Recommended Adult Immunization Schedule, United States, 2024 | Annals of Internal Medicine

RFK Jr. Disparaged Vaccines Dozens Of Times In Recent Years And Misled On Race

Long considered among the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century, vaccines have beat back infectious diseases including polio and measles, and saved more than 150 million lives around the world, according to the World Health Organization. But a Gallup poll shows Americans have become less likely since 2019 to say it is important to have their children vaccinated, a decline that came against the backdrop of concerns about coronavirus vaccine mandates.

Get Starting Point

A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

A dozen vaccine experts, physicians and public health leaders said they were alarmed that someone who could shape vaccine policy as health and human services secretary failed to recognize reams of scientific data showing vaccines are safe and effective. Kennedy, who has been critical of vaccines for years, founded Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group.

False statements about the safety of vaccines pepper Kennedy's appearances on podcasts, TV, radio and the website of Children's Health Defense (Kennedy's ethics disclosures note he resigned his position as chairman of the board and chief legal counsel in December after Trump picked him for the HHS job). He asserts that vaccines "poisoned an entire generation of American children" and that doctors have "butchered all these children" by administering shots recommended by federal authorities.

Kennedy has linked the rise of chronic disease, autism and food allergies in the United States to the "exploding vaccine schedule." Medical experts say that more vaccines are available now to combat more diseases and that his link has no basis in evidence. Kennedy says he wishes he could go back in time and not vaccinate his children: "I would do anything for that. I would pay anything to be able to do that." On Tuesday, Caroline Kennedy offered her own criticism of her cousin, warning senators he has been hypocritical in telling parents not to vaccinate their children when his have received shots; a Kennedy spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Stanley Plotkin, a physician who is among the inventors of vaccines against rubella, rotavirus and other pathogens, said Kennedy's statements showed he did not possess the scientific reasoning needed to lead HHS.

"Making statements is easy, but if you don't have the evidence, it's just baloney," said Plotkin, widely regarded as the godfather of American vaccine science.

Plotkin, who is 92, bemoaned that people had forgotten the scourge of diseases he has lived through - he contracted whooping cough and was hospitalized as a result of influenza as a child - that vaccines now combat.

Kennedy and the Trump administration did not respond to requests for comment. In public statements, Kennedy has repeatedly said he is not anti-vaccine. "I will provide Americans with transparency and access to all the data so they can make informed choices for themselves and their families," Kennedy wrote on X after Trump said he would nominate him.

Children's Health Defense also did not respond to requests for comment.

When previously confronted with his statements, Kennedy has pointed often to his writings on vaccines.

"I'd actually like to see an example of something I've ever said on my Instagram, on the Children's Health Defense, in my book, that's not true. My book has 2,200 footnotes. I am an expert on vaccines. I'm not a doctor, but I can claim expertise because I have three best-selling books on vaccines," Kennedy said in an interview in April with KLCS, a California PBS station.

Several of the studies Kennedy points to in his public comments do not conclude what he says they do - or have been retracted. Georges C. Benjamin, a physician who leads the American Public Health Association, said that's part of a larger pattern for Kennedy.

"He continually takes information that may be factual in one situation with a bunch of caveats and makes bad correlations with it," Benjamin said.

Race also threads through many of Kennedy's comments unearthed by The Post, with several misleading claims about Black Americans, including false claims about Black children's autism rates after vaccination and comments on their immune systems.

"Now we know that, you know, we should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that's given to Whites, because their immune system is better than ours," Kennedy said in a 2021 appearance posted on the website of Children's Health Defense.

Several experts said no scientific basis exists to support that claim.

While some research found a higher immune response to rubella and measles vaccines in Black people relative to White populations, there was no evidence of increased vaccine side effects or injuries, according to the studies. Plotkin, the inventor of the rubella vaccine, said the study of that shot does not imply that Black people are harmed by the recommended doses of vaccines or that they would be more or less susceptible to the disease itself.

It is vital to have someone in charge of health policy who understands science, said Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a health nonprofit, and former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"To have a secretary of health who would put forth such a false and racist statement is very concerning," he said.

Here are five statements Kennedy has made about vaccines that medical experts said lack a basis in science.

A false link to autism

" … the current state of the science that shows clearly that vaccination is causing autism, that it's one of a suite of autoimmune diseases that is really, that is ultimately coming from vaccines." — July 2020 episode of Children's Health Defense show "TRUTH" with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Federal authorities and vaccine safety experts say vaccines are not linked to autism.

About the same time children go to their pediatrician for the first dose of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine - typically when they're about 1 years old - signs of autism can appear, leaving some parents to mistakenly believe the two events are related. Top peer-reviewed journals in recent decades have published more than a dozen studies rejecting the hypothesis that the vaccine widely known as MMR causes autism. The authoritative Institute of Medicine, now known as the National Academy of Medicine, and considered a top independent evaluator of medical science, declared there is no link between autism and vaccination in a landmark 2004 report.

Additionally, a decade-long study of more than half a million children in Denmark published in 2019 added to the constellation of studies showing that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism.

Bruce Gellin, an adjunct professor of medicine at the Georgetown University School of Medicine and former director of the National Vaccine Program office at HHS, said it was alarming that Kennedy continued to promote the debunked link.

"If he still believes it, the question is why, when the body of evidence that's been looked at - up, down and sideways - says it's not there," Gellin said.

In 2022, Kennedy was listed as a plaintiff's attorney on a $75 million medical malpractice case brought against a Tennessee pediatrician and medical practice alleging the doctor caused a child's autism by giving routine vaccinations. A jury returned a unanimous verdict in favor of the defendants.

Disparaging a cancer-preventing vaccine

"Your chance of dying, according to those data, your chance of dying from the [HPV] vaccine is 10 times the chance of you dying from cervical cancer. What kind of bargain is that?" — July 2020 episode of Children's Health Defense show "TRUTH" with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Shortly after this statement, Kennedy went on to say the rate of death was 37 times, not 10.

Medical experts told The Post the vaccine against the human papillomavirus, commonly known as HPV, has dramatically reduced cervical cancer rates among people receiving it, and there is no evidence to support claims that it increases risk of death.

"It sounds like more made-up anti-vaccine studies," said David Gorski, a Wayne State University School of Medicine professor of surgery and oncology and managing editor of Science-Based Medicine, which debunks misinformation in medicine. "The data out there do not support such a statement by any stretch of the imagination."

In Scotland, a 2024 study showed that no cervical cancer was detected in any women who received the HPV vaccine at 12 to 13 years of age. Australia has launched a government effort to eliminate cervical cancer in the country by increasing vaccination rates. And a study in England shows HPV vaccination is associated with a "substantially reduced incidence of cervical cancer."

In the United States, about 13 million people, including teens, get infected with HPV each year, with 36,000 people developing HPV-related cancers. The CDC recommends adolescents between 11 and 12 get vaccinated to prevent up to 90 percent of HPV-related cancers.

Kennedy played a key role in ongoing litigation against Merck regarding its HPV vaccine, Gardasil, arguing that the vaccine causes dangerous side effects, according to Reuters. He promoted the case to his followers on social media in a search for plaintiffs.

Clouding the coronavirus vaccine

"There's a poison in there that's going to kill people." — February 2021 episode of Children's Health Defense show "TRUTH" with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In a 2021 appearance at the Louisiana Capitol, Kennedy falsely called the coronavirus vaccine "the deadliest ever made." He said that vaccine was killing more people than it helped in several clips reviewed by The Post, noting he had told Peter Marks, the top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, about this "poison" in 2020.

Experts say no evidence exists to support Kennedy's claims about the coronavirus vaccine, widely viewed as the Trump administration's top achievement in the fight to end the pandemic. Federal regulators and physicians have assured the public that the vaccine is safe, effective and recommended to prevent severe illness and death, especially in the elderly and immunocompromised. Study after study has shown the vaccine's effectiveness.

"He's got a fixed idea, almost like a religious fixed idea, against vaccines," said Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "He's just going to say anything he can to disparage them."

Vitamin A, chicken soup for measles

"What is the cure for measles, the treatment? Vitamin A and chicken soup." — February 2021 episode of Children's Health Defense show "TRUTH" with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy often argues that the risks of vaccines outweigh their benefits. For measles, he says the disease is treatable. Experts say vitamin A is far from a cure for measles, but can be given to patients deficient in the nutrient if they contract the disease. Chicken soup can be beneficial but is not a cure.

Before a vaccine became available in 1963 that nearly eradicated measles, more than 3 million people contracted the viral disease annually in the United States. About 400 to 500 people each year - many of them children - died, while 48,000 were hospitalized with severe rashes and other complications in the time before a vaccine, according to the CDC.

But amid rising rates of families choosing not to vaccinate their children, outbreaks of measles have soared, with 16 outbreaks and 284 cases last year.

"People like Kennedy have helped bring it back to some extent," Plotkin said. "Do we want children to have measles? I don't think so."

'Specious disinformation'

"The polio vaccine contained a virus called simian virus 40, SV40. It's one of the most carcinogenic materials that is known to man. In fact, it's used now by scientists around the world to induce tumors in rats and guinea pigs in labs. But it was in that vaccine, 98 million people who got that vaccine in my generation got it. And now you've had this explosion of soft tissue cancers in our generation that kill many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did. So if you say to me did the, was the polio vaccine, was it effective against polio, I'm going to say yes. If you say to me, did it kill more people? Did it avert, cause more deaths than it averted? I would say I don't know because we don't have the data on that." — July 2023 appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast

Kennedy is failing to acknowledge the rigorous vaccine safety monitoring that the polio vaccine has gone through after its release in the United States, vaccine experts said.

The original polio vaccine, which was developed using monkey kidney cells, was found to contain simian virus 40, an animal virus that can cause tumors. After that discovery, the vaccine was screened to ensure new batches of the polio vaccines did not contain SV40, according to the CDC.

The scientific community commissioned several studies to monitor whether the SV40 in that polio vaccine affected people who received it. It is an example of how the scientific community monitors for rare vaccine safety events and, if any emerge, scrutinizes them to make sure the benefits of vaccines outweigh potential risks.

Multiple studies showed no such rise in cancer.

Last month, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) forcefully condemned attempts by a Kennedy ally to limit access to a widely used polio vaccine. McConnell, who survived polio as a child, said vaccines against polio have "saved millions of lives and held out the promise of eradicating a terrible disease."

"I have never flinched from confronting specious disinformation that threatens the advance of lifesaving medical progress, and I will not today," McConnell said in a statement. "Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed - they're dangerous. Anyone seeking the Senate's consent to serve in the incoming Administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts."

Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.

Methodology

The Post created a database of 421 separate appearances Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Made across podcasts, TV, radio, his own Children's Health Defense shows and public events. The appearances ranged from May 2020, the start of one of Kennedy's first Children's Health Defense shows, through August 2024, when Kennedy ended his presidential campaign. That includes all episodes of Kennedy's "TRUTH" and "The Defender Show," the two shows hosted on Children's Health Defense's website, as well as all listed media interviews on his campaign website.

Post reporters transcribed these appearances with the assistance of AI tools and identified all instances in which Kennedy spoke about vaccines. Reporters then manually reviewed all of these mentions to identify examples in which Kennedy specifically disparaged vaccines or linked vaccines to autism. Statements were considered to disparage vaccines if they included any of these: (1) calling vaccines broadly dangerous; (2) describing how vaccine risks outweigh their benefits (for example, saying they cause specific diseases); (3) making false claims about vaccine safety testing; or (4) discrediting tenets of vaccine efficacy.

This did not include mentions of individual vaccine injuries, claims of profit incentives linked to vaccine development, commentary about vaccine mandates and censorship of vaccine criticism, or loose correlations between vaccines and poor health outcomes. Statements were considered to link vaccines with autism if they made a clear mention of "autism" or "ASD" and a direct link between vaccines and autism. Statements were not counted if they included references to autism-associated symptoms or related conditions, individual descriptions of vaccine injury or comments about censorship around studying vaccines being linked to autism. The Post counted the number of overall appearances in which Kennedy disparaged vaccines or linked them to autism, not individual mentions.

The Infamous 'Cutter Vaccine' Changed My Family Forever — But We Still Support Vaccination

By Laurie Maffly-Kipp

Jan. 15, 2025

Maffly-Kipp is the Richard Lyman Bushman professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia.

If anyone should have lobbied against the use of vaccines in this country, it was my family.

My Aunt Jean, my father's older sister, was a victim of the infamous Cutter vaccine, an early variant of the polio vaccine presumed to contain an inactivated version of the live virus. Except that it wasn't inactive. Some 200,000 children in Western and Midwestern states received that vaccine in the spring of 1955. That number included three of my cousins — Aunt Jean's children. The dosages had been administered by my father, then chief resident at Herrick Memorial Hospital in Berkeley, California. His father, my grandfather, was then the hospital's chief administrator. The vaccine had been offered to the young members of the families of health care workers, and so my cousins lined up and were inoculated.

The rest of that tragic story has been recounted in the aggregate: 40,000 cases of polio, 200 children paralyzed to some degree (one of the vagaries of polio is that it attacks everybody differently), several dozen people killed. My cousins all contracted mild cases but emerged without ongoing health issues. My aunt, however — a vibrant 29-year-old mother of three young boys — caught the virus from them. She spent the following six months in an iron lung and nearly died. Her doctors told her that she might make it to age 30 but had little chance of surviving long with the damage to her lung capacity and swallowing muscles.

Easy story, isn't it? Vaccines are the problem. Science isn't perfect and we shouldn't trust it.

Except that's not the lesson that my aunt or my father took from this horrible experience, not by a long shot. 

Polio transmission was supposed to end by 2023. A new report explains why it won't.

They had already seen children dying or permanently disabled by the ravages of the virus. Pediatrician Paul Offit, in his study of the Cutter incident, reminds us that before the vaccine arrived, in all its bumpy and imperfect beginnings, tens of thousands of children were maimed or killed by polio every year. Parents fretted over sending their children to swimming pools for lessons, and by the 1950s feared the frequent summer disease outbreaks almost as much as the atomic bomb. We don't have to wonder what would have happened without the arrival of the vaccine, because so many families lived that reality. We know.

My father knew. I asked him, many years later, what it was like to be the one that distributed that vaccine to his nephews, and then helplessly watch the terrifying illness attack his beloved sister. He answered immediately: "I have no regrets. That vaccine was flawed, but polio was horrible, and there was no other humane choice. Science isn't perfect, but it is the best human beings can do to provide protection."

Jean Wight Courtesy Laurie Maffly-Kipp

I have hesitated to write this story for many years, ever since vaccines themselves became the object of suspicion and fear. Won't this story simply give fuel to anti-vaxxers, so ready to latch onto a tale of vaccines gone wrong?

But that is exactly why this story needs to be told. It is a tale of personal tragedy, yes, but also of a faith in public health, in the greater good, and in the ability of science to self-correct as it pushes toward cures for horrible diseases. Those who have died from polio can't tell that tale. We are left, then, with stories from critics, most of whom do not have evidence to back their claims of scientific failure. And they are too often led by those looking to benefit from unregulated "cures" with even less of an evidentiary basis.

My aunt was the victim of regulatory failure. Yet she saw the greater good that was at stake and chose to remain focused on that. She lived to age 70, disabled but enjoying the presence of her children and grandchildren, building a rewarding career as a counselor, and knowing that her life, while forever altered by polio, was not defined by it. My father and grandfather also kept their eyes on the possibility for self-correction in health care. Other vaccine companies, following Jonas Salk's protocol, produced viable vaccines that saved a generation of children, including me, from having to fear swimming pools or public skating rinks. We lined up for our sugar cube vaccines at school to contribute to the public good that would, we knew, save many more individuals from the ravages of the virus.

I don't share Jean's story to suggest that disease has redeeming possibilities for those who survive. Perhaps it can, but when we have the means of prevention in front of us, we should celebrate and seize that victory, however imperfect.  It is a shoutout from the front lines to celebrate the breakthroughs of research, recognizing that not everything will be an unqualified win. Public health requires us to think beyond individual needs, to recognize that unless vaccines are widely distributed (and yes, even required in some cases) they will be of no use to anyone. It also urges us to recognize that some battles have already been litigated and do not need to be revisited when the evidence of success is overwhelming.

People from India remember life before the polio vaccine. They don't want to go back

The recent back-and-forth between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And President Trump regarding the polio vaccine reflects a lack of logic in both respects. In responding to Kennedy's vaccine criticism, Trump recently remarked that he would want to end some childhood vaccines "if I think it's dangerous." But dangerous for whom? For the one, the 200, or the millions who might benefit? I hate to contemplate harm to anyone, but as my aunt would have attested, there are lesser and greater risks in life. All that science can do is mitigate risks, not eradicate them.

Similarly, clear success of vaccine use, demonstrated by years of health statistics in the case of polio, gives lie to the notion that we should relitigate all decisions regarding vaccination, as Kennedy and others might have it. This is not to say that we should eliminate robust regulatory mechanisms that detect potential problems and question methods. But it does raise the obvious question of what sort of proof is being sought. What qualifies as adequate scientific evidence of failure or success? I have not heard any vaccine critics answer that question clearly and precisely. Until they can and do, we are left with little more than fearmongering without a clear goal in mind.

My aunt would have had no patience for these debates. Perhaps because of her close and prolonged brush with death, she always kept the bigger picture in mind. She vaccinated her family on recommended schedules. In her later years she developed post-polio syndrome, a pernicious condition that gradually robbed her of the gains her health had made since the 1950s. Still, she kept her eyes on the present and future, never turning her anger on the faulty vaccine that had altered her life. Millions of children lived long and healthy lives because of the polio vaccine, and public memory of the horrible history of a previously uncontrollable virus faded from view for many. Science is what removed that scourge, and despite its imperfections, she knew it was an ally to be nurtured and even questioned with precise evidence, but never dismissed without cause.

Laurie Maffly-Kipp is the Richard Lyman Bushman Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.

Polio Virus Detected In Sewage Samples From Sindh Districts

ISLAMABAD: Poliovirus has been detected in sewage samples collected from Mirpurkhas, Thatta, and Naushahro Feroze districts in Sindh, ARY News reported.

According to sources, the samples were collected on December 23 and 24 for poliovirus testing.

The sources confirmed that the samples tested positive for Wild Poliovirus Type 1. This development comes after over 480 sewage samples tested positive for poliovirus in 2024.

This development comes as Pakistan continues to grapple with the challenge of polio eradication, with 73 polio cases reported across the country in 2024 alone.

Earlier, the Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at the National Institute of Health (NIH) confirmed the detection of the wild poliovirus case type 1 (WPV1) in the country.

Also read: Another polio case reported in Pakistan

The lab confirmed one polio case from a female child from D.I.Khan. The onset of this case was on December 31, 2024.

D.I.Khan now reported 11 polio cases in 2024.

Pakistan has been responding to an intense resurgence of WPV1 with 72 cases reported in 2024. Of these, 27 are from Balochistan, 22 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 21 from Sindh, and one each from Punjab and Islamabad.

Polio

Polio is a paralyzing disease that has no cure. Multiple doses of the oral polio vaccine and completion of the routine vaccination schedule for all children under the age of five is essential to provide children high immunity against this terrible disease.

The Pakistan Polio Program conducts multiple mass vaccination drives in a year, bringing the vaccine to children at their doorsteps, while the Expanded Program on Immunization provides vaccinations against 12 childhood disease free of charge at health facilities.

The year's first Polio vaccination campaign is scheduled to be conducted nationwide from February 3- 9, 2025.

It is crucial for parents to ensure vaccination for all their children under the age of five to keep them protected.

---