Public Health Watch Newsletter: HHS ‘Shakeup’ Won’t Put RFK Jr.’s Anti-Vax Genie Back in the Bottle

A year of chaos, dysfunction, and infighting at the Trump-RFK Jr. HHS finally boiled over enough to prompt a leadership ‘shakeup’ this week. But desperate political deckchair shuffling won’t undo the damage the administration has done and continues to do to our public health.

As the Washington Post reports, the White House and Health Secretary RFK Jr. are “shaking up the health department’s leadership team ahead of the midterms, pushing out several deputies while elevating others in hopes of stabilizing an agency rattled by internal fights and controversial messages. … Despite the outward focus on food — rarely talking about vaccines on his recently launched national “Take Back Your Health” tour so far this year — Kennedy’s department overhauled the childhood vaccine schedule in January.”

The White House clearly read the tea leaves and recognizes that RFK Jr’s destructive anti-vax agenda is not helping them…at all. A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll found a staggering 57% of respondents disapproved of Kennedy’s approach to vaccines overall, and that adults who had heard of the Trump HHS’s downgrade of the child vaccine schedule “were twice as likely to say it would hurt children than help them.”

But the theatrics of HHS’ leadership reorganization are just that: smoke and mirrors. Trump and RFK Jr. already pushed the big red anti-vax button when they approved the CDC’s baseless and extremely dangerous rollback of the child vaccine schedule. Kennedy going shirtless to talk about red meat on the campaign trail won’t negate the fact that vaccination rates will continue to decline as a direct result of their actions. It won’t change the virtual certainty that by downgrading childhood recommendations for “hepatitis A, hepatitis B, meningococcal disease, rotavirus, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, the leading cause of hospitalization in American infants,” the nation will see a rise in all of these preventable diseases, risking the health and lives of countless children.

And whether the White House prefers to draw attention to their clear anti-vax agenda or not, the anti-vax business of the federal advisory boards RFK Jr. stacked with quacks and cranks will no doubt continue, including from the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) and Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) (whenever they manage to schedule a meeting, of course). Just weeks ago, RFK Jr.’s handpicked ACIP Chairman openly questioned the need for the polio and measles vaccines amid the worst measles outbreak in decades. And longtime Kennedy allies have reportedly “launched a new effort to repeal laws that for decades have required children to be vaccinated against measles, polio and other diseases before they enter day care or kindergarten.”

Speaking of health department reshuffling, RFK Jr. has tapped “Ineffectual Figurehead” Jay Bhattacharya as acting CDC director on top of his role as NIH director, despite running that agency into the ground. As Kayla Hancock, Director of Public Health Watch, noted: “Jay Bhattacharya has overseen the most chaotic and rudderless era in NIH history, and for RFK Jr. to give him even more responsibility at the CDC is malpractice against our public health.”

Case in point, this week NBC News reported on the “growing vacuum in leadership” at the NIH under the aloof Bhattacharya: “Of the 27 institutes and centers that make up NIH, 16 were missing permanent directors as of Friday.”

Capping off another banner week for the Trump Health Department that is objectively the most hostile towards science and reality in U.S. history, a new review has debunked the baseless Trump-RFK Jr. Tylenol-Autism Myth. Meanwhile, ProPublica revealed that RFK Jr.’s FDA quietly scrubbed official websites of warnings against dangerous and useless treatments for autism, including raw camel milk and industrial-strength disinfectants. RFK Jr. is making the snake oil industry great again while Americans get sicker.

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