RFK Jr.’s Next Move

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On October 8, 2026, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services (HHS), issued a press release titled “HHS Launches Agency-Wide Actions to Strengthen Vaccine Injury Research, Reporting, and Patient Care.” The initiative rested on four pillars: 

1) Create a National Institutes of Health (NIH) clinic to study health problems following vaccination; 

2) Reimburse physicians for reporting suspected vaccine injuries; 

3) Mine electronic medical health records to capture vaccine adverse events; and

4) Modernize the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). 

“We must listen to patients and families who report vaccine injuries — not dismiss or gaslight them,” said RFK Jr. “This is how we earn back trust in our public institutions.”

RFK Jr.’s claim that the public’s concerns about vaccine injuries have been dismissed or gaslit isn’t supported by the facts. When issues about vaccine safety have been raised, researchers have performed studies carefully and rigorously to determine whether vaccines were causing harm. For example:

• • • In 1976, a vaccine to prevent swine flu was shown to be a rare cause of Guillain-Barré syndrome, an ascending form of paralysis.
    • In 2001, a rotavirus vaccine was shown to be a rare cause of intestinal blockage called intussusception.
    • In 2010, researchers proved that a swine flu vaccine used in Europe was a rare cause of narcolepsy, a permanent disorder of wakefulness.
    • In 2021, Johnson & Johnson’s adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccine was found to be a rare cause of clotting, including clotting of the brain, which could be fatal.
    • Also, in 2021, Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were found to be a rare cause of myocarditis.

This works both ways. Carefully performed scientific studies might also prove that vaccine fears are unfounded. For example, in 1998, when a British researcher raised the possibility that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism, researchers performed more than 24 studies proving that this wasn’t true. Parents who continued to believe that MMR caused autism weren’t being dismissed or gaslit. Quite the opposite. Their fears were taken seriously, and millions of dollars were spent on studies addressing their concerns.

The problem with RFK Jr.’s new vaccine safety initiative is that he possesses something that no leader of this effort should ever possess — a fixed, immutable, science-resistant, non-falsifiable belief that vaccines are causing an explosion of chronic diseases. During the next two years, RFK Jr. will alter, manipulate, and misrepresent data to prove that he’s right. And if you don’t believe that, just look at what he has done over the past few years.

On January 30, 2025, while appearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, RFK Jr. held up a paper from a Florida Medicaid program that he claimed proved that vaccines caused permanent neurological disabilities, including autism. The study, which was funded and reviewed by anti-vaccine activists, was based on unverifiable billing codes and performed by a researcher with a history of retracted vaccine studies. 

For these and other reasons, the paper was never published. Nonetheless, RFK Jr. called this study “gold standard science,” claiming that it “proved” vaccines were causing chronic disorders.

On July 15, 2025, researchers in Denmark published a 24-year study in the Annals of Internal Medicine of more than 1.2 million children who had received aluminum adjuvants in vaccines, in amounts ranging from 0 to 4.5 milligrams. They found no relationship between the amount of aluminum a child received and the incidence of 50 different chronic disorders. 

RFK Jr., who has claimed without evidence that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines cause chronic diseases, refused to believe it. He insisted that the paper be retracted. The journal refused.

On September 9, 2025, before a Senate hearing chaired by Ron Johnson (R-WI), RFK Jr. hailed a study, performed by Henry Ford Health, which claimed that vaccinated children had a higher rate of allergies, asthma, developmental disorders, and autoimmune diseases than unvaccinated children. Again, because of its many methodological and statistical flaws, the study was never published. Indeed, representatives of Henry Ford Health issued a statement that they had chosen not to publish the study because it was impossible to draw conclusions from such flawed data.

For the past decade, RFK Jr. was paid up to $500,000 a year by the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense to represent its point of view. Now he is no longer just a personal-injury lawyer with a famous name; he is the secretary of Health and Human Services, paid half that amount to represent all Americans, not only those opposed to vaccines. Nonetheless, he has continued to aggressively pursue his anti-vaccine agenda. 

Going forward, RFK Jr. will use this new vaccine safety initiative to manipulate data to fit his bias that vaccines cause chronic disorders. His goal will be to add more injuries to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, possibly leading to its dissolution. These efforts won’t make vaccines safer; they will only make them less available, less affordable, and more feared.

Many people in this country believe they were injured by vaccines. Some were. All deserve answers based on solid scientific evidence, not the biases of a deeply dishonest man who is wholly incompetent to serve as the nation’s No. 1 public health official.

Adapted, with permission, from Paul Offit’s Substack, Beyond the Noise. Paul Offit, M.D., is a professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, and author of Tell Me When It’s Over.