Senator Cassidy: Please Save Our Children!

RFK Jr.’s reign of terror on vaccines is just beginning. The recent death of a six-year-old from measles is a glimpse of what lies ahead.

On January 30, 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared before the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) committee, the second leg of his confirmation hearings for Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). During the hearing, Senator William Cassidy (R, LA), concerned about RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine activism, questioned him about his reluctance to admit that vaccines don’t cause autism. Satisfied, Cassidy voted to confirm RFK Jr., saying “Mr. Kennedy committed that he and I would have an unprecedentedly close, collaborative working relationship…We will meet or speak multiple times a month.” On February 13, 2025, RFK Jr. was confirmed to head HHS, the nation’s largest public health agency.

For the past 20 years, RFK Jr. has been a virulent anti-vaccine activist, science denialist, and conspiracy theorist. He has said that “vaccines cause autism”, that “no vaccine is safe and effective”, that the “polio vaccine killed more people than it saved”, and that the Covid-19 vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” Never has he given his full support for any vaccine. Why committee members thought that he would act differently after his confirmation is unfathomable. RFK Jr. is now on a mission to destroy America’s faith in vaccines.

During a measles outbreak in West Texas that killed a 6-year-old girl—the first measles death in a U.S. child in more than 20 years—RFK Jr. appeared on Fox News, falsely claiming that the “measles vaccine kills people every year,” that “measles vaccine causes blindness and deafness,” that “measles vaccine causes the same symptoms as measles,” and that natural measles “prevents cancer.” The mother of the child who died in West Texas listed cancer prevention as a reason not to vaccinate. RFK Jr.’s false claims about the measles vaccine have made it much harder for health officials in West Texas to convince parents to vaccinate their children.

During the West Texas outbreak—which has now caused more than 400 cases—RFK Jr. also promoted vitamin A as a “miracle” cure for measles. Many parents saw this as a choice. “Why should I inject my child with three live viruses when I can simply give them a vitamin?” Hospitals in Texas are now caring for children with vitamin A toxicity, which manifests as headaches, blurred vision, and liver damage.

On March 7, 2025, RFK Jr. declared that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would now do a vaccine-autism study despite dozens of studies showing that vaccines don’t cause autism. It’s not hard to predict what RFK Jr.’s “study” will find. During his second confirmation hearing, RFK Jr. held up a study of Medicaid patients in Florida claiming that vaccines caused autism. The study wasn’t published in a scientific or medical journal, wasn’t peer reviewed, was funded by an anti-vaccine organization, and was critically flawed. Nonetheless, RFK Jr. claimed that the study met his “gold standard” for quality science (which means it confirmed a belief he holds with the fervor of a religious conviction).

RFK Jr. now claims that he will create a vaccine injury agency within the CDC to bring this same kind of science to the federal government. Toward that end, he hired David Geier as a data analyst. Geier had published studies claiming that a mercury-containing preservative in vaccines caused autism. RFK Jr. praised David Geier for his “gold standard” work. However, the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences determined that Geier’s studies were “uninterpretable due to serious methodological flaws.” In 2011, the Maryland Board of Physicians charged David Geier for practicing medicine without a license when he treated children with autism with a drug called Lupron, a form of chemical castration. With David Geier and RFK Jr. at the helm, we will soon see poorly done, irreproducible studies claiming that vaccines cause autism, this time under the letterhead of the CDC.

It doesn’t end there. RFK Jr., who supervises the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is banning research on mRNA, and banning studies on vaccine hesitancy, which investigate the influence of dangerous vaccine misinformation such as that provided by his own organization, Children’s Health Defense. At the end of March, while measles epidemics had engulfed 20 states, RFK Jr. banned the CDC from reporting the risk of measles in areas where vaccination rates were low and eliminated the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy.

Finally, on March 27, 2025, RFK Jr. fired Dr. Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine official, for failing to bend a knee to his relentless campaign to misinform the public about vaccines and vaccine safety. “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary,” said Marks. “But rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”

What’s next? I think we can expect more bad studies, more fear of vaccines, lower immunization rates, decreased surveillance, poor outbreak control, more measles deaths, and more deaths from other preventable diseases. This year’s measles epidemic alone is the largest in decades. Make no mistake, the passionate center of RFK Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement is a war against vaccines. Maybe Project 2025 should be renamed Project 1825. Seems like a better fit.