A “Modest” Number of Deaths

One member of the CDC’s “new” vaccine advisory committee made a surprising comment during a recent meeting.

On June 9, 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, fired all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Two days later, he replaced them with seven new members, many of whom shared his anti-vaccine, anti-science views. One was Robert Malone, whose response to the current influenza epidemic was surprising.

On June 27, CDC epidemiologists updated the committee on the most recent influenza epidemic. Committee members learned that during this past year, 770,000 people were hospitalized with influenza, 56,000 of whom were children. They also learned that 250 children had died from influenza, 80 percent of whom were unvaccinated. For this reason, the CDC continues to recommend an annual influenza vaccine for every child more than 6 months of age. Malone was unimpressed. “The 250 pediatric deaths, which is, let’s acknowledge, a modest number.” Typically, between 75 and 150 children die every year from influenza. The death rate during the 2024-2025 season was the highest since the 2009 swine flu pandemic. Jason Goldman, president of the American College of Physicians, responded by saying “the number of deaths is not a small number, especially if it’s your own child dying from a vaccine-preventable illness.” Why did Robert Malone appear to trivialize the number of deaths from influenza?

Maybe Malone was only saying that far more adults die from influenza than children. So, in comparison, pediatric deaths are “modest.” But there is another possibility. Like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Robert Malone is an anti-vaccine propagandist. “Some people believe the term anti-vaccine is a pejorative,” wrote Malone. “I do not. I view it as high praise.” To be an effective anti-vaccine activist, you need to do the following:

Spread falsehoods about vaccine safety. In November 2023, Robert Malone testified in front of a congressional committee that the mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna were contaminated with fragments of foreign DNA, which, he argued, altered our own DNA, causing cancers and autoimmune diseases among other disorders. For pregnant women, Malone warned that these DNA fragments could cross the placenta and cause birth defects.

Claim government conspiracies. At the same committee hearing, Malone said that the FDA, CIA, and other government agencies knew about this DNA contamination but were covering it up. “The CIA has its fingers all over this,” he declared. Even more insidious, these DNA fragments could be used by the federal government to monitor who had been vaccinated and who hadn’t. At the end of the hearing, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene concluded, “This is the worst thing that has happened to this country in my lifetime and the role of the government cannot be denied.”

Ignore infectious diseases. During his run for the presidency, RFK Jr. bragged that he would tell all researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to “give infectious diseases a break for a while.” Toward that end, RFK Jr. has eliminated the entire staff at the Office of Infectious Diseases and HIV policy, instituted massive layoffs at the FDA, NIH, and CDC, caused the closures of many vaccine clinics, and decreased CDC surveillance. Infectious diseases, however, haven’t given us a break. The United States is now experiencing the largest measles outbreak in more than 30 years. Two unvaccinated little girls, six and eight years old, have died this year from measles. These are the first measles deaths in U.S. children since 2003.

Minimize deaths from infectious diseases. In large part, because of misinformation provided by the anti-vaccine movement, more parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children than ever before. Consequently, more children are dying unnecessarily from preventable infections. This is not a good look for the anti-vaccine movement. They need to find a way to minimize these deaths. Malone has done his part. He was part of the “crisis team” set up by RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, to minimize the deaths of those two little girls who died from measles in West Texas. Malone said that one of the children had actually died from complications of tonsillitis and mononucleosis, not measles. “This is a case of a child suffering from pre-existing conditions who was misdiagnosed,” wrote Malone, who claimed to have reviewed the child’s medical records. He called the New York Times article that reported measles as the cause of death “an outright lie.” Doctors at the UMC Medical Center in Lubbock, Texas, however, quickly contradicted Malone’s claims, stating that the child had died from “measles pulmonary failure.”

If we are to accept RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine agenda, we are going to have to learn to accept more suffering, more hospitalizations, and more deaths from vaccine-preventable infections. Robert Malone, by appearing to minimize the 250 deaths in children from influenza this year, might have been trying to show us the way. In the end, we are going to have to ask ourselves, “How many vaccine-preventable deaths are too many?”