With Robert F. Kennedy, Jr in control of the Department of Health and Human Services, the department should be renamed the Department of Disease Occurrence (DODO). Ignoring experts in vaccine treatments, pediatricians and infectious disease specialists, RFK, Jr is making decisions about how vaccines should be allocated to the American population. Though Kennedy says he is not against the use of all vaccines in all populations in various situations, he has done nothing to promote vaccinations to assure protection for recalcitrant populations from a host of infectious diseases. And he has been unwilling to take a definitively positive stance favoring the use of vaccines.
Even prior to RFK, Jr becoming Head of HHS, questions were raised by researchers at the FDA about whether the United States had reached a dangerous tipping point regarding the non-use of vaccines. The authors of a paper in a medical journal noted in January 2024 that millions of lives were saved each year by the proper administration of vaccines and that they had been shown to be overwhelmingly safe. The risk-benefit ratio was unquestionable, yet millions of Americans were no longer receiving the necessary sequence of vaccinations. For some people, safety was still a concern, while others rejected vaccines for religious or political reasons. Much of the information decrying the use of vaccines was disseminated over social media by influencers with little knowledge of medicine. But there were occasional physicians as well who for various reasons also rejected vaccines. Needed was a major campaign by the government reinforcing the requirements for the proper vaccines and the protection it would elicit for both children and adults. This is unlikely now given the current political atmosphere and Kennedy’s tenure as head of HHS.
In June 2025, RFK, Jr, the Health Secretary fired all 17 sitting members of the CDC’s vaccine panel, experts in the field of vaccine usage. So far, he has replaced them with 8 members, some of whom are vaccine skeptics, or want further testing on vaccine safety which has already been done. This sets a dangerous precedent and will be harmful to American health. Also in June 2025, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article decrying the unreliability of vaccine information under RFK, Jr and his appointees, and the alarm it has raised among physicians, public health experts and scientists. The article notes the erosion of science under the current administration. The World Health Organization listed vaccine hesitancy as one of the top 10 threats to global health even before the Covid-19 pandemic.
A group of infectious disease specialists and vaccine experts, concerned about the non-use of vaccines, published another article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in June 2025 predicting what would happen in America if childhood vaccine rates declined by 50 percent. They projected that measles would become endemic again with 51 million cases over 25 years. There would be almost 10 million cases of rubella (German measles), 4.3 million cases of polio, and 197 diphtheria cases. 10.3 million hospitalizations would occur along with over 159,000 deaths, virtually all of them preventable. The effects of polio are generally known with paralysis of limbs in a proportion of cases. Infected individuals can also die from polio when there is involvement of the bulbar and respiratory muscles. While rubella is generally a mild viral illness, it can cause severe birth defects in the fetus if the virus infects a pregnant woman. Vaccination would prevent the deaths and disabilities associated with polio and rubella as well as numerous other infectious diseases.
The first disease that was controlled by vaccination was smallpox over 2 centuries ago. Vaccines also protect against Hemophilus Influenza which can cause meningitis or pneumonia which can be fatal. Also pneumococcus infections, Hepatitis A and B, mumps, whooping cough, flu, meningococcus and a number of other diseases, some of which are more common in tropical countries. It is likely that over the last 2 centuries, vaccines have saved tens of millions to hundreds of millions of lives in the U.S. and around the globe. Serious adverse effects from vaccines are very uncommon and they definitely do not cause autism, an RFK Jr trope.
In May 2025, RFK Jr. rescinded the recommendation by the CDC that children 6 months to age 17 and pregnant women receive the Covid 19 vaccine. At that point, the recommendation was for Covid-19 vaccines for adults 18 and older and some children. But this was again changed recently to only adults over age 65 and immune compromised patients by the new vaccine panel and RFK. It’s unclear whether these recommendations will stay in place or be changed again. Vaccination is one of the most important advances medical science has made over the centuries and it is a mistake to have a vaccine skeptic like RFK, Jr. running the Department of Health and Human Services ie the Department of Disease Occurrence (DODO).
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Tags: Department of Disease Occurrence, DODO, HHS, RFK, Trump, vaccine panel, vaccines
Political junkie, Vietnam vet, neurologist- three books on aging and dementia. Book on health care reform in 2009- Shock Therapy for the American Health Care System. Book on the need for a centrist third party- Resurrecting Democracy- A Citizen’s Call for a Centrist Third Party published in 2011. Aging Wisely, published in August 2014 by Rowman and Littlefield. Latest book- The Uninformed Voter published May 2020