WWe spent the 20th century beating measles, polio, and neonatal hepatitis B until they were statistically irrelevant. In 2025, the man who fought hardest against that victory was named head of federal vaccine policy. How did this happen? And what will happen now?
Vaccines have worked spectacularly for a hundred years.
It is all too easy to forget a war we won so well that most people alive today have never seen casualties.
Before the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963, the disease killed approximately 2.6 million people worldwide each year. Subsequently, the number of cases in the United States fell by more than 90 percent in five years, and by the early 1980s, it had fallen by 99 percent. This decline persisted even during a rebound in the mid-1970s, when vaccination coverage briefly declined. Smallpox, a disease that claimed hundreds of millions of lives in the 20th century alone, was declared eradicated from the planet in 1980. It may be the only time in human history that we have actually conquered a disease rather than just managing it. In the 1950s, polio paralyzed tens of thousands of American children each year and now occurs in only a handful of countries due to political conflict. Globally, the WHO immunization program is credited with saving something on the order of 150 million lives over the past fifty years; the overwhelming majority of them were infants and children under the age of five.
This is not a controversial scientific claim. This is closer to the idea that infectious diseases are caused by germs rather than vapors or curses. Vaccines don’t just prevent death. As a result, many more people are living their lives without disabilities. Every case of paralytic polio we didn’t have, every child who didn’t go deaf from mumps, and every baby who didn’t develop the liver damage associated with chronic hepatitis B is a life that doesn’t show up in the morbidity statistics. When people talk about the “cost” of vaccination programs, they sometimes forget the other side of the picture: the daily count of children who never got sick. How did we decide this was a bad idea?
Andrew Wakefield
One man, a British gastroenterologist named Andrew Wakefield, is almost single-handedly the reason why “vaccines cause autism” is a phrase that exists in the English language.
In 1998, Wakefield published an article in The Lancet claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism in only twelve children, without a control group. Twelve. It has since been proven to be a fraud through and through, including undisclosed payments from a lawyer building a case against vaccine makers, a history of manipulated cases and ethics violations that resulted in Wakefield having his medical license revoked. The Lancet retracted the article entirely, calling it “totally false” in 2010. Most of his co-authors distanced themselves from the article years before. The Lancet retracted it.
“The lie flies, and the truth limps after it. » —Jonathan Swift
None of this mattered, because by the time careful research had succeeded in debunking it, the story had already escaped the laboratory and gone wild in the press. Measles vaccination rates in Britain and Ireland have exploded, falling as high as 61 percent in parts of London. Inevitably, measles returned so strongly that the UK lost its WHO measles elimination status for the first time in 2018-19, just two years after finally achieving it. The UK regained this status in 2021, then lost it again in January 2026 – a trend we could see developing here on the other side of the Atlantic. Paul Offit, a pediatrician who has spent his career watching this unfold, put it as bluntly as a professional can: “This newspaper killed children. » Children were dying from vaccine-preventable diseases because their parents refused vaccination based on fraudulent documentation. This is as clear a causal chain as epidemiology gives you.
The measles vaccine scare hit the United States less like a tidal wave than like a slow-acting toxin. This fueled the boom in “vaccine court” litigation in the 2000s, which saw nearly 5,000 claims that vaccines caused autism. Each case failed when the evidence was examined. It’s worth stopping to consider this: the legal system, using a lower bar of proof than a peer-reviewed journal, has still failed to find a single case where this held up. It just doesn’t happen.
A Cochrane review of approximately 14.7 million children found no link between vaccines and autism. A Danish study followed more than 650,000 children, including those whose siblings had autism and were presumably at greater risk, and found nothing. But litigation losses do not kill beliefs; it is not enough to debunk them with evidence. According to a 2024 survey, about one in ten American adults still believe vaccines probably or definitely cause autism, and about a quarter of the public still don’t believe the CDC has ever clearly said otherwise. Twenty-eight years of unanimous negative studies, and the belief remains there. And now it’s powered by the nation’s highest medical authority, an arm of the federal government.
RFK Jr.
To be fair to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he did not invent vaccine skepticism. He’s just along for the ride. For about two decades before becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy led an organization called Children’s Health Defense, whose business model was to convince people that vaccines are dangerous, that HIV does not cause AIDS, and, memorably, that airplane contrails are a secret chemical weapons program. Scientific American published an article in 2017 cataloging a decade of distortion of vaccine science under his byline. This is not a man who came to this position with an open mind; he arrived with a set of beliefs that he has been propagating for years.
Kennedy said his own children were vaccinated, and he told the public that the MMR vaccine was the most effective way to prevent the spread of the disease.
Here’s the truly strange part, though—the one that should make anyone think twice: During his confirmation hearings and at times during the current measles outbreak, Kennedy said his own children were vaccinated and called the MMR vaccine the most effective way to stop the spread of the disease. Officially, it offers the strictest support for science-based guidelines; elsewhere he questions them and tells people to decide for themselves. In the same news cycle, he wrote an editorial presenting vaccination as a personal choice, suggested on television that healthy children cannot die from an infectious disease, or praised a doctor treating measles with cod liver oil and an antibiotic that has no effect on a virus. This is a strange rhetorical move, unless your goal is plausible deniability.
Secretary Kennedy also fired all seventeen members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the independent experts who write the current vaccination schedule. It justified this by citing a 2009 report claiming that 97 percent of its members had financial conflicts of interest. That seems reasonable until you learn that public health officials pointed out that the 97 percent figure involved missing administrative signatures, not money, and that only one of the seventeen members had an actual, disclosed conflict. Then, months after the dismissal, a peer-reviewed study JAMA One study showed that conflicts of interest on the committee had fallen from 42.8 percent in 2000 to about 5 percent in 2024. Secretary Kennedy purged the committee for alleged corruption at the precise historical moment when it was cleaner than it had been in a generation. Unfortunately, several of his hand-picked replacements turned out to be vaccine “skeptics” who were paid as expert witnesses in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.
The purge, the panel and the fictional quote
Once Kennedy took the wheel at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, changes happened quickly. The new panel’s first real act was to vote to remove a preservative called thimerosal from flu vaccines, based on a presentation by a former colleague in Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group that reportedly cited a study. it doesn’t exist. This is not a flawed study. Not one study since retracted. A study which, as far as we can determine, has never been published because it was never carried out. This slide was quietly removed before the final presentation, but the vote still took place, despite decades of thimerosal safety data.
In September 2025, the committee ended its recommendation for the combined MMRV injection in children under four years of age. In December, he voted to abandon the universal recommendation that newborns receive a hepatitis B vaccine at birth – a policy that had led to a 99 percent drop in childhood hepatitis B cases since 1990 – replacing it with a system based on testing the mother’s infection status, a policy known to significantly decrease vaccine uptake. One of the panel members, who voted against the change, said out loud: “We are doing harm by changing this, and I hope the committee will take responsibility when this harm manifests itself.” »
In August 2026, the Trump administration issued its own “Gold Standard” guidelines by executive order. Among other changes, it recommends splitting MMR into separate injections to be administered at separate visits, even if no single disease vaccine for measles, mumps, or rubella is authorized in the United States and there is no scientific evidence of any benefit to dividing them. The order’s fact sheet relies on the only argument in this entire saga that might seem reasonable to a layperson: that the United States recommends more vaccine doses than any other comparable country. That’s true, and it also doesn’t make sense. The vaccination schedule is based on the diseases we are trying to protect against and how our health care system works. We’ll talk about this later.
This decree triggered an exodus among…
Gn Health
