The health secretary has chipped away at the idea that immunizing children against measles and other diseases is a public health good.
During his Senate confirmation hearings to be health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presented himself as a supporter of vaccines. But in office, he and the agencies he leads have taken far-reaching, sometimes subtle steps to undermine confidence in vaccine efficacy and safety, public health experts say.
The National Institutes of Health halted funding for researchers who study vaccine hesitancy and hoped to find ways to overcome it. It also canceled programs intended to discover new vaccines to prevent future pandemics.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shelved an advertising campaign for the flu shot. Mr. Kennedy has said inaccurately that the scientists who advise the C.D.C. on vaccines have “severe, severe conflicts of interest” in promoting the products and cannot be trusted.
The Health and Human Services Department cut billions of dollars to state health agencies, including funds needed to modernize state programs for childhood immunization. Mr. Kennedy said in a televised interview on Wednesday that he was unaware of this widely reported development.
The Food and Drug Administration canceled an open meeting on flu vaccines with scientific advisers, later holding it behind closed doors. A top official paused the agency’s review of Novavax’s Covid vaccine. In a televised interview last week, Mr. Kennedy said falsely that similarly created vaccines don’t work against respiratory viruses.
Some scientists said they saw a pattern: an effort to erode support for routine vaccination, and for the scientists who have long held it up as a public health goal.
“This is a simultaneous process of increasing the likelihood that you will hear his voice and decreasing the likelihood that you’ll hear other voices,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said of Mr. Kennedy.
He is “decertifying other voices of authority,” she said.
H.H.S. disagreed that Mr. Kennedy was working against vaccines.
“Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine; he is pro-safety,” a department spokesman said in a statement. “His focus has always been on ensuring that vaccines are rigorously tested for efficacy and safety.”
The statement continued, “We are taking action so that Americans get the transparency they deserve and can make informed decisions about their health.”
After attending the funeral of an unvaccinated child who died of measles in West Texas on Sunday, Mr. Kennedy endorsed the measles vaccine on X as “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.”
But he has also described vaccination as a personal choice with poorly understood risks and suggested that miracle treatments were readily available. On Sunday, he praised two local doctors on social media who have promoted dubious, potentially harmful, treatments for measles.
