WASHINGTON – Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spent decades spreading dangerous disinformation about the safety of vaccines, insisted Tuesday that he’s played no role in the resurgence of measles cases in the United States.
“I’ve never been anti-vaccine,” Kennedy repeatedly claimed during testimony to a House committee about President Donald Trump’s 2027 budget request.
That’s not true, of course. This HHS secretary is easily the most famous critic of vaccines in the country. But he made nonsensical claims like this throughout the hearing, and what they all served to do — whether true or not — was help him avoid taking responsibility for the damage he’s caused to public health with his vaccine skepticism.
For hours, Democrats went after Kennedy for fueling distrust of vaccines as measles cases have exploded around the country. In his role as the nation’s top public health official, he has minimized the seriousness of measles outbreaks in Texas, emphasized the importance of personal choice over science, baselessly claimed the measles vaccine leads to “deaths every year” and misleadingly suggested the vaccine “causes all the illnesses that measles itself causes.”
