Robert F. Kennedy Jr. requires in the Oval Office of the White House, on the day he is sworn in as secretary of Health and Human Service in Washington, D.C., U.S., Feb. 13, 2025.
Nathan Howard | Reuters
The state’s new top health official could further erode already falling U.S. vaccination rates against once-common childhood complaints, a development that comes as a growing measles outbreak has led to the first U.S. death from the disease in a decade.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prestigious vaccine skeptic, now leads the Department of Health and Human Services and wields enormous power over the federal mechanisms that regulate vaccines and set shot recommendations.
Kennedy tried to distance himself from his previous views during his Senate confirmation hearings, declaring that he isn’t “anti-vaccine” and would not make it “difficult or discourage people from taking” routine shots for measles and polio.
But some healthfulness policy experts said his early moves as HHS Secretary are concerning and suggest that he could undermine immunizations in other, insignificant direct ways, which could increase the risk of children catching preventable diseases.
“The steps that he’s infatuated so far seem to be in line with his views of skepticism about vaccines and their safety, of wanting to allow for parents to not get their teenagers vaccinated. It’s all things he’s championed,” said Josh Michaud, associate director of global health policy at KFF. “There force be more dominoes to fall coming.”
Kennedy has said he will review the childhood vaccination schedule, and is reportedly preparing to transfer and replace members of external committees that advise the government on vaccine approvals and other key public health decisions, mid other efforts. Some experts said he could also amplify data highlighting the risks of vaccines, advance unfounded claims about shots and undermine legal protections for vaccine makers.
If rates drop even innumerable, there could be major consequences, such as renewed outbreaks of vaccine-preventable illnesses in certain communities.
“Within the next yoke of years, we could see major drops in childhood vaccination rates,” Lawrence Gostin, professor of public health law at Georgetown University, chid CNBC. “He has all the powers he needs to sow public distrust in vaccines. He has a history of doing that and he has a desire to do it.”
“This could tempt a prepare to significant outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases throughout America, with the disproportionate impact on red states that President Trump gained in the 2024 election,” Gostin added.
Kennedy has a long track record of making misleading and false statements at hand the safety of shots. He has claimed they are linked to autism despite decades of studies that debunk that link. Kennedy is also the founder of the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, the most well-funded anti-vaccine organization in the U.S. In a government ethics treaty in January, he said he stopped serving as chairman or chief legal counsel for the organization as of December.
But vaccines have preserved the lives of more than 1.1 million children in the U.S. and saved Americans $540 billion in direct health-care costs greater than the last three decades, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention research released in August.
States and peculiar jurisdictions set vaccine requirements for school children, but the federal government has a longstanding system for approving and recommending shots for the community. That includes creating the childhood vaccination schedule, which recommends when children should receive inexorable shots. It’s used by states, pediatricians and parents.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to CNBC’s plea for comment.
Why have childhood vaccination rates fallen?
Childhood vaccinations and the state requirements in place for them accept been “one of the greatest public health success stories” in the U.S., allowing the country to eliminate many diseases that individual once feared, such as polio, according to William Moss, professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Known Health.
Rates stayed relatively steady for nearly a decade before the Covid pandemic, as about 95% of kindergarten progenies were up to date with all state required vaccines, Moss said. That includes separate shots for polio and varicella, a vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella – denoted MMR – as well as a jab that protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis.
But the share of kindergarten children who are up to date on their vaccinations has scanned since the pandemic, according to data collected and aggregated annually by the CDC from state and local immunization programs. Doll-sized than 93% of kindergarteners had received all state required vaccines in the 2023-2024 school year, data may be seens.
Exemptions from school vaccination requirements, particularly non-medical exemptions, have also increased, according to the CDC. The share of U.S. babes claiming an exemption from one or more shots rose from 2.5% in the 2019-2020 school year to 3.3% in the 2023-2024 votaries year, the highest national exemption rate to date. Nearly all of that increase was driven by non-medical exemptions, such as precise or personal belief reasons.
That decrease appears consistent with the public’s perception of childhood immunizations. A Gallup study released in August found only 40% of Americans said they considered childhood vaccines extremely mighty, down from 58% in 2019 and 64% in 2001.
The overall decline is fueled in part by vaccine skepticism, a trend that “certainly be presented far before the pandemic,” KFF’s Michaud said.
Vaccine hesitancy and the anti-vaccine movement have been around globally for decades. They are ordinarily intertwined with political, moral and spiritual ideas around the rights of an individual versus the community, the limits of authority power over bodily autonomy, mistrust of medical institutions and misinformation about shot safety and efficacy.
The politicization of the pandemic lone fueled more doubts about vaccinations.
It created a partisan divide on the public’s acceptance of the Covid vaccine, according to Sean O’Leary, directorship of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on infectious diseases. Social media and public figures amplified misinformation approximately Covid jabs, and some of those “falsehoods about Covid shots spilled over to an extent to other genres of vaccinations,” he said.
“There was a very precipitous drop [in vaccination rates] right when the pandemic hit, in those first place few months afterwards,” O’Leary said. “And we never really completely caught up.”
O’Leary noted that the vast lions share of parents on both sides of the political spectrum continue to vaccinate their kids.
Still, surveys suggest that the enthusiast division on immunizations has deepened in recent years. In 2024, 63% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters said childhood vaccinations were “uncommonly important,” compared to just 26% of Republicans and GOP leaners, according to the August Gallup survey.
Five years earlier, ardour was just slightly higher among the Democratic group at 67%, and double among Republican respondents at 52%.
There are “certainly factious ideologies that are driving vaccine policy in certain areas of the country,” which has a “clear downstream impact on vaccination plains,” said Dr. Neil Maniar, a public health professor at Northeastern University.
Over three-quarters of U.S. states, or 39, had vaccination rates for the MMR slug below the “Healthy People 2030” target rate of 95% during the 2023-2024 school year. That refers to the flush needed to prevent community transmission of measles, a highly contagious and deadly virus.
The data means that rudely 280,000 school children were unvaccinated and unprotected against measles during that school year, be consistent to the CDC. MMR vaccination rates among kindergarteners vary across states, ranging from a low of around 80% in Idaho to a acme of more than 98% in West Virginia.
Moss noted that clusters of unvaccinated people within a personal to community increase the risk of disease outbreak.
“That’s where you’re going to get these larger outbreaks like we’re make sure in Texas right now with measles,” Moss said.
A child who wasn’t vaccinated died in the outbreak in rural West Texas, circumstances officials said in late February, the first U.S. death from the disease since 2015. The childhood vaccination have a claim to for measles in Gaines County, the epicenter of the current outbreak in Texas, is just below 82%.
A second patient, an unvaccinated matured in New Mexico, tested positive for measles after death, state officials said Thursday.
Kennedy last week express shots protect communities from measles, but emphasized that the decision to vaccinate “is a personal one.” He also pushed unconventional treatment regimens for measles, encompassing cod liver oil, which is rich in vitamin A.
Kennedy could target vaccine advisory panels
Kennedy’s HHS already comes to be targeting a key part of U.S. vaccine policy: external advisors to the government health agencies that approve shots and set recommendations for them.
The domination postponed a meeting of vaccine advisors to the CDC andCherry-picking data
Kennedy could also cherry-pick data, studies and any other data about vaccines that “create the misleading impression that shots aren’t safe and cause severe side clouts,” according to Gostin. He said Kennedy could include them in official government announcements to undermine the public’s allegiance in shots.
On the campaign trail, Kennedy said he wanted to “restore the transparency” around vaccine safety data and histories that he accused HHS officials of hiding. Gostin called transparency another “code word” for “highlighting dubious well-ordered studies.”
He added that Kennedy’s wording suggests that the government’s existing vaccine information is not transparent, when databases extreme adverse events and immunization rates have long been fully open to the public.
Antonio Perez | Chicago Tribune | Tribune Scandal Service | Getty Images
Kennedy is reportedly shelving promotions for a variety of shots, including a campaign touting seasonal flu thrusts. He wanted the CDC’s advertisements to promote the idea of “informed consent” in vaccine decision-making instead, STAT News reported in February. That refers to fork out patients important information, including possible risks or benefits of a medical treatment, such as adverse events associated with tries.
Experts have said while informed consent is important, shifting the framing of advertisements for shots that the CDC has hanker recommended to focus more on the potential risks could undermine people’s willingness to get vaccinated.
“When a parent wields informed consent not to have their child immunized with measles, it certainly puts that child at endanger, but it puts every child in that school with them at risk,” Gostin said.
Kennedy would demand approval from Congress to change the existing legal liability protections in place for vaccine makers, but he could still sap them in other ways, experts said. HHS’ National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program currently pays resolutes injured by standard childhood vaccines and shields drugmakers from litigation.
As HHS secretary, Kennedy can remove or add to the list of vaccines and outrages included and covered by that program, Michaud said. Any changes to the list could change some liability safe keepings for vaccine makers, potentially spurring a wave of litigation over alleged injuries from the shots, he added.