The Price We Pay When RFK Jr. Brings the Crusade Inside the Cabinet

What happens to childhood immunization when the country’s top health office is led by a man who built power by undermining trust.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has always understood something basic about modern public life: if you can make people feel that the system is lying to them, you don’t have to win every argument, you just have to win the doubt.

For years, Kennedy’s brand has been built on that doubt. It’s doubt in pharmaceutical companies, in regulators, in doctors who speak in careful probabilities while parents want certainty. Doubt in the institutions that aim to protect children, but have sometimes failed spectacularly in other arenas like opioids, lead, environmental toxins, medical racism, and access disparities. In that landscape, skepticism is easy to sell. And Kennedy has sold it with the intensity of a crusader: a lawyer and activist who says he is taking on captured institutions, taking on corruption, taking on the cozy relationship between money and medicine.

Now, that crusade has moved inside the U.S. government. Kennedy’s confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services didn’t merely elevate a controversial figure. It placed a man with a long record of vaccine skepticism at the center of the country’s public health apparatus, an apparatus that shapes the childhood immunization schedule, sets norms that insurers and schools follow, and communicates risk during outbreaks. You don’t have to believe he is malicious to see the danger: when a person’s career has been spent litigating and campaigning against vaccine confidence, and that person becomes responsible for guiding vaccine policy, the stakes are not theoretical. They are children.

This is not a story about whether vaccines are perfect. Nothing in medicine is, it is not a story about whether institutions can be wrong, they can, sometimes disastrously. This is a story about what happens when the levers of public health are pulled by someone whose central narrative has long depended on convincing the public that those levers cannot be trusted.