If you want to convince people not to vaccinate their children, you need to follow three simple rules. The third rule is the hardest. Arguably, no one has been more successful than our current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Thanks to RFK Jr., during the past year, American children have suffered and died from preventable diseases like measles, whooping cough, and influenza at rates greater than have been seen in decades. Most recently, RFK Jr. showed how to accomplish Rule #3.
Rule #1: Lie about vaccine safety
RFK Jr. has falsely claimed that the measles vaccine, in addition to causing blindness and deafness, kills people every year, that the polio vaccine killed “many, many, many more people than it saved,” that the COVID vaccine was the deadliest vaccine ever made, and that the hepatitis B vaccine causes autism.
Rule #2: Lie about vaccine efficacy
On September 29, 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted a seven-minute video on X claiming that measles and pertussis deaths were eliminated by advances in sanitation and hygiene, not vaccines. Unfortunately, RFK Jr. failed to note that the pertussis vaccine, which was introduced in the 1940s, reduced the number of pertussis deaths from 9,000 per year to fewer than 10, and that the measles vaccine, which was introduced in the early 1960s, reduced the number of measles deaths from 500 to virtually 0.
Rule #3: Actively suppress studies showing that vaccines are safe and effective
In May 2025, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a study in its journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, showing that the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine during pregnancy and an RSV monoclonal antibody for babies reduced the incidence of hospitalization in children 0-2 months of age by more than 50%. RSV is a leading cause of hospitalization and deaths in children, accounting for about 50,000-80,000 hospitalizations and 100-300 deaths ever year.
Normally, the CDC embargoes copies of these high-impact studies the day before publication along with a press kit that includes talking points and other details. Press outlets may then request interviews from the authors or submit questions that are answered by the CDC. Never happened. RFK Jr. muzzled the CDC media outreach. Why didn’t RFK Jr. want the press and the public to know about the impact of the RSV vaccine? Probably for the same reason he doesn’t want the public to know about the value of any vaccine.
Recently, RFK Jr. took his suppression of studies one step further. The CDC wanted to publish a study about the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine this past year. Researchers found that between September and December 2025, healthy adults who received the COVID vaccine reduced their likelihood of urgent care visits by 50 percent and hospitalizations by 55 percent. RFK Jr.’s hand-picked interim director of the CDC, Jay Bhattacharya, delayed publication claiming that the methodology was flawed, even though the same methodology had been used to determine the efficacy of influenza vaccines in a study the CDC had published one week earlier. Indeed, the same methodology was used to determine COVID vaccine effectiveness in a study published in 2021 in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine and in other journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet. “This is definitely an escalation of this administration’s undermining of CDC science,” said Dr Fiona Havers, a 13-year veteran of the CDC and former senior adviser on vaccine policy. “The fact that they are now blocking this is extremely concerning.”
RFK Jr. was able to successfully implement Rule #3 because he could. This would never have happened if he was still shouting his anti-vaccine rhetoric and science denialism from the sidelines, as he had been doing for the past 20 years. Now, as Secretary of Health and Human Services—in the name of “radical transparency”—he can take his science denialism to the next level. And continue to put children in harm’s way.
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