See story below; reaction from Brad Woodhouse, President of Protect Our Care:
“Anti-vax profiteer RFK Jr. got exactly what he wanted as Trump health secretary: lower vaccination rates. No one asked for the worst flu and measles outbreaks against children in decades that predictably followed. Adding insult to injury, RFK Jr.’s hand-picked, fellow anti-vax FDA head just took the highly unusual and arbitrary step of torpedoing a new flu vaccine from a top manufacturer over his own staff objections, which will only leave Americans less protected from this deadly disease. What is the administration’s real end goal here – survival of the fittest children and seniors?”
KEY POINT FROM THE NEW REPUBLIC:
[T]he FDA decided not to consider Moderna’s application for a new mRNA-based flu vaccine—a decision handed down by the agency’s notorious anti-vaxxer, Vinay Prasad.
Overall, under Kennedy’s watch, there has been more chaos, more confusion, and less vaccination—and the consequences have been deadly. Sixty children have died from the flu this season—the vast majority of whom were unvaccinated—according to the CDC.
New Republic: How RFK Jr.’s “MAHA” Quackery Is Making Flu Season Worse:
Across the country, the staggering costs of vaccine denialism are piling up, to deadly effect.
By Laura Weiss / February 11, 2026
VIRAL LOAD
Last month, cases of flu reached their highest levels in the United States in 25 years. Many hospitals were unprepared for the surge; as emergency wards filled with flu patients, healthcare workers were left to weather the impacts. As of February 6, there have been at least 22,000,000 reported cases, 280,000 hospitalizations, and 12,000 deaths from flu so far this season, according to the CDC. Many of those afflicted are being hospitalized due to severe post-viral complications such as pneumonia, antibiotic-resistant staph, and even fatal brain swelling.
And while rates have since subsided, we’re not out of the words yet, with Flu B now on the rise. As epidemiologist Melissa Donnelly said, “We’re still in the thick of the season.”
What explains why recent flu seasons have been so severe? There are several factors.
In this political climate, the first thing that may come to mind is the anti-vaccine policy coming from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, which has sown confusion around vaccines, leading to lower rates of vaccination for the flu and other diseases—not to mention massive preventable measles outbreaks. But it’s also true that the dominant strain of flu may not be well-matched to the existing vaccine.
However, a less discussed aspect behind the high rates of flu and disease severity is a slew of recent research finding that prior Covid-19 infections can damage immune responses—and most Americans have been infected with Covid at least once by now.
“It is clear that at least some of what we’re seeing right now is likely related to that immunity problem from Covid-19 infections,” Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, and co-author of a study on the subject, told The New Republic.
He’s not the only doctor to connect these dots. According to Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Texas, El Paso, “Prior COVID-19 infection can lead to persistent immune dysfunction, which may increase susceptibility to subsequent influenza infection and severity of disease.”
Despite this, there is a “pervasive nonchalance” about the surge in flu and spread of other respiratory viruses like Covid among the public, as Al-Aly put it—and RFK Jr’s moves at HHS are in part to blame, he said. On top of that, hospitals are refusing to adequately staff their wards or protect healthcare workers from infection, increasing the burden of disease and putting the public at risk. And this week, the FDA decided not to consider Moderna’s application for a new mRNA-based flu vaccine—a decision handed down by the agency’s notorious anti-vaxxer, Vinay Prasad.
Overall, under Kennedy’s watch, there has been more chaos, more confusion, and less vaccination—and the consequences have been deadly.
Sixty children have died from the flu this season—the vast majority of whom were unvaccinated—according to the CDC.
In the midst of this unfolding tragedy, the Department of Health and Human Services made the controversial, unilateral decision to slash the childhood vaccine schedule from 17 universally recommended vaccines down to 11. Six vaccines—rotavirus, COVID-19, influenza, meningococcal disease, hepatitis A, and hepatitis B—have been demoted to the status of “shared clinical decisionmaking.” This status is typically reserved for “situations of genuine clinical equipoise,” wrote Dr. Jake Scott for The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, which does not apply to the six removed vaccines, given the scientific consensus on their safety and efficacy.
HHS was quick to justify its decision in a paper penned by notorious anti-vax HHS leadership, which went to great lengths to play up the small risks of those vaccines. Its authors wrote that they were aligning vaccine policy with “peer” countries like Denmark, when in fact Denmark itself is an outlier among most European countries, according to KFF. It also isn’t a fair comparison: Denmark has a much smaller population and universal healthcare coverage, meaning many fewer patients fall between the cracks in terms of needed preventative care.
The result of this change will be that fewer parents will come to view the flu vaccine as safe and necessary for their children, experts say.
“Many parents are already unsure if their child needs a flu vaccine, and the Secretary’s statements can tip the balance and lead to less use,” said Dorit Reiss, a law professor and vaccine policy expert at the University of California Law, in a statement to The New Republic. “Less vaccines will likely lead to more deaths—among children and adults.” She pointed out that “for influenza, children are a real source of infection for other family members, including the elderly.”
Vaccination rates for children for flu have dropped from 58 to 45 percent since the 2019-2020 season as of late January, according to the CDC.
“With fewer people vaccinated you’re seeing the risk of having a severe reaction increase. So that’s definitely a major factor in seeing high flu hospitalizations,” said Donnelly, who also writes the New York edition of public health newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist.
HHS changing the vaccine schedule followed a year of other unprecedented moves to circumvent and challenge established vaccine policy. The list of changes is dizzying: including replacing the members of its vaccine advisory board with vaccine skeptics, cutting access to Covid vaccines, and slashing funding for mRNA vaccine research. This has led to pharmaceutical companies themselves turning away from this important vaccine technology, making note of the anti-vaccine tone set by the government. This comes atop decimating cuts to the CDC.
Meanwhile, many states and major medical associations have maintained their previous vaccine recommendations, citing the changes as not based in science, with initiatives like the Vaccine Integrity Project attempting to fill in the gaps left by the corrupted CDC.
However, patients are “confused” about what they should do given the mixed messaging they are receiving, explained Donnely. Despite the claims of the Make America Healthy Again movement that they are restoring trust in public health, they are doing the opposite. According to a survey by KFF, less than half of respondents said that they trusted the CDC, the lowest number since before the pandemic.
Inconsistent public health messaging “undermines trust,” said Al-Aly. “All of that political turmoil and misinformation… has a true effect on people’s lives.”
We are already seeing those impacts with measles, he added. “It’s really, really tragic.”