President Trump is pushing Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to cut childhood vaccines faster — and the clash between what parents want to know and what the establishment wants to bury is coming to a head.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump asked Kennedy at his Virginia golf course in May whether the health secretary had the "yips" — not over putts, but over vaccine cuts. Trump reportedly wants Kennedy to reduce the number of shots on the childhood schedule and has steered "nearly every conversation" with Kennedy back to the issue, according to people familiar with the matter. The president has said he wants "alleviating autism" to be part of his legacy.
The autism rate tells you why. As of 2020, one in 36 eight-year-olds was diagnosed with autism. Kennedy says the rate has since risen to one in 31. "The epidemic is real," Kennedy said. "Genes do not cause epidemics."
The Guardian framed the story around Trump's "anti-vaccine" history and called the vaccine-autism link "debunked," burying the autism statistics. Breitbart led with the president's push and the exploding autism rate, giving Kennedy space to argue the public just needs "good information."
Here's what happened on the ground. Kennedy slashed the routine childhood immunization schedule by one-third, from 17 recommended shots down to 11. A federal judge halted the changes in March after a lawsuit from the American Academy of Pediatrics, also freezing the work of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which the judge said Kennedy had illegally formed. The government is appealing.
Kennedy also sought to redirect $5 billion — more than 10% of the NIH budget — toward research on vaccines and autism, according to Reuters. Decades of establishment research attributes autism overwhelmingly to genetics. Kennedy isn't buying it, and neither are a lot of parents watching the numbers climb year after year.
The political operatives, meanwhile, want the whole thing shelved until after the midterms. Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio concluded in a December memo that "skepticism toward vaccine requirements is politically risky for both parties." Chief of staff Susie Wiles gave HHS a New Year's Eve deadline to make changes so the issue would fade before voters head to the polls, per Rolling Stone. Trump ignored the polling two days later, issuing a memo directing HHS to align with peer nations on vaccination recommendations.
The current schedule has infants receiving over a dozen doses in the first six months of life. Counting flu shots and the coronavirus jab, children face upward of 72 injections by age 18. Last year, the CDC removed the COVID vaccine from the recommended schedule for healthy children and pregnant women, and Kennedy announced the removal of a mercury-based preservative from flu shots.
At a September press conference, Trump warned pregnant women against acetaminophen due to autism risk and pointed to unvaccinated populations: "There are certain groups of people that don't take vaccines and don't take any pills that have no autism." Kennedy cited the Amish as one example.
The pharmaceutical industry, the pediatrics lobby, and the federal bench have all moved to block changes. The question is whether the public gets a straight answer on what's driving the autism explosion — or whether the institutions that failed to prevent it get to decide who's allowed to ask.
