5 days ago
With RFK Jr. on Their Side, Parents Feel Emboldened to Question Vaccines
For roughly seven years, Kaylee Abbott has often quietly confronted the impact of her decision to forgo routine vaccinations for her two children. It has prompted her to switch pediatricians on numerous occasions and at times made her feel like a pariah upon disclosing her children's vaccination status. Former EMT Kaylee Abbott has decided that neither of her two children will get additional vaccines.
But since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was placed at the helm of U.S. health institutions, Abbott, 46, feels as though she can finally be more open about her skepticism toward vaccines.
'Before when you said you were unvaccinated, you were judged right off the bat,' said Abbott, a former emergency medical technician who now stays at home with her children in Gadsden, Ala. 'Now, people are a little bit more open-minded. We can freely talk about it a little more.'
Kennedy's ascent to the country's top health job is opening a new front in America's attitudes toward vaccines. Childhood vaccination rates had been falling even before Kennedy became U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services this year. There are signs that his use of the bully pulpit to emphasize vaccine risks is making it more socially acceptable to question or shun immunizations.
The number of kindergarteners with exemptions from vaccine requirements is at its highest level since the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began tracking the number in 2011, according to data from the 2024-2025 school year, the most recent available.
Measles cases in the U.S. hit a three-decade high in 2025, according to CDC data released this month. The vaccine-preventable disease has hospitalized hundreds this year and resulted in the first U.S. measles-related deaths in a decade.
Scientists generally view vaccines as safe.
Nearly 60% of the public doesn't plan to get the Covid-19 vaccine this fall, according to a new KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust, which found the number of adults who don't expect to get the shot rose by roughly 7 percentage points compared with two years earlier. Nearly half of respondents say they are unsure whether federal health agencies are recommending the Covid shot for healthy children this fall after Kennedy decided to stop recommending it.
Scientists generally consider vaccines safe and say their benefits—preventing deadly or serious disease—outweigh uncommon risks. Multiple studies haven't found a link between vaccines and autism.
Kennedy in recent public appearances, television interviews and social-media posts has repeatedly emphasized those rare risks rather than benefits. He has offered a tepid recommendation of the measles vaccine and has said the shots are a personal choice. He has portrayed as understudied vaccines that doctors and scientists have for decades found to be safe and effective.
'Secretary Kennedy is not antivaccine—he is pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability,' an HHS spokeswoman said. 'He believes Americans deserve radical transparency so they can make informed healthcare decisions.'
Dr. Nola Ernest, a pediatrician in southeast Alabama, has always encountered patients with doubts about vaccines. But this is the first year she has had three families refuse to vaccinate their babies, after she had cared for and vaccinated their older children.
'Those conversations just aren't the same anymore,' she said, adding that parents have concerns about autism and mistrust in pharmaceutical companies. 'Now it's as if there's another source of information that trumps mine.'
'We are doing a lot more debunking of misinformation,' said Dr. Sue Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which joined with other doctors in a lawsuit against Kennedy after he dropped recommendations for Covid vaccines for children and pregnant women. 'We're allaying a lot of anxiety, and it's completely unnecessary.'
Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly emphasized the rare risks of vaccines.
Health experts say that while a faction of Americans have always been wary of immunization, the rise of antivaccine activism and proliferation of online misinformation have accelerated myths surrounding the science behind vaccines.
Most parents still have confidence in vaccines, and health experts say it is difficult to tell how much Kennedy will influence Americans' views.
'It's probably too early for us to have seen that trickle down to parents and their actual vaccination behavior, but we do see a lot of confusion, and I do think that will ultimately lead to lower levels of vaccine uptake,' said Ryan Malosh, who directs immunization efforts for Michigan's health department.
Attitudes are also sharply split along partisan lines. Some 70% of Republicans say they trust Kennedy to provide reliable information on vaccines, according to the KFF poll, compared with one-third of independents and 11% of Democrats. More than seven in 10 people who identified as supporters of President Trump's Make America Great Again movement placed almost equal trust in Kennedy as they did in their doctor or healthcare provider when it comes to providing reliable information about vaccines.
Abbott didn't always count herself among vaccine skeptics. Her 11-year-old daughter received all of her routine immunizations until age 4. But Abbott said her opinion shifted in 2018, when she felt as though a pediatrician forced her to vaccinate her son, now 7, against influenza when he was an infant despite her wishes not to do so.
The experience left Abbott with questions around parental choice in vaccines, and she eventually began consuming materials that cast doubts on the shots' safety and efficacy. She decided that neither of her two children would receive vaccines moving forward—a stance that was further solidified amid the Covid pandemic and vaccine requirements that followed.
Abbott doesn't consider herself a particularly political person. She voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and didn't vote in the 2020 presidential election. But her decision to finally vote for Trump last year, in his third appearance on the ballot, was motivated in large part by his promise that Kennedy would oversee U.S. health agencies.
'I do feel that RFK has helped bring awareness to our choice in the health of our children, and how we should have the final say in what goes into their bodies,' Abbott said. 'It's great to finally feel like our voices are being heard.'
Kaylee Abbott strolls with her children at a park near Gadsden, Ala.
Write to Sabrina Siddiqui at and Liz Essley Whyte at
With RFK Jr. on Their Side, Parents Feel Emboldened to Question Vaccines
With RFK Jr. on Their Side, Parents Feel Emboldened to Question Vaccines
