Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” report distorts research and uses language that undermines the safety of vaccines as a public health tool, marking one of the vaccine skeptic’s latest efforts to scale back their use.
For example, the report, released in May, questioned the reliability of the Vaccine Safety Datalink system, a collaboration between health care providers and the U.S. government that collects and shares data on adverse effects of vaccinations.
The report makes the case that VSD research is susceptible to issues of confounding and bias. But Sophia Newcomer, one of the authors of a paper cited in the report to make that argument, said the way the MAHA report characterizes the research is misleading. She added that the paper the report cites never claimed those problems are unique to VSD, and the paper she worked on even calls VSD “an important resource for conducting this research.”