Joshua Sharfstein, a former FDA official and now a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, believes this system of legal requirements will keep regulatory agencies in check. “It’s important to remember that agencies like FDA have to follow the law, and the law requires that decisions be made on the basis of evidence—not on the whim of a politically appointed leader,” Sharfstein said. RFK Jr. faces “enormous opposition” within public health, and “there will be battles,” Benjamin said. It’s less a question of what officials like Kennedy can do, and more about how the rest of the country, including public health experts and the courts, will respond. “They can try anything. But there’ll be a lot of people, starting with my organization, that will do everything they can to keep that from happening.”
At the very least, Kennedy will greatly undermine trust in vaccines. “If he continues promoting anti-vaccine policies, we’ll have less people taking vaccines, which are safe and effective, and we’ll have more people getting vaccine-preventable diseases. That’s what’s going to happen,” Benjamin said. “When the federal government says you shouldn’t trust something or creates an ambiguity about something, people do listen, and so that’s where the confusion will reign.”
The assault on vaccines in recent years from anti-vaxxers like Kennedy has been painfully successful. More Americans, especially Republicans, now believe vaccinations aren’t important. Among children entering kindergarten in 2023, 92.3 percent had received the diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine (DTaP) and 92.7 percent had the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR)—a rate that’s lower than the goal of 95 percent, and dropping. Polio and chickenpox vaccination also fell among kids entering school in 30 states last year. Even though these changes seem small, they have enormous effects. This has already been one of the worst years for measles cases in the U.S. in two decades. Globally, measles cases jumped by 20 percent last year, with more than 10.3 million people around the world sickened by the virus, global health officials said on Thursday, as global MMR vaccination has dropped to the lowest rate since 2008. Pertussis, another deadly illness easily prevented by vaccines, has also been increasing sharply in the U.S., with more than five times the cases now compared to the same time last year. Even small drops in vaccine coverage can lead to outbreaks and meaningful reductions in population-level protection or “herd immunity,” which endangers people whose immunity hasn’t developed perfectly.
