Vaccine industry executives are publicly blaming U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for tanking stock prices, declining vaccine sales in the U.S. and their reluctance to invest in clinical trials for new vaccines.
‘Not Much We Can Do’: Vaccine Makers Lash Out at RFK Jr. as Sales Slide
Written by Jill Erzen on . Posted in Current News
Asked what would need to change to move vaccine discussions forward, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla answered: “The secretary of health,” The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Bourla has emerged as Kennedy’s most vocal critic, calling his approach “anti-science.”
Speaking at a WSJ event at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Bourla said conversations with Kennedy collapse as soon as vaccines come up.
“I have very productive discussions when it comes to cancer cures. … It’s a different world when you start discussing vaccines,” he said. “There’s almost like a religion there.”
At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco earlier this month, Bourla warned that Kennedy’s influence is driving down vaccination rates and raising disease risk.
“I’m seriously frustrated,” Bourla told reporters, according to Reuters. “What is happening has zero scientific merit and is just serving an agenda which is political and antivax.”
Sanofi CEO: ‘Very little’ to do but wait for elections
Other pharmaceutical executives at the conference echoed Bourla’s frustration.
Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson blamed Kennedy for “all the … misinformation that is going around,” Reuters reported.
“I’ve had conversations with Kennedy; we just try to stick to the facts,” Hudson said, according to the WSJ. “Not much we can do.”
Executives said the concern extends beyond any single vaccine or technology.
Moderna co-founder and chairman Noubar Afeyan warned that the current policy direction sets a broader precedent.
“Today it may be childhood vaccines or mRNA, but tomorrow it’s everything,” he said, according to Bloomberg. “We have to say not just ‘Why is this happening?,’ but ‘Where will it stop?’”
As a severe flu season unfolds, Merck Research Laboratories President Dean Li said political pressure on vaccination is already affecting routine flu shots. “With the pressure on vaccination, I cannot foresee flu vaccination increasing in this country over the next three years,” he said in a presentation. “There’s a chance that it will come down.”
Hudson offered a similar outlook, saying the administration shows “a particular sensitivity around vaccination, and indeed pediatric vaccination.” Asked how companies could reverse the trend, he said there was little choice but to wait. “There’s really very little else we can do” aside from waiting for elections, he said.
Kennedy, however, has emphasized that federal health agencies are prioritizing “gold-standard” science and vaccine safety.
In a November 2025 statement to The Defender, Andrew Nixon, communications director for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the agencies’ vaccine changes “reflect gold standard, evidence-based science.”
U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary echoed that message in a November 2025 Fox News interview. “We’re not just going to rubber-stamp new products that don’t work, that fail in a clinical trial,” he said. “It makes a mockery of science if we’re just going to rubber-stamp things with no data.”
Vaccine sales declining in U.S.
The shift in federal vaccine policy is already affecting company earnings. In the third quarter of 2025, Pfizer and GSK reported global vaccine growth even as U.S. sales fell, the WSJ reported.
On an earnings call, Sanofi’s Chief Financial Officer François Roger cited “negative buzz” around vaccines in the U.S.
Companies more dependent on vaccines have been hit harder. CSL Seqirus, for example, abandoned plans to spin off its vaccine unit, citing “heightened volatility in the current U.S. influenza vaccine market.”
Moderna has gone further. CEO Stéphane Bancel told Bloomberg the company will not invest in new late-stage vaccine trials because of growing opposition from U.S. officials. “You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market,” he said.
Bancel said regulatory delays and weak government support have sharply reduced the market’s size.
“It’s sad for us to see that vaccines that have been proven for decades helping people around the world are not recommended anymore,” he said.
Kennedy’s vaccine stance means ‘everybody will start litigating’
Investors say the consequences are real and lasting.
Fifteen investors and analysts told Reuters that Kennedy’s rapid overhaul of vaccine policy — including addressing financial rewards for vaccinations, changing the childhood vaccine schedule and cutting mRNA research funding — has weakened demand and undercut biotech investment.
“Vaccines will not be a growth area under the current administration,” said Stephen Farrelly, global pharma and healthcare lead at ING.
Executives also said Kennedy’s approach increases legal risk for drugmakers. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, has profited from lawsuits against vaccine companies, as have some of his allies, Bloomberg reported.
“There is also a lot of plaintiffs’ playbook there. Everybody will start litigating,” Bourla said.
In 2018, Kennedy helped spearhead a mass legal action against Merck. The lawsuit alleged that Merck had misled customers about the safety and effectiveness of the HPV vaccine Gardasil.
But Kennedy is also facing legal challenges.
In late 2025, the American Academy of Pediatrics and several other medical organizations filed a federal lawsuit over Kennedy’s changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel.
The groups are seeking to disband the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, overturn its recent recommendations and rebuild the committee under court supervision.
For Bourla, vaccine discussions with Kennedy have effectively ended. “I’ve chosen to try to work with him on things that we agree on,” he said. “So I don’t talk to him about vaccines at all.”
About the author: Jill Erzen is associate editor for The Defender. She earned her B.A. in journalism and English at the University of Iowa. She has 25 years of experience as a copy editor, copy desk chief and multimedia web editor for newspapers and online news publications. Jill lives in Iowa with her husband and four daughters. She joined The Defender in June 2025.
source childrenshealthdefense.org
Anapat
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Of course, people decline vaccination not because of the fake pandemic Bourla&Co crashed upon us in 2020. No, it’s Kennedy, who is the scapegoat. Great move!
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Tom
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Bourla the Butcher is unhappy that he doesn’t get to murder more people in the name of profits. Go ahead and cry a tear for this murdering bum.
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Seriously
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Thank you, RFK!
Maybe just kill the stock market…(🙏🤑)won’t have to worry about those pesky stocks falling …that inject slow Posion into human bodies for PROFIT.
So, I guess they’re saying that any business in the stock market should be forever preserved even if the public decides it’s a failed technology they no longer want? Be warned…this one too profitable which means it’s going to get very nasty out there in propaganda land…
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Saeed Qureshi
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“It’s sad for us to see that vaccines that have been proven for decades to help people around the world are no longer recommended.”
Isn’t this precisely what RFK Jr. is asking for—evidence to demonstrate that these vaccines have, in fact, been proven to work against the claimed viruses or illnesses? What is wrong with asking for such proof, unless no such evidence exists—which, from a scientific perspective, appears to be the case.
Another revealing aspect is what this situation exposes about the pharmaceutical and medical industry. In normal business practice, if a product truly works as claimed, customers choose it voluntarily. When a product requires government mandates, legal pressure, or regulatory force to be sold and administered, that raises an obvious question: why is coercion necessary if the product is effective?
If vaccines genuinely delivered the promised results, there would be no need for governments to compel their use. Reliance on mandates suggests not confidence in effectiveness, but dependence on state power to sustain the business model. This is a troubling reflection of what the modern medical industry has become—one that appears unable to function without government intervention, even when selling products described as ‘safe and effective.’
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very old white guy
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Good, maybe some lives will be saved.
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Seriously
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But that is their entire model. They inject you with a toxin to keep you from getting a virus that you don’t have and no way to know if you ever would ‘get’ …you cannot prove a negative result if you weren’t 100% infected to begin with!! It makes no sense! Meanwhile, no one seems able to find a virus that can replicate itself, correct? So how can you grow something that isn’t alive and find a way to kill it? The model is ‘fear’ and it’s been used in various ways by various means by humans against each other, for control in some manner since the 1st village. We are only a couple years from a different administration, new controller in our lives….so don’t hold your breath…
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