed that this new policy allows for “individual-based decision-making.” The reality is that, like how ACIP handled COVID-19 boosters, the hepatitis B vaccine will now be subject to an unclear and costly standard called “shared clinical decision-making" (SCDM). As University of California law professor Dr. Doris Reiss noted, SCDM “usually leads to less uptake, partly because nobody is sure what it requires.” The evidence even suggests that SCDM status frightens providers into prescribing affected vaccines less often than before.
Secretary Kennedy and HHS bureaucrats seem intent on sowing doubt about trusted vaccines,making patients and providers jump through countless hoops to get them, and undermining manufacturers’ ability to produce them, through efforts to upend the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) and bankrupt it by adding costly and unfounded autism-related claims to the system.
Ultimately, these efforts will result in fewer children taking vaccines that have essentially eradicatedonce-highly lethal diseases in the United States. After all, as even some ACIP members have admitted, the longer people must wait to get vaccines, and the more shots they must take, the lower overall compliance will be. That’s bad for patients, their families, and healthcare freedom in general.
Secretary Kennedy has promised to Make America Healthy Again. But a core component of that effort should be allowing patients to make decisions about treatments and inoculations. To safeguard their own health, Americans must have the tools—such as vaccines—to ensure they’re being adequately protected from diseases. Secretary Kennedy’s decisions are compromising access to these pivotal tools.
By revoking long-standing vaccine recommendations, considering new restrictions on vaccine ingredients, and undermining confidence in pivotal products, Secretary Kennedy is making Americans less healthy and less free.
Meanwhile, HHS refuses to answer questions about the “how” and “why” of key initiatives such as ongoing autism research. On September 5, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance Foundation submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to HHS to get better insight on the agency’s autism research process and pushing of dubious links between Tylenol, vaccines, and autism. Unfortunately, the agency has yet to respond.
This is not an isolated incident at HHS. An April report in Politico noted that agency officials were shutting down FOIA offices and scaling back information response efforts. This not only raises legal questions but also enables government officials to act recklessly and politicize science.
It’s time for a new approach at HHS that prioritizes transparency, health, and patient choice. After overseeing Operation Warp Speed, one of the greatest health triumphs in American history, President Trump should consider if he wants Secretary Kennedy’s anti-freedom, anti-health agenda to be a core part of his own legacy.
Ross Marchand is a senior fellow at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.
