UPDATE (Feb. 4, 2025 11:25 a.m. E.T.): Tuesday morning, the Senate Finance Committee voted along party lines to advance Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination for health secretary to the full Senate.
So many parents refusing vaccines for the children I see in my examination room have been encouraged to do so by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the charlatan President Donald Trump has picked to take the reins of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Senate Finance Committee will vote on Kennedy’s nomination Tuesday and, we should all hope, reject it.
I was raised by Depression-era blue-collar parents who knew firsthand the devastating diseases few of today’s parents would recognize. For them, each new vaccine increased the chance that theirs would be the first generation that didn’t expect to bury a child. I still remember how proud my mom was taking me to the pediatrician for vaccines. She was doing her job, keeping us safe. As a pediatrician, I see vaccines as a force field that we and parents use to protect young lives.
As a pediatrician, I see vaccines as a force field that we and parents use to protect young lives.
During medical school and then a residency at Children’s Hospital of Michigan, I cared for countless infants and children hospitalized with bacterial meningitis and invasive diseases caused by pathogens like Hemophilus, Streptococcus pneumoniae and Neisseria. These infections often resulted in devastating damage, such as hearing and vision loss — a fate Helen Keller tragically suffered. Then, a spinal tap was a necessary and routine part of the workup of infant fever. The high-pitched, painful cries of infants with meningitis will forever reverberate in my mind, along with the coughs of infants with pertussis drowning in their own secretions.
During my 30 years as a physician, I have seen how our carefully studied vaccines have revolutionized pediatric care. Because the vast majority of young Americans are vaccinated, bacterial meningitis and its devastating effects have become so rare that only the youngest infants now require invasive procedures like spinal taps during fever workups. In the vaccinated, Pneumococcus rarely causes bloodstream infections or the deadly pneumonia for which it is named. We no longer see the chickenpox infections that result in weeks of missed school and work. Hemophilus isn’t causing the loss of limbs, eyes and airways.
This progress, however, is being threatened by vaccine refusal. As Kennedy sat before a confirmation hearing with the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday, physicians like me, who’ve dedicated our lives to the health and welfare of children, watched with outrage and exhaustion. And disgust that Kennedy refused to own his anti-vaccine advocacy.
“I support the measles vaccine,” he told senators. “I support the polio vaccine. I will do nothing as HHS secretary that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking anything.” But the fact is that he has built a name for himself by discouraging parents from getting their children vaccinated.
As Kennedy sat for a confirmation hearing, physicians who’ve dedicated our lives to the health and welfare of children, watched with outrage.
Listening, I thought about the father who recently became angry with me for “insinuating” that his sick, unvaccinated infant needed a workup and hospitalization for his high fever without an obvious source. He accused me of making up concerns to make money for the hospital. As familiar as I am with this particular conspiracy theory, it hits me hard every time I hear it. And we are hearing it more and more often.
Instead of becoming defensive and judgmental, I treat these bedside conversations as a collaboration that has as its common goal a healthy child. I talk about my own experience, painting a picture of the wards from as recently as the 1990s. I told this father that I understood he was acting as an advocate for his child the best way he knew how. Ultimately, his wife heard me and agreed to the workup. By the time their child’s blood culture grew Pneumococcus the next day, their child was already getting his third dose of intravenous antibiotics.
After he was recovered, the mother described the near-tragedy on social media. She shared how worried they’d been and how they initially hadn’t sought care because they didn’t trust hospitals. She added that if her children had received their routine vaccines, then their infant son probably would have experienced Pneumococcus as nothing more than a mild fever or ear infection. And they’d have been spared a hospital bill.
The flames of vaccine hesitancy have been stoked to a bonfire by fictitious stories by self-serving individuals. When Andrew Wakefield first theorized that the measles vaccine caused autism, he may have truly believed that. But by the time more complete and accurate research showed no connection, his taste of fame and the power of sensationalism had seemingly overpowered integrity, and he stuck to his position.
Enter RFK Jr., who, along with his Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine nonprofit group, preyed on the parents of children with autism who were searching for someone to blame. Research again and again has shown his assertions to be false. But repeating and funding independent vaccine studies took precious time. Time during which careers were made sowing fear and mistrust by discrediting the very physicians who’d dedicated their lives to defending their patients’ and the public’s health.
The people who accuse pediatricians of profiting from vaccines, Kennedy included, have ironically amassed fortunes doing so.
The people who accuse pediatricians of profiting from vaccines, Kennedy included, have ironically amassed fortunes doing so.
Parents who are vaccine hesitant are, of course, doing what they think is best for their children. They come to us having “done my research,” fueled by algorithms built to lead concerned parents down a rabbit hole of misinformation. Because they have little firsthand experience with bacterial meningitis, limb-threatening cellulitis, the devastation of measles or the infertility of mumps, they are easily convinced that vaccines are unnecessary — and even harmful.
When parents come in convinced of the deep state conspiracy, it is difficult to heal the partnership that we pediatricians seek to have with them. These conversations have stolen so much time from our ability to care for patients that many practices have chosen to exclude those who refuse vaccines for their children.
Many parents, though, seek our advice — even when they have misgivings. When we are able to have open conversations built on appreciation and partnership, parents often gratefully follow the well-studied vaccine schedule to protect their children.
One of my young parents was unvaccinated as a child and resents that her parents fell for the conspiracy theories. When she first brought her adorable children in, we had lots of conversations, including about immunizations. Like my mom, she sees herself as a fierce advocate for her children when they come in for their well visits and shots. Each visit, when I explain the shots they will receive, we both laugh when she says, “Lock and Load, Dr. Pat, Lock and Load!”
If Kennedy is confirmed as HHS secretary, he will have the ability to submit a generation of children to the experiment he has long hoped would finally prove his misbegotten theories promoting supplements and other measures as preferable to vaccines. Americans need only to look at Samoa for predictions of that outcome. There, in 2018, a nurse tragically used a vial of paralyzing muscle relaxant to dilute a vial of measles vaccine. That mistake resulted in the deaths of two infants. This caused Samoa to suspend the measles vaccination program. Kennedy visited the island, he later wrote, because “government officials, including the Prime Minister were curious to measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the respite from vaccines.”
One of my young parents was unvaccinated as a child and resents that her parents fell for the conspiracy theories.
The health outcomes included a measles outbreak that occurred months after Kennedy’s visit, which included thousands of infections and the deaths of 83 people, most of them small children. Kennedy reportedly told Samoa’s prime minister that the deaths were caused not by measles but by the vaccine used to prevent measles.
“I never gave any public statement about vaccines. You cannot find a single Samoan who will say, ‘I didn’t get a vaccine because of Bobby Kennedy,’” Kennedy told senators Wednesday.
Despite his claims that he wouldn’t discourage vaccinations, we have every reason to believe that Kennedy, if he’s put in charge of HHS, would discourage and even defund them. Defunding vaccines would mean even the parents who are steadfast in protecting their children may not be able to afford the vaccines needed to shield them. And that would put the patients I see at increased risk of disabling disease and death.
And then, incomprehensibly, we might owe declining vaccine rates and the return of long-forgotten infectious diseases not to some internet rabbit hole but to a U.S. Cabinet official charged with protecting the health of the nation.
Senators, the pediatricians who kept your children safe implore you to stand with them and with children in opposing the appointment of Mr. Kennedy to the Cabinet.
