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U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the anti-vaccine group he founded that it has a “strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” then repeated a series of misleading claims about vaccine safety during a keynote address at the Washington conference hosted by Children’s Health Defense. The appearance itself was extraordinary: a sitting health secretary shared a stage with Andrew Wakefield, the British physician whose medical license was revoked after he used falsified data in a now-retracted study falsely linking the measles, mumps, and rubella shot to autism. Kennedy’s Sept. 17, 2026, remarks focused heavily on his time at HHS, but he made clear his alignment with the group’s central concerns, telling the audience that the administration had “started asking the questions that you and millions of American parents have been asking for years.” He made just one passing mention of measles, despite the United States facing its worst outbreak in recent years and with four deaths reported in Pennsylvania. The address also came as childhood vaccination rates continue to fall and the number of parents seeking exemptions from state school vaccine mandates is rising. Kennedy has long questioned vaccine safety and has made overhauling the childhood vaccination schedule one of his signature policy goals, despite pledging during his confirmation process not to discourage vaccines or make them harder to access. AFP fact-checked the key claims he made during the address.
Kennedy’s efforts to reshape federal vaccine policy have been controversial and only partly successful. In March, a federal judge struck down his decision to replace members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the independent body tasked with reviewing vaccine safety and effectiveness data to make recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kennedy had filled the committee with prominent vaccine critics, prompting legal challenges from public health groups. But the broader push continued. In August, President Donald Trump signed an executive order recommending that children be vaccinated against far fewer diseases than the American Academy of Pediatrics currently advises. That order, while not itself a binding mandate, signaled the administration’s willingness to move away from the standard immunization schedule that has been in place for decades. Kennedy has repeatedly argued that the schedule is too crowded and that children receive too many vaccines too early in life. Public health experts counter that the recommended schedule is based on extensive research and that delaying or spacing out vaccines leaves children vulnerable to preventable diseases. The juxtaposition of Kennedy’s speech with Wakefield’s appearance underscored the administration’s comfort with figures long associated with vaccine misinformation. Wakefield’s 1998 paper was retracted by The Lancet, and he was struck off the UK medical register after an investigation found he had acted dishonestly and irresponsibly.
During the speech, Kennedy suggested that vaccination is linked to chronic disease and claimed that children who suffer vaccine injuries have not been adequately studied. Experts contacted by AFP said those suggestions are not supported by the evidence. “If there is a statistically significant association between a vaccine and a chronic condition, the post-marketing surveillance system that we have in place would identify it,” Mark Slifka, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Oregon Health & Science University, told AFP. He emphasized that routine vaccines go through extensive safety testing before licensure and continue to be monitored after they are introduced. Serious adverse events are rare, according to decades of safety reviews by the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, and independent scientists. Kennedy did not identify any specific chronic condition that has been proven to be caused by a vaccine, and the scientific literature does not provide a credible causal link between routine childhood vaccines and conditions such as autism or other chronic illnesses. The National Academy of Medicine has repeatedly evaluated vaccine safety and concluded that while some vaccines are associated with certain rare adverse events, the evidence does not support the broad claim that vaccines are driving chronic disease. Experts stressed that no parent wants to put a child at unnecessary risk, and the vaccine schedule is designed to offer protection while minimizing harm.
Kennedy specifically cited the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, a program co-managed by the CDC and the FDA, and claimed that a CDC study found vaccine injuries are underreported. That study, which looked at data from December 2007 to September 2010, found that fewer than one percent of vaccine adverse events were reported and called for improvements in the system. But the U.S. government has previously cautioned against interpreting the low reporting rate as evidence of widespread harm. The Immunization Safety Office told AFP in 2020 that one likely explanation for the low reporting of mild events is that many are expected, and people may not feel the need to report them. “As an example, sore arms are an expected event after certain vaccines so people may decide not to report this event to VAERS.” More recent research has found that serious events are reported at much higher rates—13 to 76 percent in the case of anaphylaxis and 12 to 64 percent for Guillain-Barré syndrome. VAERS is only one layer of the U.S. vaccine safety monitoring system. The federal government also uses the Vaccine Safety Datalink, the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment, and special reporting programs for members of the military and populations served by Indian Health Services. The COVID-19 vaccine was additionally monitored through V-safe, a smartphone-based tool that used text messaging and web surveys to follow up with recipients. These systems are designed to detect rare side effects and identify any pattern that might indicate a safety problem, allowing regulators to act quickly.
Kennedy also rehashed the misleading assertion that vaccines must be tested in placebo-controlled clinical trials to demonstrate safety. Without such trials, he argued, his agency cannot conduct an accurate risk-benefit analysis. Experts rejected that claim. Slifka pointed to the three phases of clinical trials that all vaccines must pass before approval, all of which include safety evaluations, followed by continued post-marketing surveillance. “No one wants to put a child at risk unnecessarily,” he said. The American Academy of Pediatrics notes that many childhood vaccines were originally tested in randomized clinical trials that included placebo or comparison groups. But once a vaccine is known to be safe and effective against a serious disease, it is no longer ethical to give a placebo to participants who could instead receive protection. The World Health Organization says it may be ethical to use placebos when no known safe and effective vaccine exists, but it is “clearly unacceptable” to delay or withhold a vaccine that could prevent a harmful disease in order to test a new product. Kelly Moore, president and CEO of the nonprofit Immunize.org, has made a similar point, explaining that clinical trial participants must be offered the existing standard of care. In the case of combination vaccines, she said, it would be “entirely unethical” to withhold separate immunizations that are already routinely given while testing a product that contains the same components. The demand for placebo-controlled trials of already-approved vaccines misunderstands both the history of vaccine development and the ethical principles that protect human subjects.
Kennedy’s appearance before Children’s Health Defense, and his warm words for the group, signaled that the administration continues to embrace the movement that helped elevate him to one of the most powerful positions in American public health. For public health officials, the concern is not just the content of the speech but the platform itself. Sharing a stage with Wakefield, whose work was discredited and retracted, was a striking symbol of how far vaccine skepticism has been normalized at the highest levels of government. The measles outbreak, the decline in vaccination rates, and the rising number of exemptions all suggest that the consequences of that normalization may already be visible. Yet the fact-checking of Kennedy’s key claims shows a familiar pattern: selective use of old data, misreading of safety monitoring, and calls for scientific standards that ignore both ethics and history. The systems Kennedy distrusts are designed to catch rare adverse events, and serious harms are rare. The trials he demands would be unethical to conduct on the exact question he wants answered. And the chronic disease epidemic he implies is vaccine-driven has not been found in the scientific literature. As Kennedy continues to reshape federal vaccine policy, public health experts say the evidence remains clear: routine childhood vaccines are safe, effective, and among the most successful public health interventions ever developed. The question is whether the rhetoric at the conference will lead to further policy changes—and what the health consequences will be if it does.
