For decades, the American public, the federal government, and the medical community have been nearly unanimous: Vaccines are important because they save lives. Today, after years of escalating attacks, that consensus has irrevocably shattered.
The rupture has centered around, what else, the Covid vaccines. Yesterday, a British cardiologist allied with US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the Daily Beast that the Trump administration would soon pull Covid-19 vaccines off the market. Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics said that the group would continue to recommend Covid vaccines for kids under the age of 2 — openly defying Kennedy’s move this May to end the recommendation for both healthy children and pregnant people.
The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology followed suit, saying on Friday that it would also continue to advise pregnant people to get a Covid shot. In both cases, some of the country’s leading medical organizations said they wanted to maintain access to protection for the very youngest children, either directly or through vaccinating their mothers, because of the evidence that the population is at a higher risk of serious illness from Covid-19 compared to older children.
Kennedy, in response, ominously warned the physician groups that their members could lose liability protections from medical malpractice lawsuits if they don’t follow the government’s vaccine guidance. In this new reality in which doctors and federal health officials are at odds over who should get vaccines, shots could be harder to get — and not only Covid shots, but flu vaccines and routine childhood shots, all of which have come under Kennedy’s scrutiny.
And the divide between the Trump administration and other medical authorities may grow even further soon: A group of New England states is meeting this week to discuss whether to issue its own vaccine guidance. Even as scientists develop exciting new applications of the same mRNA technology that helped successfully produce the Covid vaccines as part of Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” during the pandemic, Kennedy is canceling mRNA contracts with drug developers. The loss of federal funding for the platform could possibly close off future treatments before they can even be developed.
As a result of all this, more people could get sick.
Drug manufacturers may produce fewer doses of their existing vaccines. Insurers may not be willing to cover people’s shots if they are not being recommended by the government. Various nightmare scenarios could emerge: Maybe a vulnerable person gives up on getting a shot, even if it is recommended for them and covered by their insurance, simply because they can’t find one at a nearby pharmacy. Or maybe the healthy loved one of a vulnerable person won’t be able to afford their shot because their insurance plan won’t cover it anymore. That will leave them to decide between taking the risk to go see their loved one, who could get seriously ill, or not seeing them at all.
We are running headlong into a forced experiment, in which the federal government actively obstructs the usage of vaccines and the development of new ones, and a growing share of the public has lost their faith in one of modern medicine’s greatest tools.
The war between the Trump administration and the medical community is heating up
That the federal government and professional medical societies would be openly at war over vaccine guidance in this way really was once unimaginable. Around the turn of the century, more than 90 percent of Americans agreed that childhood immunizations were important. After years of federal advocacy and government coordination with doctors, the United States had successfully eradicated measles as of 2000.
But in 2025, less than 70 percent of Americans still believe that childhood vaccinations are “very important.” This year, the US saw its worst measles outbreak since the early 1990s, and Kennedy’s health department was, based on reporting by KFF Health News, reluctant to help, while he made public statements waffling on the value of vaccines — even though the measles vaccine is 97 percent effective.
How did we get here?
Well, for starters, even though anti-vaccine activism has existed for decades, the movement received a boost with the COVID-19 pandemic and the way it polarized people’s opinions about public health experts. It edged further into the mainstream with Kennedy’s presidential campaign promising to “Make America Healthy Again” — a movement that has found an uneasy home within the Trump administration. After Trump’s election, he nominated Kennedy to be US health secretary and, once confirmed, Kennedy quickly started rolling back the federal government’s support for vaccines.
In the first few months on the job, he put a vaccine skeptic in charge of searching for a link between vaccines and autism. He unilaterally rolled back those COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for kids and pregnant people. He replaced the federal government’s expert vaccine panel with his own handpicked members. He has ordered a review of the childhood immunization schedule, as well as the safety of Covid shots. He canceled a $500 million mRNA vaccine contract.
This is a fight Kennedy wanted. But now the medical community is punching back. Americans, meanwhile, are stuck in the middle, just as we head into another cold-and-flu season.
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