Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave a speech last month to Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group that he founded, acknowledging that he had not acted as aggressively as its members had hoped to change federal health policy.
“Those would have been short-lived, and I would have been out of a job because I have to manage my agency competently, according to the law, according to procedure,” he explained, adding: “We have to do certain things before we do other things.”
His remarks, and other recent actions, have made clear that he remained highly focused on vaccines despite advice from White House political advisers earlier this year to focus on issues more popular with voters.
Some of the major changes Mr. Kennedy has tried to make to vaccine policy are tied up in court. Now he and his close allies are taking more incremental steps, but ones that some public health experts fear will further erode confidence in vaccines.
Here is a look at what Mr. Kennedy has in the works.
Lots of studies centering on vaccines
The Department of Health and Human Services has begun numerous studies exploring possible connections of vaccines to a range of health problems.
Some are being commissioned by the department and conducted by an established group of outside researchers. Others are being overseen by political appointees, an approach at odds with how research has traditionally been conducted in the department.
The topics include some questions that have already been studied carefully. Some appear to be an attempt to reproduce work linking vaccines to chronic health conditions that has been discredited by mainstream scientists.
In August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued about $46 million worth of contracts to the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a respected network of health systems that have for years published studies using data on children’s vaccination and health status.
One of those studies is looking at associations between the childhood vaccination schedule and infections not targeted by the shot, such as ear infections, meningitis or others that result in hospitalization, according to a spokeswoman for the HealthPartners Institute, the research arm of a health system in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Another group of studies, by Kaiser Permanente researchers, is exploring possible links between the childhood vaccination schedule and subsequent development of autoimmune diseases such as diabetes and arthritis; possible associations between vaccines and allergies; and possible associations between aluminum salts (which are used in nearly all vaccines to boost the immune system) and asthma.
A study published last year offered persuasive evidence on the safety of aluminum after reviewing the records of 1.2 million Danish children over 24 years. It found no link between aluminum salts in vaccines and asthma or dozens of other conditions. But Mr. Kennedy found fault with the study, calling it “deceptive.”
Other sites conducting studies include Denver Health and the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute in Wisconsin; representatives said researchers there were reviewing whether vaccines were associated with seizures in young children or certain childhood cancers.
Results of all of the work will be submitted to peer-reviewed journals regardless of the outcome, representatives for the research groups said.
Speaking at a recent MAHA Data Summit, Mr. Kennedy expressed some qualms about the Vaccine Safety Datalink teams’ research, which he has long criticized as biased in favor of vaccines. “It’s very, very difficult for us to study with faith and trust that we’re getting the results that we need,” he said.
Dr. Bruce Gellin, a former federal vaccine safety official, said the external researchers were tapped long ago to establish trust with people who doubted government assurances about vaccines. He said Mr. Kennedy’s concerns appeared to reflect his bias in favor of studies finding that vaccines cause harm.
“I think basically the premise is if you don’t find what I believe,” he said, “I’m not going to believe what you find.”
Mr. Kennedy has also tasked political appointees to perform studies with the health department, including David Geier, a discredited researcher whose work concluding that vaccines cause harm has been deemed unreliable.
Mr. Kennedy’s department did not respond to questions about the internal studies. A spokeswoman only said they were meant to “restore trust in vaccines” after the Covid pandemic.
In public health circles, the lack of transparency has set off some alarms.
“I think many of us are concerned that we will not have any insight into it until there’s some cockamamie report that they then hold a press conference and tell us that vaccines are causing autism,” said Jess Steier, a public health communicator who has written about Mr. Geier’s research methods.
Reviving a defunct task force
Mr. Kennedy has revived a federal task force to review the safety of childhood vaccines. The group was disbanded in 1998, but after a lawsuit by Children’s Health Defense last year, the administration moved quickly to resurrect it.
President Trump has ordered the group, which includes the leaders of the C.D.C., National Institutes of Health and Food and Drug Administration, to produce a report to the White House on a range of vaccine-related topics next month.
A federal request for information meant to inform the group suggests that it is reviewing several measures that could result in lower vaccination rates.
The request invited the public to weigh in on whether vaccines should be recommended in new ways by federal officials, such as with a “conditional recommendation” or with “qualifying language” or with “explicit statements of evidentiary certainty.”
It also called for comments on the category of “shared clinical decision making,” which is used when there is not enough evidence for a direct recommendation. Some in public health are concerned that Mr. Kennedy will move additional vaccines to the weaker tier, resulting in reduced uptake and a potential pathway to litigation.
One comment from a group of 23 Democratic attorneys general, led by Rob Bonta of California, said the potential changes were likely to erode trust in vaccines and were “unwarranted and dangerous.”
More than 35,000 comments have been submitted, although only 16 have been publicly posted. A Health and Human Services Department spokeswoman said officials were reviewing them.
Revamping the vaccine injury court
Early in his tenure, Mr. Kennedy said he was going to overhaul the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which was created in 1986 under a law that gave vaccine makers immunity from most lawsuits. People who believe they were injured by vaccines can file a case in a special vaccine court seeking awards that are funded by a 75-cent surcharge on vaccines.
Mr. Kennedy argued in a social media post that the system, which is meant to swiftly compensate families after vaccine injuries, has “devolved into a morass of inefficiency, favoritism, and outright corruption.” He did acknowledge that the court has paid billions to compensate people since it started operating about 40 years ago, a tally at $5.6 billion paid to about 13,500 people, according to the court’s latest annual report.
In the fall of 2025, Mr. Kennedy brought in Drew Downing, a vaccine injury lawyer whom he had worked with on litigation over the Gardasil vaccine, to submit a report about changes to the system. Mr. Kennedy has said little on the matter since.
In March, Aaron Siri, a vaccine litigator and close ally of Mr. Kennedy’s, filed a petition to Mr. Kennedy, calling on the Department of Health and Human Services to make significant changes to prompt the court to pay out rapidly for scores of additional purported vaccine injuries.
Mr. Siri filed the petition on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, which is run by Del Bigtree, a spokesman for Mr. Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign. Mr. Bigtree has said that getting polio is “just like having a cold,” a statement that public health experts say is ludicrous.
Public health experts take the petition seriously, partly because of Mr. Siri’s close ties to Mr. Kennedy, which has included participating in interviews of administration candidates during the Trump transition.
Mr. Siri said in his petition that more than 150 injuries were deemed associated with vaccines and flagged for further study by federal officials in 2009. He argued that all of them should be added to an official government “table” of injuries that tend to be compensated rapidly.
Mr. Siri continues to pressure Mr. Kennedy’s department. “We plan to bring a lawsuit for H.H.S.’s failure to add associated injuries to the Vaccine Injury Table,” Mr. Siri said in an email.
Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a pediatrician and former top F.D.A. official; Sara Rosenbaum, a former federal health official and health law professor emerita; and others responded to Mr. Siri’s petition. They said that Mr. Siri drew the 150 injuries from package inserts for vaccines, which list each illnesses that emerges after vaccination without any certainty of whether it was cause or coincidence.
That is not the same as the current standard at the court, which is whether “current scientific evidence” supports a “causal association” between the vaccine and the injury, they said.
Adding scores of unfounded injuries, they argued, would scare parents from getting vaccines and make compensation harder to get for deserving families at the court, “ultimately crippling it.”
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