RFK Jr. fires ‘opening salvo' on vaccine status quo
Public health experts say Robert F. Kennedy Jr is exactly who they thought he was.
The Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary — who is also the nation's most well-known vaccine skeptic — is remaking the agency in his image, casting doubt on the benefits of vaccines, and erecting new barriers that will make it harder for people who want shots to get them, like requiring new vaccines to be tested against placebos.
During his confirmation hearings and other recent congressional testimony, Kennedy sought to distance himself from the anti-vaccine movement.
He argued he is simply seeking good data about vaccine safety. He assured lawmakers he would not take away anyone's vaccines and specifically pledged to Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) that he would not make any changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) vaccine advisory panel.
While testifying at a House Appropriations Committee hearing on May 14, Kennedy said his views on vaccines were 'irrelevant.'
'I don't want to seem like I'm being evasive, but I don't think people should be taking medical advice from me,' he told lawmakers, after being asked whether he would vaccinate his own children today against measles.
Yet in the past week, Kennedy made an end run around the traditional process to change the recommendations about who should get a COVID-19 vaccine.
He threatened to bar government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals, and his office revoked hundreds of millions of dollars pledged to mRNA vaccine maker Moderna to develop, test and purchase shots for pandemic flu.
Kennedy has been critical of mRNA vaccines, and HHS said the funding was canceled because of concerns about the safety of 'under-tested' mRNA technology.
Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said the public should take Kennedy at his word.
'He's right. We shouldn't trust him,' Benjamin said. 'He's unbridled. He's out of control, and so I am fearful that he will do more to undermine vaccine access and quality in the United States.'
Kennedy has a long history of opposition to vaccines. He petitioned the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2021 to revoke the emergency use authorizations of the COVID-19 vaccines and threatened to sue the agency if it authorized COVID vaccines for children.
His latest moves to change the COVID vaccine recommendations on healthy children and pregnant women are raising serious concerns about the potential to pull back on even more vaccines.
'What I see is COVID has provided this natural starting point … to sort of have that opening salvo in a bigger, longer-term effort to reconstruct, undermine vaccine policy,' said Richard Hughes IV, an attorney at Epstein Becker Green and former vice president of public policy at Moderna.
The decision to change COVID vaccine policy was announced in a 58-second video clip shared on the social media site X.
'I couldn't be more pleased to announce that as of today the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC-recommended immunization schedule,' Kennedy said.
Days after Kennedy's pronouncement, the CDC issued new guidance that removed the recommendation for pregnant women to get a COVID shot but kept the vaccine on the childhood immunization schedule.
The agency changed the recommendation from its previous wording of 'should' to say healthy children 'may' get the COVID vaccine after consulting with a health provider, an apparent contradiction to Kennedy's plan.
Despite the new wording, the changes buck the traditional method of making new vaccine recommendations.
The FDA decides whether to approve or authorize a vaccine, and the CDC's independent vaccine advisory panel convenes in an open public meeting to decide questions like who should get it, when and how often. It then sends recommendations to the CDC director, who can endorse or reject the recommendations.
The director nearly always defers to the panel.
The HHS secretary isn't typically involved in vaccine decisions, but there currently isn't an acting CDC director.
'We're seeing a total side-stepping of the nation's leading public health agency,' said Richard Besser, a former acting director of the CDC and president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Besser said doctors rely on the recommendations of federal health experts, which are supposed to be based on the best available science and evidence. But doctors can't be assured that's the case anymore, he said.
Both Hughes and Benjamin said other changes to HHS vaccine policy are likely to be more nuanced and subtle than the agency's actions on COVID.
'I would have said a couple months ago, obviously measles, obviously polio, those are childhood vaccines [that could be changed]. … But I think it's going to be a little more subtle [than banning a shot]. It's going to be a little more slow,' Hughes said.
In April, the CDC's vaccine advisers met after a two-month delay to vote on recommendations for chikungunya vaccines, meningitis vaccines and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccines.
About a month later, Kennedy personally signed off on recommendations for the chikungunya shot.
He has not acted on the other recommendations from the panel's April meeting, including the use of a new meningitis vaccine and an expansion of RSV vaccines to high-risk adults ages 50-59.
The vaccine panel isn't scheduled to vote on COVID vaccine recommendations until late June. Experts said it'll be important to listen to what the panel members say, and whether they feel they have the freedom to discuss HHS's recent actions.
'You've got a committee of advisers who were cut out of the loop. How are they going to handle that in a public forum?' Benjamin said.
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Podcast host Meghan McCain, the former co-host of 'The View,' made headlines when she posted to social media recently in support of a 'detox' supplement to be taken after Covid-19 vaccination or infection. The 'detox' supplement McCain touted costs $89.99 and is one of several versions sold online. It make claims about its ability to 'break down spike protein and disrupt its function' and provide 'your body with unparalleled support for cellular defense and detoxification.' Vaccine experts say such claims are nonsense. 'There's nothing to detox from, because the vaccines themselves are not toxins,' said Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan. 'They're not toxic and they're not harmful.' McCain's X post about the supplement has been deleted, but McCain's personalized discount code continued to work on the website of the supplement maker, The Wellness Company. Neither McCain's representatives nor The Wellness Company responded to a request for comment. McCain also posted this week about 'concerning data' about mRNA vaccines and said friends had experienced health problems after getting the Covid-19 shot. As part of the post, she shared a video that suggested material in the vaccines could stick around long-term and change a person's genome. Vaccine experts say that just isn't true. The messenger RNA in Covid-19 vaccines instructs cells in the body to make a certain piece of the virus' spike protein — the structure on the surface of the coronavirus. The mRNA vaccine is like a blueprint that the body uses to train the immune system to recognize the virus that causes Covid and protect against it, said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. 'MRNA is only in there in minute amounts,' Schaffner said. 'The spike protein is metabolized. It's broken up by our own body very, very quickly. So it's not in a position to disseminate or be distributed throughout the body requiring some sort of 'detoxification.' 'It's simply not scientifically a valid concept.' Since mRNA is so short-lived, vaccine makers do make a modification that allows it to stick around a little longer than it would otherwise, Rasmussen said. 'But mRNA, even modified mRNA like in these vaccines, does not stay around forever,' Rasmussen said. 'It's still not a very stable molecule.' Rasmussen said she has also read that some believe the lipid nanoparticle used to get the mRNA into the cells lingers and is toxic. The lipid nanoparticle, Rasmussen said, 'also don't stick around forever.' She said they get broken down at about the same rate the mRNA does, 'or even maybe a little before.' Schaffner believes maybe some of the language scientists use to describe how mRNA vaccines work may be unhelpful. 'I wonder if the very name of the protein, this 'spike protein' just makes people uneasy,' Schaffner said. 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Unlike pharmaceuticals, which must be tested and approved before they go to market and then comply with strict regulations about how they can be marketed, the US Food and Drug Administration doesn't have the authority to approve dietary supplements before they are marketed. Fear or distrust of Covid-19 vaccines is an easy target for supplement makers, Cohen said. 'This is a perfect scenario for supplements to jump in to the rescue,' Cohen said. 'You manufacture a false health concern, and then you have the solution that you can settle with a supplement. It's really a perfect opportunity for supplement manufacturers to profit from. From something that doesn't even exist.' It's hard, he said, to even define what 'detoxing' from a Covid-19 vaccine would mean. 'Are you trying to wash away the effects that boosted immunity against Covid? Is that the goal? I think it's a very vague, moving sort of target,' Cohen said. 'Or is it more that there's some fear that the Covid vaccine causes more harm than the government's letting on. Then the idea is that you sell these supplements to prevent that mystery harm.' 'I think it's a health fear mongering approach and profiting by the fear,' Cohen added. No vaccine is perfect, the experts said, but the risk with the Covid vaccine is extremely small and the problems like a sore arm or a low-grade fever that some of his patients have experienced resolved quickly. 'That's not something that any supplement will help resolve faster,' Cohen said. Research has consistently shown that the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines are safe and effective, and millions of people have gotten them without serious incident. As of May, the FDA required Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna to use expanded warning labels with more information about the risk of a rare heart condition after vaccination. Some studies have found that Covid-19 infection itself carries a higher risk of myocarditis or pericarditis than vaccination. Schaffner said if there were true problems with any of the Covid vaccines, the country's surveillance system would have caught it by now. That's what happened with the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine: Surveillance identified a rare risk of a severe blood clotting syndrome, particularly among some women. The vaccine is no longer in use. 'The system works,' Schaffner said. 'These mRNA vaccines are safe, and that's been seen in millions and millions of patients.' What may be even more dangerous, experts say, is the disinformation surrounding vaccines that drives people to want to take a supplement to detox from them in the first place. 'This is a much bigger problem,' Rasmussen said. 'It's important to smack this disinformation down where we can. It's morally wrong and reprehensible.'
