Reaction from Kayla Hancock, Director of Protect Our Care’s Public Health Project: “Anti-vax kingpin RFK Jr. has created a perfect storm for multiple preventable diseases to return with a very costly and deadly vengeance against our kids.”
Key Excerpts from ProPublica’s reporting:
The U.S. government took a half century to build a vaccination system that shielded children from such a fate. Its success depended on two fundamental pillars: parents trusting in vaccines and children having access to them. Both are now in peril, thanks in no small part to the man steering America’s health policy.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who founded an antivaccine group and once likened the immunization of children to a holocaust, is transforming a government that long championed the lifesaving benefits of shots into one that spreads doubts about their safety here and abroad.
Kennedy is also considering changes that could prompt the few companies that make vaccines for American kids to abandon the U.S. market, leaving parents who want the shots unable to get them.
The threat to vaccine access reaches across the globe after Kennedy yanked the government’s $1.6 billion pledge to the aid group that provides shots for the world’s poorest children. For decades, the U.S. had funded such work not just as a humanitarian mission but as a way to keep Americans safe from unchecked contagions.
Kennedy’s efforts to reshape vaccine policies have been well chronicled, but ProPublica wanted to take a broader look at how the changes might affect Americans’ health in the years to come.
We found that long-forgotten plagues have roared back, killing and maiming children in parts of the world where access to vaccines or trust in them faltered. What seemed like subtle changes to a country’s vaccine policies had disastrous consequences years later.
Even in places that offer highly advanced health care, doctors have felt impotent trying to undo the damage when these horrors return. Modern medicine can’t reverse paralysis from polio. Surgeons can intervene when a baby is born blind, deaf and with heart defects after being exposed to rubella in the womb, but the child is still likely to face a life shaped by disability.
ProPublica reviewed hundreds of studies on vaccines and outbreaks of the diseases they prevent and interviewed more than three dozen people who have worked on U.S. immunization programs here and abroad, dating back to the days of smallpox. Some had never spoken publicly about their experiences.
They shared a pit-of-the-stomach dread that American children will end up fighting for their lives against infections that have long been preventable.
“I think there always was a worst-case scenario,” said Dr. Melinda Wharton, who retired last September after more than three decades leading immunization programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “I don’t think I imagined it could or would be this bad.”
This week, Kennedy’s agency indicated it planned to appeal a federal court ruling that halted, at least temporarily, some of his changes. Among those was the decision to drop six diseases from the routine childhood immunization schedule.
[…]
Vaccination rates have fallen in large swaths of the country. Resentful of how government institutions responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, many Americans lost trust in public health leaders. Antivaccine activists spread misinformation and recast the once-fringe practice of refusing shots as an exercise in “medical freedom.”
Now the U.S. is experiencing a surge in measles not seen in three decades. There have been more than 3,600 cases across 46 states and three deaths since January last year. The virus spread so fast in South Carolina this year that some medical teams had to examine infected patients in their cars to protect vulnerable people in their waiting rooms, like they did during the worst days of COVID-19.
Measles, among the most contagious diseases, is typically the first to infect undervaccinated communities and serves as a warning that other scourges will follow.
That’s what happened in New York City where antivaccine forces distributed illustrated handouts that seeded fear in Orthodox Jewish communities.Ratner saw a direct line between a loss of trust and the sick children in his ICU — first with measles in 2018 and 2019, then with Hib a few years later.
Now the villainization of vaccines isn’t coming from pamphlets passed out on a Brooklyn street corner. It’s coming from the highest health offices in the U.S. government.
[…]
When Kennedy became America’s top health official last year, no other leader at the CDC had more experience preventing death and disability with vaccines than Dr. Melinda Wharton.
It was Wharton who had sent Vitek to Russia to figure out why diphtheria returned. And it was Wharton who started Reef on her quest to vanquish congenital rubella syndrome. Like them, she had trained as a disease detective.
In her 39 years at the CDC, Wharton had seen activists try to persuade Americans that the shots they were giving their babies were scarier than the diseases those shots prevented. In 2021, Kennedy had written in a book that measles — a virus the CDC says kills nearly 1 to 3 of every 1,000 children who contract it — wasn’t the menace that the government proclaimed.
“Measles outbreaks have been fabricated to create fear that in turn forces government officials to ‘do something,’” he wrote. “They then inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children for the sole purpose of fattening industry profits.”
During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy told senators he isn’t antivaccine. “I am pro-safety,” he said. “I worked for years to raise awareness about the mercury and toxic chemicals in fish, and nobody called me anti-fish.”
In his early days as the nation’s top health leader, HHS dismissed thousands of Wharton’s colleagues, ended vaccine promotions during an especially deadly flu season and buried a CDC measles forecast that stressed the need for immunization.
Wharton set five empty cardboard boxes on her filing cabinet in case she needed to pack up quickly. In recent years she managed the committee of outside experts that recommends which shots Americans should get and when. Few people had ever heard of her obscure corner of the federal health bureaucracy.
But Kennedy knew it well. He understood that Congress had given these advisers the power to determine which shots were free for more than half of American kids and which ones insurers must pay for. Many states used the committee’s recommendations to set vaccine mandates for kids attending school.
Kennedy for years complained the panel had been captured by Big Pharma. On June 9, his chief of staff at the CDC removed Wharton from her role managing the committee. Just as that news was sinking in, Wharton’s phone lit up with messages from the committee’s members. Kennedy had announced in a Wall Street Journal column that he was replacing all of them. “A clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science,” he wrote.
Kennedy stacked the new committee with many vaccine skeptics who quickly delved into his longstanding grievances about America’s immunization system. Webcasts of the meetings became a megaphone for mistrust. Some devolved into shouting matches as doctors from medical societies pushed back against misinformation.
[…]
The chair of the committee, Dr. Kirk Milhoan, told the “Why Should I Trust You?” podcast he wasn’t afraid to reconsider whether the polio shot is needed any longer. In an email to ProPublica, Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist, said that the committee is required to review vaccines every seven years “to optimize effectiveness and to reevaluate possible long term risks.”
[…]
The American Academy of Pediatrics, which for decades had collaborated with the committee on the childhood vaccine schedule, boycotted the panel’s meetings and sued to block many of Kennedy’s moves.
On Monday, a federal judge sided with the academy, finding that for an advisory committee dedicated to using vaccines to control preventable diseases, more than half of the new members “appear distinctly unqualified.” While he considers the case, the judge, for now, put on hold Kennedy’s appointments to the panel as well as the CDC’s changes to the childhood vaccine schedule.
The ruling is a setback for Kennedy, but the Trump administration has foreshadowed other changes that could affect Americans’ access to shots.
In September, President Donald Trump stepped up to the microphone in the White House’s Roosevelt Room with a major announcement about his administration’s efforts to counter the rise of autism. Flanked by Kennedy and other top health officials, the president urged pregnant women not to take acetaminophen, the pain reliever often sold as Tylenol. This news ricocheted around the globe.
But less attention was given to other bombshells dropped about vaccines that day. The president complained that pediatricians were giving so many shots, they were treating America’s children like horses.
“They pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies, it’s a disgrace,” he said.
Without explaining how, Trump said his administration was going to get aluminum removed from vaccines. “Who the hell wants that pumped into a body?” he said.
Aluminum has been used in shots since the 1930s to boost immune response. It is an essential ingredient in vaccines for nine diseases, including diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, human papillomavirus (a cause of cervical cancer), one version of the Hib vaccine, and many of the combination shots babies receive. Kennedy has long questioned its safety.
A CDC-sponsored study found an association between aluminum in shots and asthma in young kids. But the researchers, citing limitations in their analysis, wrote that “these findings do not constitute strong evidence for questioning the safety of aluminum in vaccines.” A larger study by Danish government researchers subsequently found aluminum in shots did not increase the risk of autism, asthma, autoimmune diseases or dozens of other conditions. Kennedy criticized the methodology and tried unsuccessfully to get the Danish study retracted.
If the federal government were to ban aluminum in vaccines, companies would have to reformulate them and, possibly, launch costly clinical trials. Nearly all the shots American kids get are made by a handful of pharmaceutical giants. The market is fragile enough that if any were to balk and stop making these vaccines, families could face shortages or lose access altogether.
The fate of the measles-mumps-rubella shot, which does not contain aluminum, is also up in the air. At the White House autism press conference, Trump, without offering evidence, said he had heard bad things about that shot, which has been used here since 1971. Researchers around the world repeatedly have found it does not cause autism.
Nevertheless, the president implored parents to insist on separate shots for measles, mumps and rubella — “separate, separate, separate,” he repeated.
But there are no FDA-approved standalone shots for measles, mumps or rubella. Facing a year with the most American measles cases in a generation, the president had suggested that there’s a problem with the only surefire prevention available and told parents to demand shots that don’t exist here.
[…]
The federal court ruling that paused January’s revisions to the childhood vaccination schedule doesn’t stop Kennedy from making similar changes in the future, as long as he follows the proper procedures. While moving shots to the talk-to-your-doctor category may seem harmless, it could affect access down the line.
The injury compensation program that Congress created to prevent manufacturers from fleeing the U.S. market in the 1980s only coversimmunizations the CDC recommends for “routine administration” to children or pregnant women. That leaves shots in other categories open to legal challenges by vaccine injury lawyers, renewing the specter of big legal verdicts that previously prompted vaccine makers to bolt.
Kennedy has long railed against the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, arguing it’s a gift to the pharmaceutical industry that removes any incentive to make safe products. Before he became HHS secretary, Kennedy referred plaintiffs to a law firm suing a vaccine maker in exchange for a cut of its fees if they won, federal financial disclosures show.
Last year, he hired a vaccine injury lawyer to help him overhaul the compensation program and expand who can receive payments. In September, that attorney said he and Kennedy were considering ways to add symptoms of autism to the program’s injury table for quick payouts.
So many studies — performed in different parts of the world and involving more than a million people — have found no link between vaccines and autism that this has become scientific consensus. (Scientists have found serious methodological flaws in papers that have claimed such a link.) The compensation program’s vaccine court spent years in the 2000s trying cases that alleged shots caused autism and found they didn’t. ProPublica asked HHS whether Kennedy planned to add symptoms of autism to the program’s injury table, but the agency did not answer.
Given how prevalent autism is, a change like this could exhaust the compensation fund. If the program collapses and the legal protections go away, manufacturers may stop selling shots here like they did in the 1980s.
Then, even Americans who still trust vaccines couldn’t get them.
[…]
The Trump administration has walked away from long-standing international alliances that helped the U.S. beat back scourges in other countries. The president withdrew the U.S. from the WHO. And Kennedy backed out of the government’s promise to give $1.6 billion to Gavi, the global vaccine aid group the U.S. has funded for decades. He accused the organization of neglecting vaccine safety.
[…]
When countries launch rubella vaccination campaigns for the first time, they can’t just target babies or the virus shifts to older groups and can infect those who are pregnant. To avoid this, Gavi for many years supported immunizing all children from 9 months old up to age 15 when countries first introduce the shot, which offers protection not just for rubella but also for measles.
But facing a massive hole in its budget, Gavi’s board in December decided in the future to save money by only guaranteeing that vaccine up to age 10 when a country first debuts it. Modeling predicts the change could result in 72,000 additional deaths from measles and congenital rubella syndrome, according to the Gavi board’s records.
A Gavi spokesperson acknowledged that the shift creates a greater risk of congenital rubella but said that the organization had to figure out how to protect as many people as it could with far less money. Countries that want to offer the vaccine to older kids, she noted, can draw from a different pot of Gavi money, but that will leave those places with less funding for other shots.
Fallout from the budget cuts goes well beyond rubella. “The bottom line is that, over the next five years, we expect to be able to prevent 600,000 future deaths less than if we were fully funded,” the spokesperson said.
Addressing Kennedy’s criticism, the spokesperson added, “Gavi’s utmost concern is the health and safety of children. Our approach to vaccine safety is guided entirely by global scientific consensus.”
The spread of measles in the U.S. warns of future rubella outbreaks. Since the rubella shot here is given in combination with the vaccine for measles and mumps, parents who turn down measles vaccines leave their kids vulnerable to rubella, too. It could take 20 years before birth defects from rubella become common again. Unvaccinated children have to grow old enough to become pregnant. The long lag time can give a false sense of security.
But, Reef warned, “when it comes back, it will come back with a vengeance. We will see babies being born who are blind, deaf and have heart disease.”
[…]The world is ill prepared for a major resurgence in diphtheria. Antitoxin, made from the blood of horses, has to be given immediately. Yet supplies are scarce, and not many companies sell it. Dozens of kids in Pakistan died in 2024 because doctors there couldn’t get it in time.
Vitek, the CDC doctor who fought diphtheria in Russia, helped obtain permission for the CDC to keep an emergency stash of antitoxin for Americans after the only manufacturer with FDA approval stopped making it. The U.S. medical system still relies on an emergency supply controlled by the CDC.
ProPublica asked the CDC and HHS how many diphtheria patients the government’s current supply could treat, but neither agency would say.
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