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RFK has claimed for years that vaccines are not tested for safety, which is nonsense. Childhood vaccines are held to very high standards by the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control. For the Secretary of Health to badmouth his agencies’ work on safety is a dereliction of duty.

RFK baselessly claimed that Lyme Disease “is highly likely to have been a military weapon,” adding, “we also know they were experimenting with diseases of the kind, like Lyme disease, at that lab [Plum Island], and putting them in ticks and then infecting people, testing them with bird vectors…" There is no evidence that Lyme disease was ever a research topic at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, let alone a bioweapon.

On January 5, 2026, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the CDC will no longer recommend six of the seventeen vaccines previously on the United States (U.S.) childhood immunization schedule, claiming it was to promote "informed consent." This change doesn't change the informed consent process between the healthcare provider and the patient. But it does complicate who can give a vaccine, how physicians present information, and which individual circumstances should be considered relevant in decision-making.

In 2024, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) concluded that over 70% of peanut allergies could be prevented through early consumption of peanut allergens by infants and children. Secretary Kennedy has been trying to cast doubt on the findings from NIAID’s studies, saying that aluminum salt adjuvants might be responsible for food allergies. Real scientific data about how children develop peanut allergies and what interventions prevent them contradict Kennedy. 

Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK) has repeatedly said that antidepressant medications may be linked to mass shootings. Ignoring the considerable evidence that there are no links between antidepressants and violence towards others, Secretary Kennedy insists that new studies are required to explore this discredited theory.

RFK Jr. believes that with a healthy diet, exercise, and the avoidance of environmental toxins and stresses alone, an individual can prevent disease. While these are good health practices, they are not an excuse for RFK Jr. to deny the known benefits of infectious disease prevention strategies like vaccines, antiseptics, antibiotics, and social distancing . If RFK’s misguided beliefs become policy they will make us sicker and increase rates of acute and chronic diseases and death.

In June 2023, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told New York Magazine, "There are much better candidates than HIV for what causes AIDS." This is blatantly false, contradicted by mountains of data and real-world experience. Though Kennedy's kept his recent wording more vague, his actions as HHS Secretary suggest that this anti-science nonsense, which has already killed hundreds of thousands, may well be influencing government policy on HIV/AIDS.

ACIP will meet in December and is considering some major changes to childhood vaccines. In June Secretary Kennedy fired the panel of experts and installed a group of vaccine cynics. To justify this change, RFK claimed that ACIP was rife with conflicts of interest and corruption. The meeting in December is a test of whether his of advisors will rubber stamp his anti-vaccine policies.

Physicians and scientists across the country warned Congress that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was unfit to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy, who has no medical or scientific training, told Senators in September that he has broad support from doctors and scientists, but thousands of letters condemning his actions as Secretary of Health prove that is not true. His supporters are a fringe minority, not the medical consensus.

Aluminum, found naturally in many foods, is sometimes added as a salt in tiny quantities to vaccines as an immune booster. For years, Robert F. Kennedy has said that aluminum-containing vaccines cause autism, allergies, asthma and other health issues and as Secretary of HHS, Kennedy wants to ban aluminum from vaccines. But banning aluminum would “wipe out about half the nation’s supply of childhood inoculations” for dangerous diseases like whooping cough, polio and the flu and would result in no additional health benefits for children.

American fertility rates, like those of most countries, have been dropping since about 1960 for
many reasons related to broad social, economic, technological and demographic changes. At a White House press conference in October, Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy told Americans that our fertility rate was a national security threat, that teenage boys are less virile than 65-year-old men, and that the root cause of the problem is endocrine disruptors. But Kennedy’s claims are not fact based: data about sperm count does not even exist for teenage boys and the scientific consensus has long been that the quality of sperm declines as men age. In short, Kennedy tried to tie one of his favorite themes, that chemicals are poisoning our youth, to an insidious right-wing conspiracy theory that dropping fertility rates are leading to a decline in American power.

RFK Jr does not want the CDC to recommend newborns be vaccinated against the Hepatitis B virus (HBV). HBV infection early in life, especially as a baby, puts a person at a high risk of developing a chronic lifelong liver infection, which in a quarter of cases can lead to fatal liver failure or cancer. The hepatitis B vaccine for newborns is safe and effective; and it gives durable lifelong protection against a serious infection that children can encounter during birth, and throughout their lifetime in their families and communities.