US health agencies under Robert F Kennedy Jr. and American medical groups are in conflict over childhood vaccination policy. At the heart of the clash is a long debunked, persistent myth about vaccine safety.
Family doctors are probably the best place to obtain trusted, first-point information about vaccines and other medicines, say experts, amid a growing and public conflict between the Trump Administration’s health agencies and professional, independent medical groups.
Forty-four such groups, including the American Medical Association (AMA) and American Academy of Pediatrics, co-signed a statement protesting a new recommendation by the US Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a high-level government advisory panel on vaccine safety and effectiveness.
The ACIP voted that the hepatitis B vaccine, typically administered to all newborns in the US within the first hours of birth, be optional for all but those at highest risk of the infection. Hepatitis B is a vaccine-preventable viral infection that causes liver disorders, including often fatal cirrhosis and cancer.
In September, the ACIP also recommended the MMRV vaccine that combines doses for measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox-causing varicella, be split.
The changes come despite a lack of evidence that vaccines cause harm and years of data optimizing vaccine dosage schedules.
“The overwhelming concern that those of us watching these recommendations have, is how it is sowing distrust about our vaccines and our vaccine schedule and about the data that we have,” Jodie Guest, a specialist in infectious disease based at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, told DW.
“It’s messy, it’s confusing.”
Controversy stems from Kennedy’s remaking of health structures
Usually, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), America’s federal public health agency, enact recommendations from its ACIP as guidance for US states, which have ultimate responsibility for health policy within their borders.
CDC guidance is usually supported by peak medical groups and followed by health insurers to decide policy coverage.
But the ACIP and CDC have been overhauled this year by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a noted anti-vaccine campaigner — with new appointees.
This “new group of people [is] quite skeptical, if not outright hostile to vaccines,” said Josh Sharfstein, a public health expert based at Johns Hopkins University.
A former Maryland state health secretary, appointed under a Democrat governor, Sharfstein told DW the ACIP’s core decision-making processes have been abandoned under Kennedy’s new panel.
“The decision making on vaccines has lost integrity,” Sharfstein said. “The scientists aren’t making presentations to the advisors, there are advocates who, have had all kinds of challenges with the accuracies of [their own] statements in the past, who are the ones briefing the advisors.
“It’s more than just a different conclusion, it’s an entirely different process,” Sharfstein said.. “It’s a process that’s gone off the rails.”
In the background is Kennedy’s long-stated view that some vaccines cause autism. He recently directed an update to the CDC’s “Autism and Vaccines” safety information page, which now says key research into a purported autism-vaccine link has been “ignored by health authorities” and that “the statement ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim.”
However there have been multiple studies reviewing millions of births that find no connection between vaccines — usually the MMR vaccine — and autism. An expert committee from the World Health Organization reaffirmed this in December 2025. Medical professionals have said claims of increased rates of autism in the US are due to expanded definitions of the condition and improved diagnostic methods, not vaccination. Many pages on the CDC website still say vaccines, including the MMR vaccine, are safe.
“That doesn’t mean that there are not important things to study in vaccine safety,” said Sharfstein. “The goal should always be for vaccines to be safer and for risk to be better understood. You can believe that the benefits far outweigh the risks of vaccines and still want to make vaccines as safe as possible.
“What’s going on now is, I don’t think, driven by a specific kind of study. I think it relates to a very general hostility towards vaccines.”
Family doctors now the safe voice
As Kennedy has remade key federal health structures, resignations of long-serving science staff within his health agencies have followed.
Independent medical groups, academies and experts are concerned that information from federal health agencies is no longer reliable and have begun publishing their own advice to the public.
James Campbell, the vice chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ infectious diseases committee, called the ACIP meetings a “brazen attempt to sow fear and distrust in vaccinations that have saved countless lives.”
In the aftermath of the recommendations, around a dozen states — all led by Democrats — said they would reject any changes to the vaccine schedule. Health insurers have said they would continue to offer coverage for at-birth hepatitis B vaccination, despite the change from ACIP.
A new survey commissioned by the Annenberg Public Policy Center also found that American adults, by a 2-1 margin, would now be more likely to take advice from the AMA than the CDC.
Jason Schwartz, a vaccines and vaccination policy researcher at Yale University, US, told DW the pushback by America’s medical community now taking place was “an attempt to try and mitigate what the overwhelming majority of the mainstream public health and medical community sees as inappropriate shifts in our recommendations regarding vaccines from the federal level.”
But he and the other experts DW spoke to say the conflict in messaging between the federal government, states and peak medical groups could be confusing.
“I do think that the standing of the professional associations, the doctors, the nurses, have a lot more credibility right now with the American people,” said Sharfstein.
Schwartz pointed to relationships with family health care providers as being the “back stop” amid the conflict between high level doctors groups and Kennedy’s health department.
“That relationship with a health care provider who a family knows, can talk with, can listen to their questions and concerns, can help clarify the confusion or uncertainty that they are no doubt feeling to some degree in this moment,” Schwartz said.
Wider impacts for the US and the world?
The traditional role of the US as a global health leader is also on the decline.
Many countries have based their own long-standing public health agencies, vaccine advisory committees and scientific review structures, on the US.
Some also look to agencies like the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is responsible for drug approvals in the US, as a valuable reference for their own medicine approvals.
“I don’t know that other countries should currently be looking to the United States for leadership on these decisions, and that is so unfortunate,” said infectious disease specialist Guest.
The change in procedure across US federal health agencies, and the increase in language that muddies long-established scientific research on vaccine safety, might also impact public perceptions of immunization and medicine outside of the US.
Source : https://www.dw.com/en/medical-experts-are-pushing-back-on-new-us-vaccine-policy/a-75161898
