America's health secretary under Donald Trump. His childhood was blighted by assassinations. He built a career as a trial lawyer battling toxins spread by oil and coal companies. He has set aside his habitual scepticism of injections to go on testosterone-replacement therapy as part of an "anti-ageing protocol". An outspoken vaccine sceptic, he published a book condemning thimerosal in 2014. In 2019 he called the HPV vaccine "the most dangerous vaccine ever invented". He has long pushed the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism. He was confirmed in February 2025 with the deciding vote of Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator and doctor from Louisiana, after Kennedy promised not to interfere with the Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices (ACIP), an expert panel at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
In June 2025 Kennedy removed all 17 members of ACIP and replaced them with a smaller group of vaccine sceptics and scientists without expertise in vaccines. The reconstituted committee's draft agenda included a presentation by Lyn Redwood, a nurse and anti-vaccine activist, about thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative long fixated upon by anti-vaccine activists despite its safety record and rare use. CDC sources said they were blindsided by the last-minute addition.
On June 26th 2025, the reconstituted panel voted five to two to recommend removing thimerosal from all flu jabs. Kennedy claims thimerosal is a neurotoxin that causes autism in children. The scientific evidence strongly suggests otherwise: a 2003 study from the University of Aarhus, published in Pediatrics, found that autism rates in Denmark increased even after thimerosal was removed from all vaccines in 1992; a 2004 study of over 100,000 British children, also in Pediatrics, found no evidence that thimerosal caused neurodevelopmental disorders. Since 2001 thimerosal has been reduced in or removed from almost all childhood vaccines in America. The only holdouts were some multi-dose flu shots—about 4% of those administered in the most recent season—which, being cheaper and more durable, are key to efficient mass-vaccination campaigns. The FDA says a single dose contains about as much mercury as a tin of tuna.
The Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices has shaped American vaccine policy since it was established in 1964. While the Food and Drug Administration approves vaccines, ACIP determines which are recommended and to whom. Doctors and state health departments look to ACIP when setting school vaccination mandates. ACIP is also the gatekeeper for the Vaccines for Children programme, which spends some $4.7bn to provide free immunisations to roughly half of America's children.
Kennedy promised Senator Bill Cassidy during his confirmation that he would not delete from a federal website a statement that vaccines do not cause autism. He kept the letter of his promise but in November 2025 appended an asterisk noting the statement "has not been removed due to" the agreement with Mr Cassidy. The site now adds that "the statement 'Vaccines do not cause autism' is not an evidence-based claim" because "studies have not ruled out" the possibility. He has called the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention the "most corrupt" government agency.
Kennedy's role has given rise to the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, which fuses rightist populism and leftist whole-Earthism around healthy eating, exercise, the benefits of psychedelics, and suspicion of such government undertakings as putting fluoride in drinking water and vaccines in children. Kennedy likes to say people should do their own research, because trusting experts is the stuff not of science but of totalitarianism and religion. He has made a point of touring states, encouraging legislatures to pass MAHA food bills; by 2025 lawmakers had introduced 150 such bills in 41 states.
Kennedy wants to overhaul the Vaccine Injury Compensation Programme (VICP), which routes claimants to a special vaccine court where they get faster and easier payouts than in regular civil court, since they do not have to prove fault by vaccine-makers. In return, manufacturers are largely shielded from liability in the normal tort system. Through the rulemaking process, the health secretary can add injuries to the VICP's compensation table or loosen existing definitions—potentially opening the litigation floodgates.
Kennedy held a financial stake in ongoing litigation against Merck over allegations that its HPV vaccine caused autoimmune disorders. He transferred this interest—a 10% cut of some plaintiff lawyers' potential winnings—to one of his sons. The presiding federal judge gutted those lawsuits, citing the manufacturers' liability shield.
Kennedy has also terminated 22 mRNA-related contracts worth nearly $500m across academia and industry, citing safety concerns that scientists have discredited. His department cancelled $766m in funding for a late-stage human mRNA vaccine against bird flu and work on five subtypes of influenza with pandemic potential, and gave up the rights to purchase bird-flu shots from Moderna. Research into filoviruses such as Ebola also lost funding, as did therapeutic-antibody and RNA-interference projects. Kennedy said America was moving beyond the "limitations of mRNA and investing in better solutions".
Besides reconstituting ACIP with vaccine sceptics, Kennedy made pernicious changes to three other federal committees relating to vaccines. The committee that reviews clinical data before vaccines are licensed dismissed Paul Offit, a leading vaccine scientist, without explanation. The committee that sets priorities for vaccine research did not meet in 2025. A third committee, which advises the health secretary on how to compensate patients harmed by vaccines and is required by law to meet four times a year, convened four perfunctory 30-minute meetings on December 29th 2025; in January 2026 Kennedy removed half its members without explanation.
Kirk Milhoan, a cardiologist who serves as ACIP's chair, told a podcast on January 22nd 2026: "I don't like established science," adding that "science is what I observe." He then cast doubt on the necessity of the polio and measles vaccines, which have prevented some 107,000 deaths in America since 1994.
In January 2026 Kennedy's Health Department cut the list of recommended routine immunisations for children from 13 to seven, without any of the customary analysis. The last time a disease had its jabs removed was in 1972 for smallpox, the last known American case of which occurred 23 years earlier.
Kennedy also yanked at least $1.2bn in Health Department grants to develop mRNA vaccines.
Kennedy has called for research on vaccines targeting what he describes as "natural immunity", while expressing scepticism about mRNA-based approaches. A trial funded under his regime is testing a flu vaccine made from mixtures of whole inactivated viruses. Many of the most promising broad-spectrum vaccine approaches, however, depend on mRNA.
Kennedy announced a $50m National Institutes of Health programme called the Autism Data Science Initiative (ADSI) to investigate environmental causes of autism. Many researchers were nervous given his history of vaccine scepticism, but the programme has been running smoothly. One project, led by Judith Miller of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, tracks roughly 104,000 children, around 4,000 of whom are autistic, and includes data on genetics, maternal health, air quality, water and green space.
Kennedy is a supporter of what is politely called nontraditional medicine. Advocates of a Biden-era pilot programme that brought traditional Native American healing rituals—such as sweat lodges and smudging—under Medicaid coverage in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Oregon are optimistic that Kennedy could keep the programme going beyond its initial two-to-five-year authorisation.
New federal dietary guidelines published on January 7th 2026 bear Kennedy's imprint. The big-picture message—eat fruits, vegetables, protein-rich foods and whole grains; avoid sugary drinks, processed foods and excess alcohol—is uncontroversial and echoes earlier editions. But the guidelines break with precedent by promoting meat and animal fats such as butter and beef tallow (labelled "healthy fats") and by setting a protein target of 1.2–1.6g per kilogram of body weight, well above the World Health Organisation's recommended 0.8g/kg. Many nutrition experts have criticised the emphasis on red meat and full-fat dairy, noting that the saturated-fat intake implied by the guidelines' own visual imagery would exceed the 20–30g daily cap the same document prescribes. Kennedy has maligned seed oils as poisonous—a claim not supported by the scientific evidence—and some American fast-food chains have swapped seed oils for other fats such as beef tallow or avocado oil.
Kennedy has intervened in state-level vaccine policy. Over the summer of 2025, his Health Department sent a letter to West Virginia's public-health authorities endorsing the Republican governor's executive order expanding vaccine exemptions to include religious objections, and warning that restricting religious exemptions could jeopardise the state's funding under the Vaccines for Children programme (VFC), which provides free immunisations to poor children. In September the department's Office for Civil Rights dispatched similar letters to other states. West Virginia is one of just five states—and the lone Republican-led one—that permit only medical exemptions to school-vaccine requirements; its vaccination rates are among the country's highest by kindergarten. Since the pandemic, vaccine hesitancy has surged among Republicans, and exemptions to school-vaccine requirements based on religious or philosophical objections have roughly doubled—with the increase 2.6 times steeper in states that voted for Trump in 2024.
Aaron Siri, a lawyer specialising in anti-vaccine cases, served as both an adviser to Kennedy's presidential campaign and his personal lawyer, and is lead counsel in a case before the West Virginia supreme court challenging the state's strict mandate.
Recent Pew polling shows Kennedy's net approval at minus 4—higher than both J.D. Vance (minus 14) and Donald Trump (minus 18)—making him an effective messenger for anti-vaccine views.
Vaccine development requires massive clinical trials because the products are given to healthy people. Each vial costs 25 to 200 times as much to produce as a simple small-molecule pill. Before the pandemic roughly 75 vaccine trials were launched annually in America—just 4% of the number devoted to therapeutic drugs.
Vaccine scepticism is politically skewed. One-quarter of Trump supporters tell YouGov that vaccines are unsafe, compared with 3% of Kamala Harris's backers. The two-point gap in vaccine uptake between blue and red states is the difference between staying above and falling below the threshold for herd immunity against measles.
You are dishonest, but never to the point of hurting a friend.