Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly said that he’s not anti-vaccine and is taking a “pro-safety” approach as Health and Human Services secretary.
“We encourage people to get the measles vaccine,” he told CBS in an interview broadcast Wednesday, while adding the government shouldn’t “mandate” it.
But the broader changes Kennedy has made since taking over the sprawling health department have followed a different, familiar playbook: the one spearheaded by his old vaccine-skeptical organization.
From 2015 to 2023, Kennedy was the chair of Children’s Health Defense, an organization that continues to spread misleading information about the dangers of vaccines. Now, as secretary, even as he’s distanced himself from the organization, Kennedy has built out early priorities that mirror CHD’s.
CHD outlined a plan for upending the health bureaucracy on a since-deleted website, reformpharmanow.org, which listed 10 policy goals to “restore healthcare integrity.” Many of Kennedy’s recent changes to HHS policy and priorities have aligned with these 10 points.
Kennedy has attempted to separate himself from CHD: Just last month, Kennedy ordered CHD to take down a webpage they’d created that looked like a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention site but suggested links between vaccines and autism.
When asked about Kennedy’s actions aligning with the CHD plan, an HHS spokesperson said via email that Kennedy “is committed to investigating the root causes of the chronic disease epidemic to improve our country’s health. To assist this effort, Secretary Kennedy launched his vision for a more streamlined Department to better serve the American people, which included the consolidation of duplicative offices and redundancies across HHS.”
“Additionally, the Secretary is dedicated to restoring public health agencies to their tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science through radical transparency and integrity,” the spokesperson added.
CHD listed its vaccination goals on its deleted priorities site. CHD’s plan called for health officials to “restore medical freedom” by not basing access to school, work or travel on vaccination status.
“Reformed medical freedom means that censorship, shadowbanning, and gaslighting are not allowed to restrict your access to the full body of knowledge on medical issues, leaving you able to make fully informed decisions,” the CHD plan continues.
A spokesperson for CHD declined to comment on their 10-point plan or on Kennedy’s actions so far.
Kennedy has continued to treat vaccines with some skepticism, most significantly in connection with the ongoing measles outbreak.
In a March op-ed, Kennedy wrote that “the decision to vaccinate is a personal one” and did not directly urge people in affected areas to get themselves or their children vaccinated.
In recent posts on X about the measles outbreak, Kennedy acknowledged that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.” But he added that he visited with doctors Richard Bartlett and Ben Edwards, whom he called “extraordinary healers” for treating unvaccinated Mennonite children with measles with the alternative and unproven treatments clarithromycin and aerosolized budesonide. He has also promoted using vitamin A to treat measles, even though it’s not as effective as a vaccine at preventing death and can cause liver damage and other side effects if taken in high doses.
The HHS spokesperson pointed to Kennedy’s post on X about his visit to Texas to attend the funeral of one of the two children who have so far died in the outbreak.
“HHS has deployed CDC resources to respond to the ongoing measles outbreak and CDC continues to be in close communication with local and state health officials,” the HHS spokesperson said.
CHD’s plan also pushes against “Big Pharma funding and political influence” in “every facet of our healthcare system.” Kennedy mirrored that point during his swearing-in, saying his plan was “ending the corruption, ending the corporate capture” of agencies like the NIH, FDA, and CDC, in part by “getting rid of people” with perceived conflicts of interest.
Kennedy has already postponed or canceled several advisory panel meetings, and has created a database of all conflict of interest declarations for members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
“Reformed agencies protect consumers with honest processes that ensure the products on the market have no hidden costs or dangers,” CHD’s plan continues. It’s not just individual panels that are on the chopping block: Last week, Kennedy announced a major overhaul of HHS that would reduce the 28 divisions of the department to 15 and its workforce from 82,000 to 62,000.
“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said in an announcement.
CHD’s plan also emphasizes the need to remake the department to “prevent back-door dealings” and stop pharmaceutical companies from “leveraging their collective money and power to propagate a corrupt cycle of sickness and pharmaceutical dependence.”
Kennedy and CHD are also on the same page about pharmaceutical advertising. CHD’s plan calls for a ban on ads paid for by pharmaceutical companies, which would put the U.S. more in line with the rest of the world. Kennedy campaigned on enacting such a ban, including when he was stumping for President Donald Trump.
CHD’s plan includes a ban on so-called “gain-of-function” research, which it says “means the methods of circumventing laws prohibiting bioweapons research are exposed and eliminated.”
Kennedy and Jayanta Bhattacharya, the newly confirmed director of the National Institutes of Health, have said that they would seek bans on certain kinds of infectious disease research. Bhattacharya was previously on the board of Biosafety Now, an organization that advocates for research reductions because it believes COVID-19 was caused by a “lab leak” that was the result of such “risky research.”
The Wall Street Journal reported early in his presidency that Trump was considering issuing an executive order that would ban “gain-of-function” research, or experiments on pathogens that could make them more infectious or harmful to humans. That order has yet to be issued.
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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.