Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took to Fox News to do what he does best: spread wildly incendiary misinformation about vaccines and public health.
RFK Jr. was asked about his decision to fire the entire vaccine advisory committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a move that directly contradicted a confirmation process promise and set off alarms for experts.
“Ninety-seven percent of the people on the committee had conflicts of interest. This is a committee that has … we’ve gone up from 11 vaccines in 1986. Today, children get between 69 and 92 vaccines before they’re 18. Not one of those vaccines—”
“That’s really high,” Fox News’s Martha McCallum said. “Those are not all mandatory.”
“Those are all mandatory, and the reason there’s 69 to 92 is some of the brands require three doses, some of them require four. But none of them have been safety tested. Except for the Covid vaccine, the only vaccine on the schedule that has gone through placebo-controlled trials prior to licensure was the Covid vaccine, so nobody has any idea what the risk profiles are on these products. And we don’t know whether they have anything to do with the epidemic of chronic disease, almost all the chronic disease.… These are products designed to deregulate your immune system, change your immune system for life. And we are now having an epidemic of immune dysregulation in our country, and we don’t have an idea … we’re gonna investigate.”
RFK Jr is on Fox News going full anti-vax pic.twitter.com/nqqhHfzsvJ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 12, 2025
Kennedy Jr. is exaggerating about the number of vaccines before 18, which is closer to between 24 and 50. And many medical professionals have already stated their opposition to this placebo-controlled testing.
“The first vaccine for a disease is already proven safe through a placebo-controlled trial,” Senator Bill Cassidy—who was recently betrayed by Kennedy— told The Washington Post. “Updating that vaccine does not require a new placebo-controlled trial to determine its safety. To require a placebo group would deny those patients access to the vaccine that has already been found safe.”
There’s also the fact that this kind of testing would be intentionally deceptive to patients. “Ethics must be taken into account when you set up a study,” physician Stanley Plotkin said. “Can I ethically agree to having people acquire the disease because they receive a placebo?” We should expect more delusional, crank-adjacent theories from perhaps our most important public sector.
The post After Purging Key Vaccine Panel, RFK Jr. Moves to Assert Control appeared first on New Republic.
