Whopper of the Week: RFK Jr. Has a Plan to Fake “Proofs” of Vaccine Harm

THIS WEEK'S WHOPPER:

RFK JR. HAS A PLAN TO FAKE "PROOFS" OF VACCINE HARMS

“We must listen to patients and families who report vaccine injuries—not dismiss or gaslight them. President Trump and I are building a health system that takes them seriously, follows the evidence, and uses what we learn to make vaccines safer. This is how we earn back trust in our public health institutions.”  -- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., October 8, 2026 
 

SUMMARY

On October 5th, 2026, Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy attended a meeting at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda with families and organizations representing the “vaccine injured.” It was his first visit to the NIH, the agency that sets the agenda for biomedical research in the United States. Kennedy and all his agency heads were there to listen to the voices of the parents and doctors and to announce a plan to build a health system that “follows the evidence.” 

Kennedy has for years rejected the evidence supporting vaccine efficacy and vaccine safety. Now, he is looking for “better evidence about potential vaccine-related injuries.” Kennedy is openly trying to manufacture data that could justify the vaccine policy changes he wants to make, but which have been blocked by federal courts, Congress, states and professional organizations.

WHY ITS A WHOPPER

In his 20 months as Secretary of HHS, Kennedy has tried and failed to tie vaccines to higher risks of autism, neurological and autoimmune disorders, or death. Now Kennedy has publicly announced how he intends to juice the numbers of what he calls “vaccine injuries” reported to the government. 

In October, Kennedy, flanked by his agency heads Mehmet Oz, Jay Bhattacharya, and Erica Schwartz, announced four “agency-wide actions.” First, Medicare will create a new billing code to reimburse doctors for reporting suspected side effects to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Second, the VAERS interface is being modernized to make it easier for professionals and the public to file reports via a web portal on mobile devices. To that end, the CDC awarded a $1 million contract to a cybersecurity company tasked with “increasing report submission rates.” Third, Kennedy wants to require that electronic health records (EHR) include a field for vaccine adverse events, making them a permanent, easily searchable element of the medical record. Finally, the NIH launched the Vaccinology and Immunology Center which will “enroll several hundred participants initially, focusing on individuals experiencing the most serious adverse effects following vaccination or long-term symptoms post-infection.”

Kennedy is open about seeking to increase the raw number of alleged adverse events reported to VAERS. Dorit Reis, an expert on vaccines and law professor UC Law San Francisco said, “The actual thing that concerns me here is the idea of incentivizing doctors to report vaccine adverse reaction, which raised the concern of gaming the vaccine adverse reaction system. In other words, generating reports of things that aren't there because of incentive to make vaccine look more dangerous than they are.”

But there is no reason to think that underreporting has caused safety issues to be missed. Created in 1990, VAERS is an early warning system that flags potential safety concerns with vaccines, based on voluntary reports, for investigation by scientists at the CDC and the FDA. VAERS data was important in signaling incidences of rare, severe side effects of the childhood polio vaccine in 1997 that led to a change in the timing of when it was given to babies. In 2021, during COVID-19, VAERS reports of myocarditis in young males led to discussions about whether to space out the two primary doses of the COVID-19 vaccines and to more studies about the relative risks of myocarditis and pericarditis that supported their continued use.

VAERS has limitations. It cannot establish whether a vaccine caused a reported problem because that requires knowing, according to Bob Morris, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, “whether an adverse event occurs more frequently following vaccination than would be expected in a comparable population.” That is why the U.S. vaccine surveillance system relies on other programs to understand the relative risks of vaccines in the population. Kennedy’s laser focus on VAERS means either he does not understand epidemiology, or he does not care how professionals actually prove cause and effect. 

It is not clear yet why Kennedy wants vaccine adverse events to be included in health records, but if it is to better study vaccine risks, his plan could backfire. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert and infectious disease professor at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that well designed studies “might also prove that vaccine fears are unfounded.” These kinds ofobservational studies are often the way epidemiologists evaluate the safety and efficacy of vaccines.

The secretive opening in October of a new NIH Center on Vaccinology and Immunology earned Kennedy an angry rebuke from the NIH’s Hospital Board. The only public information to date is a short statement that the Center will "investigate health problems following vaccination and infections," although NIH also issued a call for research on the biological basis of vaccine adverse events. The chairman of the NIH Hospital Board, Leslie Clark, said "the signs suggested a foregone conclusion to the research, ordered by a secretary who is openly critical of vaccination.” Under Secretary Kennedy's leadership, there is good reason to worry about research quality and how results might be used to advance political goals, for example changing vaccine schedules .  

WHY IT MATTERS

According to the New York Times, “Mr. Kennedy has long said that he wants to build a body of scientific evidence on the harms of vaccines and environmental exposures, which he believes are behind an epidemic of chronic disease.” Defend Public Health has documented many such fishing expeditions that wasted millions of taxpayer dollars – money that would be better spent on improving treatments for devastating childhood diseases like cancer, or for public health interventions to prevent epidemics and chronic diseases. 
 
Vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit concludes that “If [Kennedy’s] past record is any indication, he will continue to put out misleading, poorly performed studies that will only further shake parents’ confidence in vaccines.”  He wants to sow doubt about vaccines. The mere fact that he is looking for evidence of harm is often enough to convince people there must be harm, and to increase vaccine hesitancy.

Kennedy is interested in scientific “evidence” because it can be used as leverage in courts, Congress and the states to buttress his radical and unpopular antivaccine agenda. HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon implied the work should indeed “inform vaccine recommendations, address critical gaps identified by scientific and medical organizations, including the Institute of Medicine, and strengthen public trust in public health.” Kennedy knows he lacks scientific data to back his anti-vaccine crusade, and he’s told how he intends to generate that data to advance his antivaccine policy goals.
 

Contributors to this post are: Benedicte Callan, Ph.D., Bruce Mirkin, Aurora Horstkamp, M.D., David Moskowitz, M.F.A.