US Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr repeated misleading vaccine claims during a keynote address to the Washington conference hosted by Children's Health Defense, as he assured the anti-vaccine group he founded that it has a "strong and steadfast friend at the White House."
In an unusual move for a health secretary, Kennedy appeared just before Andrew Wakefield, the infamous British doctor whose license to practice medicine was revoked after he included falsified data in a now-retracted study falsely linking the measles, mumps and rubella shot to autism (archived here and here ).
While Kennedy's September 17, 2026 address focused largely on his tenure at HHS, he put an emphasis on vaccines, telling the audience that the administration had "started asking the questions that you and millions of American parents have been asking for years" (archived here ).
He made just one passing mention of measles in his speech, despite the country facing the worst outbreak in recent years, with four deaths in the state of Pennsylvania (archived here ).
The speech also comes as childhood vaccination rates in the United States continue to fall , and the number of parents seeking exemptions from state mandates in place to attend public school is up (archived here ).
One of Kennedy's signature policy aims has been to overhaul the childhood vaccination schedule , despite promising during his confirmation process not to discourage vaccines or make them harder to access (archived here ).
A federal judge struck down the move in March after Kennedy replaced members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a body tasked with reviewing vaccine safety and effectiveness data to make recommendations, with vaccine critics (archived here and here ). But the effort was renewed in August when President Donald Trump signed an executive order recommending children be vaccinated against far fewer diseases than the American Academy of Pediatrics advises (archived here and here) .
AFP fact-checked key claims Kennedy made about vaccines during his Children's Health Defense address.
The health secretary suggested that vaccination is linked to chronic disease and said children suffering from vaccine injuries do not receive adequate study.
Experts, however, have extensively reviewed the safety of routine vaccines -- and they have found serious adverse events to be "rare" (archived here ).
"If there is a statistically significant association between a vaccine and a chronic condition, the post-marketing surveillance system that we have in place would identify it," Mark Slifka , a professor of microbiology and immunology at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), told AFP on September 17 (archived here ).
Kennedy specifically cited the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a program co-managed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to monitor safety, claiming a CDC study found that "vaccine injuries" were underreported.
The study examined the period from December 1, 2007 to September 30, 2010 and called for improvements after finding that "fewer than one percent of vaccine adverse events are reported" (archived here ).
But when AFP asked the US government about those findings in 2020, the Immunization Safety Office said: "One potential explanation for low reporting of mild events might be that many are expected, and therefore people don't feel the need to report them. As an example, sore arms are an expected event after certain vaccines so people may decide not to report this event to VAERS."
When a serious event that should be further investigated occurs, more recent research has found much higher rates of reporting -- 13 to 76 percent in the case of anaphylaxis and 12 to 64 percent for Guillain-Barré syndrome (archived here ).
In addition to VAERS, the US government monitors via the Vaccine Safety Datalink and the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment . There are also programs for members of the military and populations served by Indian Health Services to report adverse events.
The Covid-19 vaccine was subject to additional safety monitoring when the CDC introduced V-safe , "a smartphone-based tool that uses text messaging and web surveys" to check-in after receipt of the shot.
Kennedy also rehashed misleading assertions that vaccines must be subject to placebo-controlled clinical trials in order to demonstrate their safety. Without such testing, he said his agency struggles to make accurate "risk-benefit analysis."
OHSU's Slifka pushed back on the assertion, pointing to three phases of clinical trials all checking for safety , as well as post-marketing surveillance.
" No one wants to put a child at risk unnecessarily," he said.
Many childhood vaccines were originally tested in randomized clinical trials that included placebo or comparison groups, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (archived here ).
The World Health Organization states that it may be ethical to use placebos when there is no known safe and effective vaccine available, but that it is "clearly unacceptable" to subject participants to the risks of delaying or foregoing a shot that could prevent a harmful disease (archived here ).
Kelly Moore , president and CEO of the nonprofit Immunize.org, also previously told AFP that clinical trial participants must be offered the existing standard of care (archived here ).
Pointing to the development of combination vaccines, she said it would be "entirely unethical" to withhold existing immunizations while testing a product that contains components already routinely given in those separate shots.
Find more of AFP's reporting on vaccine misinformation here .
