Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared on Fox News Thursday night, to spew some of his threadbare misinformation about vaccines, defending his recent abrupt and poorly supported moves to change public health policy.
“We’ve gone up from 11 vaccines since 1986. Today, children get between 69 and 92 vaccines before they’re 18,” Kennedy told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum. In reality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends far fewer vaccines for children.
“None of [childhood vaccines] have been safety tested except for the COVID vaccine. The only vaccine on this schedule that has gone through placebo-controlled trials prior to licensure was the COVID vaccine. So nobody has any idea what the risk profiles are on these products.”
As for his claim that it’s mandatory for kids to receive “69-92 vaccines before they are 18,” it seems that Kennedy is doing a lot of MAGA-math. Most states require 30 to 32 total shots (and that includes multiple doses for some vaccines).
His claim that no vaccines other than those for COVID have been through testing and reviews is also flatly false. Every vaccine on the recommended childhood schedule has undergone rigorous testing, including comparisons with placebo or existing vaccine groups. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, placebo groups are only excluded when testing a new vaccine intended to replace an existing one. In those cases, the comparison group is given the older, already tested vaccine as a standard ethical practice.
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Kennedy need only read his own goddamn CDC website to learn about the testing—which includes three phases, followed by continued monitoring by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that Kennedy recently purged. He’s replaced the ACIP experts with a gaggle of individuals known for spreading COVID and vaccine misinformation.
Even Kennedy’s internal logic falls flat. The one vaccine he claims meets his own standards, the COVID vaccine, is the very one he recently moved to exclude from recommendations for children and healthy pregnant women. That decision, based on dubious science and in defiance of expert consensus, contradicts his supposed commitment to rigorous testing.
Kennedy’s baseless claims that vaccines have not been properly vetted have fueled skepticism about vaccinations, and hesitancy in parents, posing a real risk to children’s health outcomes.