RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines (part 6): Liability, ethics, and policy-based evidence making

As 2026 dawns, look for HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to ramp up his assault on vaccines using policy-based evidence making and altering Vaccine Court standards.

The post RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines (part 6): Liability, ethics, and policy-based evidence making first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

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I had hoped to get through the first month of the year without revisiting this topic. In retrospect, I should have known that that would be a fool’s errand, given that antivax activist turned Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. decided to start the first full week of January by, as Dr. Steven Novella accurately characterized it, following an executive order by President Donald Trump issued as 2025 faded into 2016 to alter the US CDC-recommended vaccine to turn it into, basically Denmark’s recommended vaccine schedule, in essence outsourcing our vaccine policy to Denmark. Why? It’s certainly not because Denmark’s vaccine schedule is in any way superior based on science. Rather, it’s because, of all the nations in the European Union, Denmark vaccinates against the fewest diseases and RFK Jr. wants to eliminate as many vaccines as he can as fast as possible. We are now one of the outliers when it comes to vaccine policy, and as a result we can expect in the next few years to see resurgences of rotavirus, meningitis, influenza, and other vaccine-preventable diseases for which the vaccine was dropped from the US schedule. Seriously, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Greece now recommend vaccinating against more diseases than the US does.

The drive to make the US Denmark derives from an old antivax lie that portrays US children as “overvaccinated” and suffering health damage because of it, none of which is true:

Vaccine experts disagree with their conclusions.

“They want you to believe that we’re way out of sync, and that we give way more vaccines than everybody else. But we don’t,” said Anna Durbin, director of the Center for Immunization Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

But RFK Jr. is antivax to the core and has been so for over two decades, which means that “too many too soon” is one of the main antivax tropes that are driving forces behind his (anti-)vaccine policy.

Although I missed what I consider to be the window of opportunity to discuss why this change is so transparently not science-based, I do still consider it worth directing you to a post from a decade(!) ago in which I described why the fact that different countries recommend different vaccine schedules does not mean that any of them are necessarily less science- and evidence based than others. Basically, different countries have different infectious disease risk profiles, healthcare systems, and priorities, and crafting a science- and evidence-based vaccine schedule requires taking those into account and then using science and evidence to devise a vaccine schedule that is as optimal as humanly possible. RFK Jr. has most definitely not done that, and that’s because he is coming for your vaccines and his endgame has always been to eliminate as many vaccines as he can.

Given our alignment of our vaccine schedule with Denmark, a tiny country with universal health insurance, a much more homogeneous population than that of the US, and vastly different needs, I came across an op-ed in the Washington Post by Ezekiel J. Emanuel, an oncologist, medical ethicist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Paul Friedrichs, the inaugural director of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, entitled How RFK Jr. plans to bankrupt vaccine manufacturers. Of course, bankrupting the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) has long been one of the tactics that I’ve been warning about that RFK Jr. will use to eliminate vaccines, but it’s good to see that these warnings are finally showing up in mainstream news publications. I just hope it’s not too little, too late. That being said, and particularly in light of recent updates regarding RFK Jr.’s very own attempt to replicate the unethical nature of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment by outsourcing an unethical vaccine trial to Africa, I thought this a good time to revisit early in 2026 where I think RFK Jr.’s plans to eliminate vaccines will go next in the coming year. Spoiler alert: It will involve what fellow SBM blogger Dr. Jonathan Howard once called “policy-based evidence-making,” in which evidence,

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