When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took office in February 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services oversaw food and hospital inspections, health insurance for roughly half of the American population, vaccine recommendations, and the scientific research infrastructure that underpins most of what your doctor tells you. It was imperfect, often bureaucratic, and in genuine need of reform in places. What it did not need was to be systematically dismantled by someone who rejected the scientific foundations it was built on.
That is what happened anyway.
Within his first two months Kennedy announced the elimination of approximately 10,000 HHS jobs on top of another 10,000 employees who had already taken buyouts, collapsed 28 agencies into 15, and closed half of HHS’s regional offices. The cuts did not fall evenly. They targeted, as 19 state attorneys general would later document in federal court, specific programs and areas of expertise — the ones Kennedy had already decided were part of the problem. Infectious disease surveillance. Vaccine research. The scientific advisory infrastructure that had taken decades to build.
The research bleeding is quieter than the vaccine headlines but may prove more lasting. The National Institutes of Health cut approximately $2.7 billion in research funding, including a 31 percent reduction in cancer research. Five hundred million dollars in contracts to develop vaccines using mRNA technology, the same technology that saved millions of lives during the pandemic were canceled. Four NIH directors were fired or forced out. The FDA’s vaccine chief was removed. A CDC director Kennedy himself had hired was gone within a month. As one Georgetown University public health law professor put it, America is being hollowed out of its scientific leadership, and it will be extraordinarily difficult to reverse.
But it is the vaccine story that will be most immediately felt in pediatricians’ offices and school hallways across the country.
Kennedy promised during his confirmation hearings that he would not touch vaccine policy. Instead he fired all 17 sitting members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the expert body that has guided vaccine recommendations since 1964 and replaced them with known vaccine skeptics. The reconstituted committee promptly began downgrading recommendations. Then in January 2026, the CDC unilaterally reduced the universally recommended childhood vaccine schedule from 17 vaccines to 11, cutting protection against rotavirus, influenza, hepatitis A, hepatitis B and meningococcal disease from routine recommendations, not based on any new safety data, but modeled after Denmark, a country with universal free healthcare that is an outlier even among its European peers.
The consequences are not theoretical. A measles outbreak has spread to 26 states with over 960 confirmed cases centered in South Carolina. Two children have died from whooping cough. Vaccination rates have been falling since Kennedy took office. Last flu season saw 280 child deaths from influenza, the highest toll in more than a decade, and the federal government has now made the flu vaccine a matter of parental discretion rather than routine recommendation.
There is a clock ticking that most people don’t know about. Major health insurers pledged to keep covering the old vaccine schedule through the end of 2026. That pledge expires in December. After that, whether parents pay out of pocket for vaccines that were covered last year is an open question, and in a country where cost is already a barrier to preventive care for millions of families, the answer will show up in infection rates within a year or two.
None of this happened by accident. None of it happened without warning. Kennedy’s record as a vaccine skeptic was not hidden during his confirmation process, it was the central concern of every senator who questioned him, and he addressed each concern with a promise he did not keep. The damage being done to American public health is real, it is documented, and it is the direct result of placing ideological conviction above scientific evidence at the highest level of the public health system.
The question worth asking, and the one we will address next, is not whether Kennedy knows what he is doing. He does. The more useful question is why a genuinely intelligent person, with a real history of fighting for public health, arrived here. Because the answer to that question is the one that might actually help us understand how to stop it from happening again.
Making America Sick — Part 2 of 4: The Damage
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took office in February 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services oversaw food and hospital inspections, health insurance for roughly half of the American population, vaccine recommendations, and the scientific research infrastructure that underpins most of what your doctor tells you. It was imperfect, often bureaucratic, and in genuine need of reform in places. What it did not need was to be systematically dismantled by someone who rejected the scientific foundations it was built on.
That is what happened anyway.
Within his first two months Kennedy announced the elimination of approximately 10,000 HHS jobs on top of another 10,000 employees who had already taken buyouts, collapsed 28 agencies into 15, and closed half of HHS’s regional offices. The cuts did not fall evenly. They targeted, as 19 state attorneys general would later document in federal court, specific programs and areas of expertise — the ones Kennedy had already decided were part of the problem. Infectious disease surveillance. Vaccine research. The scientific advisory infrastructure that had taken decades to build.
The research bleeding is quieter than the vaccine headlines but may prove more lasting. The National Institutes of Health cut approximately $2.7 billion in research funding, including a 31 percent reduction in cancer research. Five hundred million dollars in contracts to develop vaccines using mRNA technology, the same technology that saved millions of lives during the pandemic were canceled. Four NIH directors were fired or forced out. The FDA’s vaccine chief was removed. A CDC director Kennedy himself had hired was gone within a month. As one Georgetown University public health law professor put it, America is being hollowed out of its scientific leadership, and it will be extraordinarily difficult to reverse.
But it is the vaccine story that will be most immediately felt in pediatricians’ offices and school hallways across the country.
Kennedy promised during his confirmation hearings that he would not touch vaccine policy. Instead he fired all 17 sitting members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the expert body that has guided vaccine recommendations since 1964 and replaced them with known vaccine skeptics. The reconstituted committee promptly began downgrading recommendations. Then in January 2026, the CDC unilaterally reduced the universally recommended childhood vaccine schedule from 17 vaccines to 11, cutting protection against rotavirus, influenza, hepatitis A, hepatitis B and meningococcal disease from routine recommendations, not based on any new safety data, but modeled after Denmark, a country with universal free healthcare that is an outlier even among its European peers.
The consequences are not theoretical. A measles outbreak has spread to 26 states with over 960 confirmed cases centered in South Carolina. Two children have died from whooping cough. Vaccination rates have been falling since Kennedy took office. Last flu season saw 280 child deaths from influenza, the highest toll in more than a decade, and the federal government has now made the flu vaccine a matter of parental discretion rather than routine recommendation.
There is a clock ticking that most people don’t know about. Major health insurers pledged to keep covering the old vaccine schedule through the end of 2026. That pledge expires in December. After that, whether parents pay out of pocket for vaccines that were covered last year is an open question, and in a country where cost is already a barrier to preventive care for millions of families, the answer will show up in infection rates within a year or two.
None of this happened by accident. None of it happened without warning. Kennedy’s record as a vaccine skeptic was not hidden during his confirmation process, it was the central concern of every senator who questioned him, and he addressed each concern with a promise he did not keep. The damage being done to American public health is real, it is documented, and it is the direct result of placing ideological conviction above scientific evidence at the highest level of the public health system.
The question worth asking, and the one we will address next, is not whether Kennedy knows what he is doing. He does. The more useful question is why a genuinely intelligent person, with a real history of fighting for public health, arrived here. Because the answer to that question is the one that might actually help us understand how to stop it from happening again.
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