Politics

Vaccines Under Kennedy

He promised a senator he would leave the vaccine panel alone. Four months later he fired all of it. Then measles came back, including in Utah.

The argument

Trust in public health collapsed during COVID, and some of that was earned. Asking hard questions about vaccines is not crazy. This page is about what happened when the person asking them was put in charge.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed after promising a doctor in the Senate that he would not change the government’s vaccine advisers. He replaced all of them, cut the childhood schedule, and had the CDC’s own website say studies have not ruled out that infant vaccines cause autism. Measles, declared eliminated in 2000, came back at the highest levels in decades, and one of the biggest outbreaks was in Utah.

1. The promise

Kennedy’s confirmation hinged on Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican and a physician. In a floor speech on February 4, 2025, Cassidy explained his vote by describing what Kennedy had committed to:

2. What he did

3. Measles

The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000. According to the CDC’s own count, updated October 9, 2026, there were 2,289 cases in 2025 and 4,080 so far in 2026. Children died in Texas in 2025, and deaths in 2026 are still being counted; the numbers reported by the CDC and by news outlets do not yet agree, so this page does not state one. The international body that tracks elimination is expected to decide in November 2026 whether the country has lost that status.

Utah had one of the largest outbreaks. By April 15, 2026, the state counted 602 cases, 85% of them in people who were not vaccinated, with 49 hospitalized; by mid-June, nearly 700. Nationally, kindergarten measles vaccination fell to 92.4% for the 2025 to 2026 school year, and exemptions rose to 4.2%, according to the CDC.

4. What the Church said

5. Beyond vaccines

Tylenol. On September 22, 2025, the president told pregnant women, “Don’t take Tylenol,” and the FDA began the process of changing the label to mention a possible link to autism. The FDA’s own announcement says something much more careful: “a causal relationship has not been established and there are contrary studies in the scientific literature” (FDA). A Swedish study of nearly 2.5 million children, which compared siblings, found the association disappeared, which points away from Tylenol as the cause (FactCheck.org). A Harvard review the administration cited found evidence “consistent with an association,” and its authors said it did not establish a causal link. That is the best case for the warning, and the agency that issued it said cause has not been shown.

Food dyes. In April 2025 the FDA moved to revoke two little-used dyes and asked food companies to drop six more by the end of 2026 (FDA). For those six, the request was voluntary. FactCheck.org found his claims about the dyes partly right on attention problems and not supported on cancer (FactCheck.org).

The department itself. HHS set out to cut about 20,000 jobs, and the first wave was about 10,000. The CDC lost more than 1,500 scientists and other technical staff, and more than 1,500 NIH research grants were cut. In May 2025 Kennedy told the Senate, “We are not abandoning any life-saving research” (FactCheck.org).

Medicaid. The 2025 budget law, which Congress passed and HHS carries out, is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to leave 10 million more people uninsured by 2034, more than half of them from new work requirements (FactCheck.org, citing the CBO).

What is true on the other side

• He has said the MMR vaccine works. In April 2025 he called it “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.”
• Trust really did collapse. Shifting guidance during COVID cost public health credibility, and rebuilding it is a fair goal.
• Conflicts of interest are a real concern on any advisory panel, and informed consent is a legitimate principle.
• The courts have checked him. The schedule cuts are blocked for now.

The common rebuttals

“He is just asking questions.”

Asking questions is not what happened. He removed the panel that answers them, after promising not to, and replaced its answer on autism with a sentence the research does not support.

“Autism used to be rare. Now it is one in thirty. Something changed, and it was the shots.”

Something did change: the counting. The CDC’s own monitoring network found about 1 in 150 eight-year-olds identified with autism in 2000 and about 1 in 31 in 2022 (CDC). Over the same years the diagnosis widened from a narrower category, classic autism, to a spectrum that includes milder presentations, and screening reached far more children. Denmark tested how much that alone explains. Following all 677,915 children born there from 1980 through 1991, researchers found that the 1994 change in diagnostic criteria plus the 1995 decision to count outpatient visits explained about 60 percent of the rise (Hansen, Schendel and Parner, JAMA Pediatrics, 2015). Try the same reasoning on the sky. NASA’s database lists more than 42,000 known near-Earth asteroids today (JPL Small-Body Database), almost all of them found since dedicated sky surveys began. Nobody concludes that telescopes cause asteroids. A number that rises when you start looking harder tells you about the looking first.

“Measles is mild.”

Most cases recover. Some children do not, which is why Utah had 49 hospitalized by April. A disease the country had eliminated is back because fewer children are protected.

What this means

Cassidy said Kennedy promised to leave the vaccine panel alone. Kennedy changed all of it, and measles came back to Utah.