What it's like watching RFK Jr.'s hearing with his biggest fans as an autistic person
The basement of the Dirksen Senate Office building was packed Wednesday morning with people lining up to watch Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee even though it was taking place on the first floor.
It was the first day of hearings for Kennedy in his attempt to become secretary of Health and Human Services. He will also testify before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the very committee his late Uncle Ted led as chairman before he was diagnosed with brain cancer.
Supporters were decked out in Kennedy gear, and many of them referred to him as 'Bobby,' the name used for his father when he roamed through these same halls as a senator from New York and US attorney general before his 1968 presidential campaign and assassination.
Sheri Gagnon and her granddaughter drove from South Carolina to take in the spectacle. 'And so I thought, wow, we can go up and support Bobby because Bobby's been supporting us,' she told The Independent.
Kennedy has come under withering criticism for his use of debunked vaccine conspiracy theories. And I'm one of his critics as an autistic person who believes his anti-vaccine rhetoric has harmed the community.
For years, I have traveled around the country interviewing autistic people about their experiences, which are chronicled in my book We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation. In that capacity, I interviewed one young autistic person whose mother blamed herself for vaccinating her child.
In the years since the anti-vaccine panic that Kennedy elevated, we have seen an improvement in how society views autism. But Kennedy puts that progress at risk. By toying with the claim that vaccines cause autism, he is implying that autism is something to be feared and to be avoided and that not taking vaccines will help with that.
Kennedy's hearing inspired me to go 'stealth' to see what his most enthusiastic supporters think about him. One of the benefits of being an autistic person who can speak and hold a job — a luxury many don't have — is that people don't know immediately that I am autistic.
'I'm a sit-at-home-and-read kind of person,' Gagnon said. 'And I don't like to bother the world, but the world is starting to bother us because the journalists aren't reading the science.'
To Gagnon, Kennedy is someone 'lifting the veil' and 'he's just like the middleman, and we keep shooting the middleman.'
It is true that the health system consistently fails plenty of people, especially women, with their health claims often discredited by professionals. Amy Macris came to the hearing from Durham, North Carolina, and mentioned how she worked for a biomedical research company when she was diagnosed with a complex illness.
'I went to every specialty and went to different states, and I went to different countries, and no one could help me,' she told me. 'So I've put things together myself. I found a few doctors who were outside-of-the-box thinkers, and here I am after 13 years of thinking that I was dying.'
To her, Kennedy is the kind of shakeup needed in the department.
'They understand sickness, and they give you sort of band-aid treatments that really just keep you sick,' she said. 'You don't actually heal. They're just putting a band-aid on the symptoms.'
During Kennedy's hearing, many of his fans looked intently at their phones. During questioning from Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, one of RFK Jr.'s supporters called him 'a piece of s**t.'
Some of Kennedy's supporters were obviously disappointed at how Democrats handled him.
'You have people like Elizabeth Warren, who knows all about regulation with banks she comes from Massachusetts, with all the biotech and health companies,' Susan Labin told The Independent. During the hearing, Warren grilled Kennedy about how he profited from an arrangement from a law firm that specializes in suing drug companies.
Ironically, Andrew Wakefield, the British former physician who promoted the link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and autism, lost his medical license because he did not disclose that he had been paid by law firms suing vaccine manufacturers.
But Chris Devol said he decided to get behind Kennedy largely because of the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.
'I think if anybody truly wants peace, that Bobby is that kind of person, and the Democratic Party proved that they really weren't interested in doing things,' he said. Devol said he collected signatures to get Kennedy on the ballot in Pennsylvania before Kennedy dropped out to endorse Trump.
'Obviously, we'd prefer him being president, but the team that Trump has put together is absolutely incredible, and I hope that everybody that is so scared to death that Trump will at least take one day at a time, and let's see how things play out,' he said.
Throughout his hearing, Kennedy tried to insist that he was not anti-vaccine, saying that his children were vaccinated, despite the fact, as Sen. Bernie Sanders flagged, his organization, the Children's Defense Fund, sold onesies for babies bragging about unvaccinated status.
That does not seem to bother Kennedy's fans.
'My favorite comparison is between just pure tobacco and Marlboro reds,' Macris said. 'You know, the cigarette industry, they add all of these additives to make it more irritating to your lungs, so the tobacco gets in and makes it more addictive.'
The same, she said, is true for vaccines.
'People are talking about thimerosal, which is mercury is incredibly neurotoxic, and we're giving it to children and babies, and we're seeing all these diseases come up,' she said. This came despite the fact that thimerosal was removed from vaccines in 2001 as a precautionary measure.
Labin said she came to the hearing on behalf of her grandchildren and said that even though she did not have autistic grandchildren, her friends were worried about vaccines.
'Because anybody who reads the literature, not the government literature, but the independent peer-reviewed university literature, can see that there is a huge correlation,' she said. 'And boys are even more susceptible.'
It's true that boys are more likely to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) than females. But that has largely been the case going back to initial research on autism. And diagnosis has largely been skewed by gendered perceptions of autism.
For years, autistic people, their families and loved ones have had to wrestle with these lies, the skewing of data, and misinformation. They had to contend with their feeling they did something wrong by vaccinating and failing their children. All the while, Kennedy gained credibility because of his famous name.
Kennedy could not have promoted his presidential campaign had it not been for his previous espousing of anti-vaccine views — views that Trump at a minimum toyed with before running for president and in the days since.
Now, thankfully, the idea that vaccines cause autism has been thoroughly discredited. But falsehoods cannot be untold. Like the viruses that vaccines inoculate against, the misinformation has permeated the bloodstream.
Except now, if he is confirmed, Kennedy will no longer be the problem of autistic people and their loved ones. He will be everyone's problem. And none of us can go stealth to avoid that.
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The True Beginning of America's Anti-Vaccine Era
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accepted his new position as health secretary, he made a big show of distancing himself from his past life. 'News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry,' Kennedy, who has for decades promoted the debunked notion that vaccines cause autism and has baselessly sown doubt over the ability of the U.S. government to vet shots, said at his confirmation hearing in January. 'I am neither. I am pro-safety.' But for all Kennedy's talk, this week he did exactly what a person would do if they were trying to undermine the scientific consensus on vaccination in the United States. He abruptly dismissed the entire expert committee that advises the CDC on its nationwide vaccine recommendations—and began to fill the roster with like-minded people ready to cast doubt on the benefits of vaccination. Like Kennedy, few of these new appointees to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice, or ACIP, have openly embraced the notion that they are anti-vaccine. But among them are individuals who have spoken out against COVID vaccines and policies, claimed vaccine injuries for their own children, and falsely linked COVID shots to deaths—or even baselessly accused those vaccines of ' causing a form of acquired immunity deficiency syndrome.' In January, I wrote that remaking the committee in exactly this way would be an especially harmful blow to Americans' health: Perhaps more than any other body of experts in the U.S., ACIP guides the nation's future preparedness against infectious disease. By appointing a committee that is poised to legitimize more of his own radical views, Kennedy is giving his skewed version of scientific reality the government's imprimatur. Whether he will admit to it or not, he is serving the most core goal of the anti-vaccine movement—eroding access to, and trust in, immunization. In an emailed statement, Health and Human Services Press Secretary Emily G. Hilliard reiterated that 'Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine—he is pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability,' and added that his 'evidence-based approach puts accountability and radical transparency first, which will restore trust in our public health system.' (Kennedy, notably, promised Senator Bill Cassidy during his confirmation process that he would maintain ACIP, as Cassidy put it, 'without changes.') Since the 1960s, ACIP has lent government policy on vaccines the clout of scientific evidence. Its mandate is to convene experts across fields such as infectious disease, immunology, pediatrics, vaccinology, and public health to carefully vet the data on immunizations, weigh their risks and benefits, and vote on recommendations that guide the public on how to use them—who should get vaccines, and when. Those guidelines are then passed to the CDC director, who—with only the rarest of exceptions—accepts that advice wholesale. 'These recommendations are what states look to, what providers look to,' Rupali Limaye, an expert in vaccine behavior at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me. Medicare, for instance, is required to fully cover the vaccines that ACIP recommends; ACIP also determines which vaccines are covered by the Vaccines for Children Program, which provides free vaccines for children whose families cannot afford them. The experts who serve on ACIP have the opportunity, more than just about any of their scientific peers, to translate their vaccine rhetoric into reality. So far, Kennedy has dismissed the 17 people who were serving on ACIP, and filled eight of the newly open slots. Most of the new nominees have an obvious bone to pick with at least some vaccines, especially COVID shots, and have publicly advocated for limiting their use. Among the new members, for instance, is Robert Malone, a controversial physician who has spoken at anti-vaccine events, where he has denounced COVID vaccines and, without evidence, suggested that they can worsen coronavirus infections. Another appointee is Vicky Pebsworth, who serves on the board of the National Vaccine Information Center, an anti-vaccine nonprofit previously known as Dissatisfied Parents Together. A third, Retsef Levi, a health-care-management expert, called for the administration of COVID vaccines to be halted in 2023, and has questioned the shots' safety, despite a large body of evidence from clinical trials supporting their continued use. Overall, 'this is not a list that would increase confidence in vaccine decisions,' Dorit Reiss, a vaccine-policy expert at UC San Francisco, told me. (None of these new ACIP members returned a request for comment.) The next ACIP meeting is scheduled for the end of this month—and the agenda includes discussion about anthrax vaccines, chikungunya vaccines, COVID-19 vaccines, cytomegalovirus vaccine, human-papillomavirus vaccine, influenza vaccines, Lyme-disease vaccine, meningococcal vaccines, pneumococcal vaccines, and RSV vaccines. That's a big slate of topics for a brand-new panel of members, Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert who has previously served on ACIP, told me: Depending on how the meeting is structured, and on the input from CDC scientists, these new committee members could substantially alter the guidelines on several immunizations—perhaps so much so that certain shots could stop being recommended to certain groups of Americans. Based on the composition of the committee so far, Offit predicts that eventually the new ACIP will push the CDC away from full-throated endorsement of many of these vaccines. Even subtle changes in the wording of CDC recommendations—a should swapped for a may —can have big ripple effects, Limaye told me. Insurers, for instance, may be more reluctant to cover vaccines that are not actively endorsed by the CDC; some states—especially those in which vaccines have become a political battleground—may stop mandating those types of shots. If the CDC softens its recommendations, 'we will likely see more partisan divides' in who opts for protection nationwide, Jason Schwartz, a vaccine-policy expert at Yale, told me. Pharmaceutical companies may, in turn, cut down production of vaccines that don't have full CDC backing—perpetuating a cycle of reduced availability and reduced enthusiasm. And primary-care physicians, who look to the CDC's vaccination schedule as an essential reference, may shift the language they use to describe childhood shots, nudging more parents to simply opt out. Historically, medical and public-health associations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, have aligned their vaccine recommendations with ACIP's—because those recommendations were all driven by scientific evidence. Now, though, scientific consensus and government position are beginning to diverge: Multiple groups of physicians, scientists, and public-health scholars have issued statements condemning the vaccine decisions of Kennedy and his allies; a number of prominent scientists have now banded together to form a kind of alt-ACIP, dubbing themselves the Vaccine Integrity Project. As the views of fringe vaccine groups become the government's stance, Americans may soon have to choose between following the science or following what their nation's leaders say. Identifying as 'anti-vaccine' has historically been taboo: In a nation where most people remain largely in favor of shots, the term is pejorative, an open acknowledgement that one's views lie outside of the norm. But the more vaccine resistance infiltrates HHS and its advisers, the more what's considered normal may shift towards Kennedy's own views on vaccines; ACIP's reputation for evidence-backed thinking could even gild those views with scientific legitimacy. Assembling one's own team of friendly experts is an especially effective way to sanewash extremism, Reiss told me, and to overturn the system through what appear to be normal channels. If the nation's most prominent group of vaccine advisers bends toward anti-vaccine, the term loses its extremist edge—and the scientists who argue, based on sound data, that vaccines are safe and effective risk being labeled anti-government.
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an hour ago
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Under RFK Jr., Vaccine Approval Is Getting More Politicized, Not Less
"Vaccines have become a divisive issue in American politics," asserted Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his June 9 Wall Street Journal op-ed. "Public confidence is waning." This is true. But the HHS secretary bears responsibility for much of that division and waning confidence. And he's just made it worse. How? Kennedy has politicized the U.S. vaccine approval process by summarily firing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) earlier this week. Typically appointed to four-year terms, Kennedy has taken the unprecedented step of prematurely sacking the entire panel. Two days later, he announced his selection of eight new members, many of whom are chiefly famous for espousing contrarian views with respect to vaccine safety and efficacy. So what did Kennedy find wrong with the original ACIP panel? The secretary asserted that it "has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interests" stemming from members' "immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy." At least in his Journal op-ed, the secretary offers no evidence of any unreported or improper conflicts of interest among those he just fired. It is worth noting that the fired ACIP members were vetted before they were appointed and that they each declare any conflicts that later emerge before each of the committee's meetings. What about RFK Jr.'s vague claims hinting at nefarious "immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms" on the part of committee members? If your automobile keeps stalling out, you take your jalopy to a trained mechanic for diagnosis and repair. If your computer system has been hacked, you seek help from qualified computer engineers. You earnestly hope that your mechanics and computer engineers are fully immersed in their respective systems of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms—that is, you hope they are experts who know what they are doing. Looking over the pre-firing ACIP membership list, they chiefly appear to be immersed in the fields of immunology, vaccinology, and epidemiology. In other words, they, on the face of it, have the training you would expect them to have in order to expertly diagnose the relative safety and efficacy of vaccines. For the most part, the new appointees are notably lacking in such professional expertise. The HHS secretary gives his game away when he characterizes his wholesale firing as being "above any pro- or antivaccine agenda." With respect to his new ACIP appointees, Kennedy promised that "none of these individuals will be ideological anti-vaxxers." That's great. After all, an anti-vaccine agenda makes as much sense as anti–automobile repair or anti–computer debugging agendas. The agendas we want are pro–making cars run, pro–computers correctly ciphering, and pro–vaccines that protect against diseases. However, in looking over the backgrounds of the new ACIP members, several of them can be fairly characterized as being at least anti-vaxxer-adjacent. First, there is physician researcher Robert Malone, who has made exaggerated claims about being the inventor of the mRNA technologies that led to the development of the successful mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Eventually, Malone became a COVID-19 vaccine skeptic, asserting that "they are not working." In 2023, he credulously cited a bogus analysis that claimed COVID-19 vaccines were responsible for 17 million excess deaths worldwide. Later epidemiological research suggests that the vaccines averted around 4 million deaths globally. A 2024 Brookings Institution report suggests "the delivery of vaccines to a substantial majority of the American population by mid-2021 saved close to 800,000 American lives relative to what would have occurred had vaccines not been developed." Then there is public health nurse Vicky Pebsworth. She is a board member of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). NVIC continues to peddle the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism, as does our HHS secretary. Next up is Massachusetts Institute of Technology management professor Retsef Levi. In 2023, Levi called for the immediate suspension of all COVID-19 vaccination programs. His chief concern was the reported detection of heart inflammation (myocarditis) cases in young males who had been vaccinated. Subsequent research has shown that post-vaccination myocarditis is considerably less harmful than post–COVID infection myocarditis and conventional myocarditis. In his announcement of the new ACIP members, Kennedy declared, "All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense." Maybe so, but the backgrounds of several of these appointees provide good reasons for skepticism. The post Under RFK Jr., Vaccine Approval Is Getting More Politicized, Not Less appeared first on
Yahoo
an hour ago
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RFK Jr's shakeup of vaccine advisory committee raises worries about scientific integrity of health recommendations
On June 11, 2025, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a slate of eight new members to serve on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on national vaccine policy. The announcement, made on the social media platform X, comes two days after Kennedy removed all 17 of the serving committee members. Kennedy called their replacements 'a bold step in restoring public trust' rooted in 'radical transparency and gold standard science.' However, public health experts decried the removals, pointing to Kennedy's promise not to change the committee and warning that the move politicizes its work and undermines its scientific integrity. Health experts have also noted that multiple new committee members appointed on June 11 have voiced anti-vaccine views that are not evidence-based. The Conversation U.S. asked Santosh Kumar Gautam, an expert in global health policy at the University of Notre Dame, to explain how the vaccine committee's guidance has shaped vaccine recommendations for the public, and what the changes might mean for peoples' ability to access vaccines in the future. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, is a panel of experts appointed to advise the CDC on how to use vaccines to protect the health of people in the U.S. The committee's job is to review multiple strands of scientific evidence to recommend which vaccines should be used, who should get them and when they should be given. Its guidance affects vaccine schedules for both children and adults, insurance coverage and public health policy across the country. The committee was formed in 1964 to establish national vaccine policy as federal immunization programs began to expand. It can have up to 19 voting members, who are appointed by the secretary of Health and Human Services. Members are experts in areas such as medicine, public health and immunology. Member usually serve overlapping four-year terms to ensure continuity. All 17 previous members were appointed at different times during the Biden administration. Removing all members of the committee at once is unprecedented. The group also includes nonvoting members from government health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. There are also representatives from more than 30 medical and public health organizations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Physicians. These nonvoting members share useful information and real-world experience such as practical issues in administering vaccines in hospitals, management of vaccine side effects and insights into adverse events. Their input helps the committee make recommendations that reflect both science and practical needs. The committee meets three times a year to review new data on vaccine safety and effectiveness. Its next meeting is scheduled for June 25-27 and is expected to include discussions on COVID-19 and HPV vaccines, with recommendation votes planned for COVID-19 boosters, human papilloma virus and influenza vaccines. The meeting is open to the public and will be telecast live online. The committee makes its recommendations to the CDC by reviewing scientific evidence about a vaccine's safety and efficacy, as well as practical issues, such as how easy a vaccine is to use, how it affects different groups, its side-effects and how it fits into the health system. The recommendations don't just consider whether a vaccine works, but how it can be most effectively deployed to protect the American public from disease outbreaks. The committee looks at data from clinical trials and other research to examine the most recent data on a vaccine's safety, efficacy and use in everyday settings. When new vaccines come out or a change occurs in the way a disease spreads or behaves, the committee often revises its advice. It also responds to public health emergencies such as recent measles outbreaks in the U.S. The committee has made many updates over time. It changed flu shot guidance when new strains appeared. It lowered the recommended age for the HPV vaccine based on new research. And it adjusted vaccine plans for meningitis to better protect people at higher risk. The committee played a vital role in evaluating vaccine safety and effectiveness and authorizing the use of vaccines for different age groups by reviewing clinical trial data, from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and other vaccine manufacturers. The committee also developed step-by-step guidelines for who should get vaccinated first, based on how likely people were to catch the virus, their risk of serious disease, the type of work they did and whether they came from a population that was historically underserved or at higher risk. It also issued tailored guidance for pregnant and breastfeeding women, immunocompromised people and children and adolescents as more trial data became available. These recommendations shaped vaccine rollout strategies at both national and state levels, guided insurance coverage and influenced COVID-19 vaccination policies in other countries around the world. Although Kennedy promised more transparency, he handpicked the advisory committee's new members without revealing how they were selected. Historically, the body's members are selected after an extensive vetting process that can take two years. The newly appointed members have expertise in psychiatry, neuroscience, epidemiology, biostatistics and operations management. However, several have been linked to vaccine-related misinformation, particularly relating to COVID-19 vaccines, raising concerns about the scientific neutrality of the committee moving forward. For example, Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at MIT Sloan School of Management, has publicly called for suspension of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, claiming they cause serious harm and death in young people – a statement not supported by evidence. Another member, physician and biochemist Robert Malone, made scientifically inaccurate statements about the dangers of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic. A third member, epidemiologist and biostatistician Martin Kulldorff helped write the Great Barrington Declaration, which opposed lockdowns and argued that people at low risk of severe illness or death should be allowed to contract COVID-19 to build natural immunity – a stance that was heavily debated among health experts. The committee's new makeup and Kennedy's decades-long anti-vaccine stance threaten to erode the integrity of scientific decision-making and commitment to ethical standards in vaccine recommendations. Kennedy's overhaul of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will likely affect how insurers, doctors and the public make decisions about vaccines – and vaccine policy generally. For example, the advisory committee's decisions directly affect which vaccines are covered by health insurance. If a vaccine is not recommended by the committee, many insurance plans, including those under the Affordable Care Act, are not required to cover it. This means families could face out-of-pocket costs, making it harder for children to access routine immunizations. The advisory committee also plays a key role in shaping the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule. Given Kennedy's long-held skepticism about childhood vaccines — including those for measles and polio — some public health experts worry that the newly appointed members could push to revisit or revise vaccine recommendations, especially for newer and more debated vaccines like those for COVID-19 or HPV. States usually base their school entry vaccine requirements on the committee's guidelines, and insurers often use them to determine which vaccines are covered. As a result, shifts in policy to childhood vaccinations could influence both school vaccination mandates and access to vaccines for millions of children. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Santosh Kumar Gautam, University of Notre Dame Read more: RFK Jr. says annual COVID-19 shots no longer advised for healthy children and pregnant women – a public health expert explains the new guidance Unverified reports of vaccine side effects in VAERS aren't the smoking guns portrayed by right-wing media outlets – they can offer insight into vaccine hesitancy Vaccine misinformation distorts science – a biochemist explains how RFK Jr. and his lawyer's claims threaten public health Santosh Kumar Gautam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
