After making a pledge on vaccines to Sen. Bill Cassidy during his confirmation process, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promptly reversed course.
In his first address to agency employees since his confirmation as Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, Kennedy said the Trump administration’s new Make America Healthy Again commission—established last week with Kennedy at the helm—will consider no topic off-limits on its quest to explain a “precipitous decline in American health over the past two generations.”
“We will convene representatives of all viewpoints to study the causes for the drastic rise in chronic disease,” Kennedy said during the private address, portions of which have been circulating on social media. “Some of the possible factors we will investigate were formerly taboo or insufficiently scrutinized.”
Kennedy didn’t mince words about the topics causing him concern, singling out childhood vaccination schedules, the common class of antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and other mental health medications, as well as electromagnetic radiation, the herbicide glyphosate, microplastics and ultra-processed foods.
Kennedy has become one of President Donald Trump’s most controversial allies and word of his nomination as the nation’s leading health authority quickly drew fire from the scientific community, thanks in large part to the former environmental lawyer’s history of anti-vaccine rhetoric.
In the past, Kennedy has opposed vaccine mandates for COVID-19 and promoted the disproven claim that childhood immunizations can cause autism.
That stance proved problematic for Kennedy during his Senate confirmation hearing last month, when Cassidy went against the party line by grilling Kennedy over his previous vaccine claims.
Ultimately, however, Kennedy won Cassidy’s support, with the Louisiana politician explaining in a post on X earlier this month that he’d pivoted after engaging in “very intense conversations with Bobby and the White House.”
Chief among the concessions Kennedy made to win Cassidy’s support was a pledge to leave vaccine recommendations from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) untouched, The Associated Press reported this week.
ACIP, which meets yearly to review data on vaccines old and new, issues recommendations on the very childhood immunization schedules Kennedy has now pledged to investigate.
"[Kennedy] has also committed that he will work within current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems and not establish parallel systems," Cassidy said on the Senate floor earlier this month.
Acutely aware of his reputation, Kennedy told HHS staffers last week that “whatever belief or suspicion I have expressed in the past, I’m willing to subject them all to the scrutiny of unbiased science.”
“Let’s all depoliticize these issues and reestablish a common ground,” Kennedy said during his address, stressing the need to “renew the search for existential truth with no political impediments and no preconceptions.”
Kennedy’s dispatch coincided with the Trump administration’s mass government layoffs last week, which have trickled down to many HHS divisions, Fierce Healthcare reported on Friday.
The federal purge has prompted the voluntary exodus of several high-ranking health leaders, too, including National Institutes of Health (NIH) deputy director for extramural research, Michael Lauer, M.D., and the agency’s principal deputy director, Larry Tabak, Ph.D.