Kennedy remains greatest threat to our public health

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, continues his multifaceted, chaotic dismantling of the American public health system. He is endangering the public’s health, especially by instilling doubt, confusion, and distrust in vaccines.

Despite his denials, Kennedy is an anti-vaxxer and even founded a leading anti-vaccination organization. He shamefully challenges the necessity and safety of routine immunizations. He recklessly promotes the idea that vaccinations cause autism.

Kennedy is a bright person. Rather than pursuing the withdrawal of vaccine approvals or the termination of vaccine recommendations – actions that would produce severe backlash – he strategically discourages immunizations by imposing “shared decision-making” with a medical provider. This approach essentially sends the message that these vaccines are not essential but optional. It’s an effective strategy that’s undermining vaccine confidence and producing a concerning decline in immunization rates.

Kennedy ousted 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, replacing them with mostly unqualified individuals sympathetic to his views. He made COVID vaccination recommended through shared decision-making and previously removed the recommendation for pregnant women, a high-risk group for severe COVID disease. He removed the universal hepatitis B birth-dose recommendation, which has proven critical in reducing the population-level risk in children.

Kennedy also altered the childhood immunization schedule without independent expert input, reducing the universal recommendations from 17 to 11 vaccines. Six vaccines are now recommended only after shared decision-making or in high-risk groups, including hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, meningitis, influenza, and RSV. Healthy children can die of influenza and meningitis, and in the days before RSV and rotavirus immunizations, our hospitals were packed with sick children, some seriously, with these two diseases. Now without CDC credibility, some states and medical organizations are developing their own vaccination guidelines.

With immunization rates continuing to decrease, vaccine-preventable infectious diseases are reemerging. Whooping cough is increasing; measles is now at levels not seen in over 30 years. Will children also suffer and die from diseases like polio, and diphtheria? Dismantling our proven national vaccination standards is dangerous.

Vaccines do not cause autism. Over 40 high-quality independent studies – some huge – have demonstrated this as settled science. Nonetheless, Kennedy changed the longstanding CDC position that vaccines do not cause autism and maintains that research hasn’t ruled it out. Not true.

The notion that the measles vaccine causes autism was principally fueled by completely fraudulent research. The infamous 1998 Lancet journal study was conducted by British doctor, Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield betrayed the world, his profession, and devastated parents of autistic children. After his exposure, Lancet retracted Wakefield’s paper in humiliation. He was discredited and lost his British medical license. Wakefield’s motivation was financial gain.

Kennedy recently launched a reconstituted Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee to determine the causes of autism. Of the new 21 committee members, at least 12 have autistic children with some maintaining vaccines were the cause. Others also believe vaccines cause autism, and many are anti-vaccine activists or skeptics. A conclusion that vaccines instigate autism is predictable and will likely be based on misinterpretation of studies, poor-quality and cherry-picked research, and political agendas.

The causes of autism are complex and multifactorial and valid definitive answers will be elusive.

Kennedy remains the greatest threat to public health in memory. Meanwhile, a federal district court in Boston, exercising a measure of reason, has temporarily blocked his changes to the childhood schedule and his appointments to the ACIP. Unfortunately, I doubt the court’s decision will ultimately prevail.

Richard D. Feldman, M.D. is an Indianapolis family physician and former Indiana State Health Commissioner who served in the administration of Governor Frank O’Bannon.