RFK Jr. Bolsters Vaccine Skepticism at Children’s Health Defense Conference

As the measles outbreak continues to spread in Pennsylvania, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday appeared before the vaccine skeptic group he used to lead and gave a full-throated defense of vaccine skepticism.

“We are not taking vaccines away from anyone,” he said to an enthusiastic crowd of supporters at the Children’s Health Defense meeting in a Washington hotel. “We have preserved access, but we have started to ask the questions that you and millions of American parents have been asking for years.”

And people asking those questions have a friend in the White House, he assured them. “If anyone in this room doubts the president’s commitment, put those doubts to rest. He has directed us to pursue answers to strengthen vaccine safety.”

Kennedy discussed HHS’s efforts to study the impact of childhood vaccines on the chronic disease epidemic. “The vaccine schedule has followed the same trajectory [as chronic disease], where there were dramatic increases in the early 1990s,” he said. “We went from the three vaccines I had as a kid to 94 doses of 28 vaccines. The question is: Should … we be looking at the potential that some of these chronic illnesses are associated with vaccines?”

According to the CDC, a child who receives every recommended vaccine dose before age 18 will have gotten about 33 doses of 18 or 19 vaccines, with some variations depending on the child’s situation.

Of all the vaccines given, “only one of them was subject to a randomized controlled trial, and that was the COVID vaccine,” he said. “For the other ones, there was no safety study … We have no idea of the risks for these products. We can’t make the risk-benefit analysis that my agency is supposed to.”

Kennedy’s claim that vaccines aren’t tested is untrue, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. “When a new vaccine is developed, it goes through multiple rounds of research and testing,” the academy said in a fact sheet on its website. “This process begins with lab research and animal testing, followed by multiple phases of clinical trials to ensure the vaccine is both safe and effective … Many childhood vaccines were tested originally in randomized clinical trials that included placebo or comparison groups.”

Although each vaccine carries a number of possible adverse events, it’s difficult to know how often they occur because “we have a very bad adverse event reporting system,” Kennedy said, referring to the FDA’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). “The only one we rely on is broken. The CDC’s own study of that system in 2010 found that fewer than 1% of adverse events are reported.”

Kennedy was referring to the “Lazarus report” issued by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which includes the 1% figure although it does not say how it was calculated. Kennedy said HHS was fixing VAERS, which he described as “a system designed to fail.”

“Now, it’s highly likely that most of these injuries are very rare — we don’t know,” he said. “Anybody who tells you that is not talking about science. There’s no way for us to know this. And even if they are rare, in our country, we care about rare illnesses and deaths. We care about every child who dies from measles. They get headlines. I ask you: Shouldn’t we care about children who are dying or suffering or being injured by vaccine injuries?”

The secretary also referred to a 2012 study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that looked at 158 “vaccine/adverse event pairs” to see if there was convincing evidence of a relationship. The authors found that the evidence “convincingly supported” 14 of the relationships, “favored rejection” of five relationships, and was inconclusive for the rest.

“That is a very big indictment of my agency,” Kennedy said, adding that the authors concluded it was “urgent” to do more research. “We’re doing that at my agency right now.”

“We’re going to continue to face resistance,” he told his supporters. “I’ve spent 40 years in these battles. … I intend to stay in this fight as long as I’m able.”