Health and Man Secretary of Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. he has aggressively overhauled federal vaccine guidelines and infrastructure since he took office just over a year ago. His program is now on hold after a federal judge blocked many of those changes, and reports show the White House is holding back its anti-vaccine rhetoric ahead of the midterm elections.
The future of US vaccine policy will depend on the outcome of the federal court case and whether Kennedy will be able to resume his anti-vaccine crusade after November. Even if the Trump administration moves to a more science-based approach to vaccines, public health experts worry about the long-term effects of Kennedy’s tenure so far.
“There’s no telling what those consequences will be,” says Syra Madad, director of biological preparedness at NYC Health + Hospitals, the largest urban health system in the US. “We’re already seeing increasing vaccine hesitancy. We’re seeing an increase in vaccine-preventable diseases like measles.”
Kennedy, a longtime vaccine conspiracy theorist, rejected Covid-19 vaccine recommendations for robust children and pregnant women in May last year. Shortly thereafter, he removed all 17 previous members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which makes vaccine recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After he appointed novel members who had criticized vaccines in the past, the reconstituted panel voted in December to end the recommendation for a universal birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine that had been in place since 1991.
In January Kennedy announced radical changes to the childhood vaccination schedule, bypassing its own vaccine advisory panel and reducing the number of routine vaccines from 17 to 11, without providing any scientific justification for this action.
A lawsuit filed by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups challenged these changes. In March, a federal judge ruled that novel ACIP members were unlawfully appointed, invalidating their previous actions. The decision also halted the implementation of Kennedy’s changes to the childhood vaccination schedule because he did not first consult with ACIP.
The Trump administration said it would appeal, throwing vaccine policy into limbo. “HHS looks forward to overturning this judge’s decision, like his other attempts to stop the Trump administration from governing,” spokesman Andrew Nixon told WIRED in an email.
In recent weeks, Kennedy it softened its messaging on vaccines, focusing instead on nutrition and microplastics, and announcing: new podcast. Robert Malone, one of Kennedy’s handpicked ACIP members who stepped down in March, said on conservative podcast that a White House adviser ordered Kennedy to “shut down” all vaccine discussions before the midterm elections in November, suggesting Kennedy’s anti-vaccination views are unpopular with voters.
How the U.S. makes vaccine decisions for the rest of President Trump’s term remains an open question. ACIP recommendations become federal policy once adopted by the CDC director, but Kennedy fired the previous CDC director, Susan Monarez, allegedly because she didn’t want to rubber-stamp his vaccine changes. The position has been vacant since August, and the agency is currently led by National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya. Despite his boss’s anti-vaccination views, Bhattacharya recently told CDC staff that getting vaccinated against measles is “absolutely essential.”
“Vaccine recommendations were frozen until before Kennedy took office,” says Elizabeth Jacobs, an epidemiologist at the University of Arizona and founder of Defend Public Health, a grassroots organization that launched in delayed 2024 after Kennedy’s nomination.