How measles, whooping cough and worse could roar back on RFK Jr.'s watch
With anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of the nation's biggest health agency, it wouldn't take much tampering to enable vaccine-preventable diseases to make a comeback.
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The availability of safe, effective COVID vaccines less than a year into the pandemic marked a high point in the 300-year history of vaccination, seemingly heralding an age of protection against infectious diseases.
Now, after backlash against public health interventions culminated in President-elect Donald Trump's nominating antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the nation's top health official, health experts and vaccine advocates say a confluence of factors could cause renewed, deadly epidemics of measles, whooping cough, meningitis, or even polio.
"The litany of things that will start to topple is profound," said James Hodge, a public health law expert at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. "We're going to experience a seminal change in vaccine law and policy."
"He'll make America sick again," said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public health law at Georgetown University.
State legislators who question vaccine safety are poised to introduce bills to weaken school-entry vaccine requirements or do away with them, said Northe Saunders, who tracks vaccine-related legislation for the SAFE Communities Coalition, a group supporting pro-vaccine legislation and lawmakers.
Even states that keep existing requirements will be vulnerable to decisions made by a Republican-controlled Congress as well as by Kennedy and former House member Dave Weldon, should they be confirmed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, respectively.
Both men — Kennedy as an activist, Weldon as a medical doctor and congressman from 1995 to 2009— have endorsed debunked theories blaming vaccines for autism and some chronic diseases. (Weldon has been featured in antivaccine films in the years since he left Congress.) Both have accused the CDC of covering up evidence this was so, despite dozens of reputable scientific studies to the contrary.
Kennedy's staff did not respond to requests for comment. Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign's national press secretary, did not respond to requests for comment or interviews with Kennedy or Weldon.
Kennedy recently told NPR that "we're not going to take vaccines away from anybody."
