RFK Jr. Leading Multi-Agency Study on Childhood Vaccine Safety
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is “spearheading an intense push” across several federal agencies to study vaccine safety and the potential role of vaccines in the chronic disease epidemic, The New York Times reported Monday
The initiative includes “a look at the overall effect of the childhood vaccine schedule.” Researchers will also compare the health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated kids, and examine possible links between vaccines and autism — including whether thimerosal, a mercury-based adjuvant used in some vaccines, may trigger autism.
This research is a “top priority” for Kennedy despite the Trump administration’s public shift away from vaccine-related messaging in the lead-up to this year’s midterm congressional elections.
Kennedy and key advisers are overseeing the project. Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., a biostatistician, vaccine safety expert and critic of COVID-19 vaccine mandates, is leading the effort. In 2020, Kulldorff co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration — a controversial but influential critique of lockdown policies during the pandemic.
Despite its criticism of Kennedy’s vaccine policies, the Times acknowledged that Kulldorff has a good reputation within the scientific community.
Dr. Sara Brenner, a “MAHA Mom” who was recently appointed deputy commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, will play a key role in the initiative, according to the Times. Brenner has previously suggested she is aligned with Kennedy on the need for more safety testing of vaccines.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesperson Andrew G. Nixon told The Defender that Kennedy “is executing on President [Donald] Trump’s commitment to strengthen public health by advancing gold-standard vaccine research.”
“We are continuing to conduct studies to better understand vaccine safety and efficacy and to assess how vaccine exposure, timing, and patterns affect health across the lifespan,” Nixon said. Failure to do so “would amount to gross negligence by an agency charged with protecting public health and rebuilding public trust.”
Nixon told the Times the findings will “inform vaccine recommendations.”
According to the Times, Kennedy’s initiative “is raising alarms among some vaccine scholars and critics,” who are concerned he will “use the findings to further erode confidence in vaccines.”
“Public health experts complain that by spending money on issues that have already been thoroughly studied, he is taking funds away from research that might answer the very questions he is asking, including what causes autism,” the Times reported.
The initiative will cost the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) alone approximately $50 million, the Times reported.
But other medical and scientific experts applauded Kennedy for taking a new look at vaccine safety.
“It is long overdue, as the existing research is not designed to — or rather, it is designed not to — identify any such link between vaccines and autism,” said internal medical physician Dr. Clayton J. Baker.
John Gilmore, executive director of the Autism Action Network and one of the new members Kennedy appointed to the federal Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee in January, also supports the initiative.
Gilmore said:
“They do not and have never done comparisons of a vaccinated to an unvaccinated group. They compare one vaccinated group to another vaccinated group. If they use a placebo, it is never inert, a drug safety test that did not use an inert placebo would never be accepted, why is that acceptable for a vaccine?
We know that the CDC and other agencies are sitting on the data from many studies that did not produce the desired results. If that data were released, many questions would be answered.”
Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, said that between 1991 and 2013, the Institute of Medicine — now known as the National Academy of Medicine — published a series of studies “that repeatedly concluded there are huge knowledge gaps about vaccine safety.”
“They found that epidemiological studies were too often methodologically flawed or absent, and there was special concern about a scarcity of bench science investigating the biological mechanisms of vaccine injury and death at the cellular and molecular level,” Fisher said.
Science is never ‘settled’
Experts took issue with the notion that the vaccine safety concerns targeted by Kennedy’s initiative have already been “thoroughly studied.”
Daniel O’Connor, founder and CEO of TrialSite News, said, “The claim that ‘the science is settled’ has become one of the most anti-scientific phrases in modern medicine.”
He added:
“Science is never settled — especially when dealing with complex neurodevelopmental disorders like autism, evolving vaccine schedules, cumulative exposure questions, gene-environment interactions, immune activation pathways, adjuvants, or long-term outcomes that remain incompletely understood.”
Baker said:
“‘The science’ … is never ‘settled’ with regard to any topic. With new vaccines so frequently added to the pediatric vaccine schedule, it is totally disingenuous to claim this regarding vaccines.
Issues such as the potential toxicities from multiple simultaneous injections at pediatric visits, and the cumulative risks of dozens and dozens of total shots across childhood have never been scientifically evaluated.”
Baker called the Times’ claim that the process of conducting studies comparing the health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated children will be “riddled with pitfalls” is “intellectually dishonest on its face.”
“If these studies have not been done, then it is impossible for ‘the science’ to be ‘settled,’” Baker said.
Several key studies asserting vaccine safety have been found to contain potential flaws. For instance, a 2002 study that found “strong evidence against the hypothesis that MMR [measles-mumps-rubella] vaccination causes autism” was found to contain significant methodological flaws.
A peer-reviewed analysis published last year cast further doubt on the 2002 study’s conclusions.
One of the co-authors of the study, Danish researcher Poul Thorsen, was extradited to the U.S. from Germany last week to face charges of wire fraud and money laundering connected to CDC grants he received for autism research.
Other recent studies denying a link between aluminum-based adjuvants in vaccines and autism have also been found to contain significant flaws.
Epidemiologist and public health research scientist M. Nathaniel Mead said many past autism studies have been “great at spotting broad patterns across large groups,” but “often miss the real complexity of what’s happening on an individual level.” He added:
“What these studies tend to overlook is how environmental toxins can trigger or worsen autism symptoms in kids who are already vulnerable. These aren’t minor details — they’re central to how the disorder develops.
“Most population studies also don’t account for the huge differences between kids — things like their metabolic profiles, how their bodies handle biochemistry, or their ability to process toxins.”
‘I don’t understand the fear of delving deeper into safety research’
The newspaper quoted Katie Wright, the mother of an adult with autism, who supported Kennedy’s push for more vaccine safety research.
“There’s been tremendous pushback; they say, ‘Well, the research has been done,’” Wright told the Times. “Well, you know what? A lot of families are concerned. I don’t understand the fear of delving deeper into safety research.”
Recent polls suggest the number of Americans who question vaccines is growing. A Politico poll conducted in March found that nearly half of U.S. adults think the science on vaccines remains up for debate and that vaccine mandates are damaging — and only 39 percent think that the science on vaccines is clear and it is damaging to challenge it.
A Zogby Strategies poll conducted in February found that 80.4 percent of adults believe they should have the right to refuse vaccines and that 65.7 percent of respondents agreed that parents should have the right to refuse vaccines for their children.
CDC data released last year showed that vaccination rates in the U.S. hit a record-breaking low for the third consecutive year, continuing a trend that began years before Kennedy took the helm of HHS.
“The public increasingly recognizes that many vaccine safety studies rely heavily on observational designs vulnerable to healthy-user bias, underreporting, short follow-up windows, industry entanglements, and a near-total absence of true vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated long-term cohorts,” O’Connor said.
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