RFK Jr.’s health department heightens scrutiny of vaccines

The Wall Street Journal – Tuesday, March 4, 2025
By Liz Essley Whyte, Dominique Mosbergen, and Betsy McKay

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taking the first steps toward reshaping how the federal government oversees vaccines.

In Kennedy’s first few weeks at the helm, the Health and Human Services Department scuttled meetings of infectious-disease experts and began scrutinizing vaccine contracts.

More changes to the government’s stands on shots are in the works.

Kennedy is collecting names of potential new members to put on a committee that recommends which vaccines Americans should get and when, according to people familiar with the matter.

He is also weighing a new conflict-of-interest policy for the committee that would disqualify some current members, another person familiar with his thinking said.

The moves make clear that Kennedy, a longtime critic of shots, has government immunization practices, programs and personnel in his crosshairs now that he is in charge of U.S. health policy.

HHS is broadly re-evaluating everything it oversees, including food and drugs, in an effort to understand the causes of chronic disease, a White House spokesman said. The department is also examining its conflict-of-interest policies, he said.

Kennedy “absolutely will live up to his word in taking in expertise and science from all sides,” said Zen Honeycutt, a Kennedy supporter and founder of Moms Across America, a nonprofit opposed to pesticides and genetically modified foods.

Kennedy’s first few weeks also show, however, that he will need to chart a careful course to turn his views into government policy while at the same time leading the country’s public-health response.

The new Health and Human Services secretary posted on social media on Friday that stopping a measles outbreak in Texas, which killed an unvaccinated child, was a “top priority.” He had earlier faced criticism from some doctors and infectious-disease experts for saying “we have measles outbreaks every year.”

Also on Friday, Tom Corry, the top HHS communications official, quit after roughly two weeks on the job, partly because he wanted Kennedy to offer stronger encouragement to vaccinate children for measles, a person familiar with the resignation said. Politico reported earlier that Corry left as a result of a disagreement.

Kennedy encouraged parents, in an opinion piece published Sunday, to speak with doctors about measles vaccination, while saying that “the decision to vaccinate is a personal one” and that sanitation and nutrition had eliminated most measles deaths before shots arrived.

“I hope that from his new vantage point he sees how important vaccines are for protecting children and adults,” said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Medical experts cite several factors, including improved medical care, for the decline in measles deaths ahead of the vaccine’s introduction in 1963. In the decade before the shot was introduced, there were 400 to 500 measles deaths a year in the U.S. The recent death in Texas was the first from measles in the U.S. since 2015.

Kennedy spent two decades questioning the safety and efficacy of vaccines before his nomination for health secretary. A nonprofit he founded and led filed lawsuits challenging vaccines and vaccine mandates.

Ahead of his confirmation, Kennedy told senators he wasn’t antivaccine and said he would focus on chronic illness.

Since Kennedy became secretary on Feb. 13, HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority suspended a $460.7 million contract with Vaxart to develop an oral Covid-19 vaccine. HHS said it was re-evaluating its $590 million contract with Moderna for a bird-flu vaccine.

“While it is crucial that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services support pandemic preparedness, four years of the Biden administration’s failed oversight have made it necessary to review agreements for vaccine production,” an HHS spokesman said regarding the Moderna contract. A White House spokesman said the Vaxart contract was being scrutinized as part of the administration’s effort to tackle wasteful spending.

Vaxart said it was committed to working collaboratively with Kennedy and the federal government as they evaluate data supporting a planned vaccine study. Moderna declined to comment.

Meanwhile, promotional materials for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Wild to Mild” flu-vaccination campaign disappeared from the agency’s website. Links that originally led to webpages with shareable campaign images now lead to an outdated campaign page from 2023. NPR earlier reported that the campaign had been pulled.

The CDC wasn’t directed to take down the flu-vaccination campaign webpage, an HHS spokesman said. “Officials inside the CDC who are averse to Secretary Kennedy and President Trump’s agenda seem to be intentionally falsifying and misrepresenting guidance they receive,” he said.

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration abruptly canceled a meeting of vaccine experts who help the government and companies select strains to be targeted by next year’s flu shot. The FDA said it would consult with federal partners and recommend flu-shot strains to pharmaceutical companies in time for them to make shots for the next flu season.

“I think he’s just putting the brakes on things, saying slow down, let’s look at things,” said Jeff Hutt, spokesman for the Make America Healthy Again political-action committee, which supports Kennedy.

A planned Feb. 26 meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (or ACIP), the vaccine experts who recommend when Americans should get vaccinated, was postponed just a few days ahead of time without a rescheduled date.

At the meeting, the committee was to make recommendations for use of a newly approved vaccine to prevent mosquito-borne disease chikungunya, as well as of a new meningitis shot, according to an agenda posted on the CDC website.

ACIP’s members include experts in infectious diseases, pediatrics and public health. HHS secretaries have the legal authority to remove ACIP members, though they don’t usually.

HHS said that it postponed the committee meeting to “accommodate public comment.”

Dr. Jeffrey Klausner said he was unofficially collecting names for potential new members. Klausner is an infectious-disease doctor who said he has spoken with Kennedy and offered him advice.

The goal, Klausner said, was to put on the committee public-health experts who don’t have industry conflicts to restore public trust in vaccines.

“We need to have our advisory groups and our lower-level administration in a place where the American people can feel like people are recommending things for their benefit, not for the benefit of shareholders,” Klausner said.

All ACIP Committee members are required to undergo an annual conflict-of-interest review.

Members who conduct vaccine clinical trials or advise vaccine makers on such trials can seek waivers to sit on the committee, but they aren’t allowed to cast votes related to those vaccines, according to CDC guidance.

Among the people Klausner has reached out to are retired Vanderbilt University vaccinologist Dr. Kathy Edwards, who previously served on the committee.

Klausner said in an email to Edwards reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that Kennedy “is looking for highly credible individuals not conflicted with the vaccine industry who can objectively review the science” and that “members must never have been deposed by Kennedy,” who previously worked on vaccine lawsuits as a lawyer.

Edwards said she didn’t think she would be eligible for Kennedy’s version of the ACIP because she works on vaccine-data safety monitoring for pharmaceutical companies. She said she thought the existing ACIP conflict of interest rules are rigorous.

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