“Do your own research,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. advised parents considering vaccination for their children during an 80-minute televised interview with Dr. Phil last week. He offered the loaded directive with some of his go-to antivax falsehoods: common shots are neurotoxic, the measles mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is “leaky,” the MMR vaccine hasn’t been adequately tested. In the middle of a major U.S. measles outbreak, where three unvaccinated people have died — two of whom were children — Kennedy continues to downplay the virus and refuses to tell the truth about lifesaving vaccines.
The root system of his disinformation campaign is multibranching. In one of his own published books, Kennedy indicates that he does not believe in germ theory, instead subscribing to a version of the abandoned 19th century concept that the “miasma” is the source of disease. He has historically profited from his “vaccine skepticism.” And then, there’s something else: the taproot that reaches deepest into the American psyche and is echoed across the Trump administration’s policies.
“It’s very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person,” Kennedy falsely said during a March Fox Nation interview. “We see a correlation between people who get hurt by measles and people who don’t have good nutrition or who don’t have a good exercise regime.” Coupled with his disturbing statements on autism and long-standing belief that vaccinations cause the condition, Kennedy is circling a dark idea: that the value of one’s life can be tabulated in accordance with diagnoses and preexisting conditions. Since his appointment as secretary of health and human services (HHS), he has pursued a brutal vision of American health that several experts liken to a sort of eugenics. Kennedy has made it clear that certain deaths are acceptable or even preferable to a world where every child is vaccinated.
“There’s a sort of Darwin-esque notion that only the fittest survive,” says Paul Offit, a vaccine scientist, virologist, and professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “But these viruses can kill anybody, so that’s just wrong.” In the recent deaths, the first from measles in a decade, no underlying medication conditions have been reported. Both of the Texas children were reportedly healthy before they contracted measles. They could have stayed that way.
Measles was declared eradicated in the United States in 2000. There have been outbreaks since, but they’ve been contained quickly enough to avoid a return to endemic spread. In the recent past, including in 2019 during the previous Trump administration, measles outbreaks have elicited vigorous state, local, and federal response. Extensive contact tracing helped keep track of exposures and new case clusters. Clear public communication and education for those living in impacted communities ensured they understood the disease and how to prevent it. Most critically, quick and targeted vaccination campaigns helped stop the spread.
“There’s a sort of Darwin-esque notion that only the fittest survive… that’s just wrong”
During the 2019 outbreak, as the confirmed case count neared 700, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and HHS secretary issued clear, firm, and unified statements that the MMR vaccine is safe and urged everyone to get vaccinated.
But 2025 is different. Elon Musk’s DOGE crew continues to slash the federal workforce, including CDC staff. Distrust in public health is high after the covid-19 pandemic. There is no confirmed CDC director. And Kennedy is using his largest, most influential platform yet to continue his longtime crusade sowing vaccine skepticism — messaging that puts Americans, especially children, at risk of disease and death.
Since January, there’ve been nearly 900 confirmed measles cases — mostly children, according to data from the CDC and administered by HHS. Local spread is ongoing in at least eight states. More than one in 10 people infected have been hospitalized.
All of these statistics are likely undercounts, given how little on-the-ground monitoring and outbreak tracking there’s been, Offit says. Cases have been concentrated among insular Mennonite communities where people are less likely to seek medical attention or report illness than the general public, and the CDC is operating with a newly cut budget and staff. “You’d like to think that hospitalizations and deaths would be clearly reported, but I think the CDC has limited resources right now in terms of surveillance on the ground, testing, and providing help to communities overwhelmed,” Offit says.
In a Fox News interview on March 11th, Kennedy told Sean Hannity that the MMR vaccine “does cause deaths every year. It causes all the illnesses that measles itself causes: encephalitis and blindness… people ought to be able to make that choice for themselves.” This is all patently false, according to many science and health experts. There have been cases where powerful drugs were tragically and inadvertently administered in place of or mixed with the vaccine. But when given properly, to children who aren’t severely immunocompromised, “it’s a remarkably safe vaccine,” Offit says. “The MMR vaccine, to my knowledge, has never caused a fatality.” Measles, in contrast, kills up to three in every 1,000 and leaves others severely ill. Even in mild cases, measles can trigger years of immunosuppression.
“It’ll clearly get worse.”
Kennedy has issued tepid statements endorsing MMR vaccination, but all come muddled by his continued claims that the vaccine is ineffective or dangerous and that measles itself is no big deal. In an April 8th interview with CBS News, he said, “We encourage people to get the measles vaccine.” But in the same conversation he also said “we don’t know the risk of these products because they’re not safety tested,” and “the vaccine wanes very quickly.” Two more false statements. (The MMR vaccine has been extensively tested for safety and efficacy, we’ve used it for decades, and it offers lifelong, 97 percent effective protection against measles infections for almost everybody given the two-dose course). It also doesn’t contain “aborted fetus debris,” counter to yet another of Kennedy’s inflammatory claims. The MMR vaccine and many others are manufactured using the same fetal stem cell lines that have been relied on for decades. No administered vaccines contain any human cells — fetal or otherwise.
Meanwhile, the HHS attempts to spin Kennedy’s apparent views. “Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine — he is pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability,” HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard wrote to The Verge in a statement. “He believes Americans deserve radical transparency so they can make informed healthcare decisions,” the statement continued, while failing to provide the citations and scientific references in support of Kennedy’s claims that The Verge requested.
“I think it’ll clearly get worse,” Offit says. MMR vaccination saved an estimated 60 million lives between 2000 and 2023, according to previous CDC research. Despite having the means to eliminate measles entirely, the exceptionally contagious virus could be poised to make a long-term comeback under Kennedy’s influence, Offit says, adding that he fears many more cases and child deaths are on the way.
The quiet part, not so quiet
The underlying message of Kennedy’s campaign is that measles deaths are expected and admissible, because the people who don’t survive the disease were flawed anyway, says Laura Appleman, a professor of law at Willamette University in Oregon. Kennedy has talked up the “measles parties” of past decades — discounting that sometimes those parties proved deadly. “I think there’s a real subtext here saying that, ‘no, that’s ok, because in the old days the ones who survived were the strong ones,’” she adds.
Appleman has studied and written about the history of eugenics in the U.S., in the context of the criminal justice system, as well as that of public health and the covid-19 pandemic. The current rhetoric coming from Kennedy is an amplification of what’s long persisted in American culture and politics, she says. “I talk a lot about the long tail of eugenics [in the US]. And I think certainly, lately, the tail is not so hidden anymore.”
“He’s pretty much coming out and saying these things,” Appleman says. “Who deserves to live and who is it okay to not mourn? And this is from someone who runs the HHS. This is profoundly disturbing.”
“I think there’s a real subtext here saying that, ‘no, that’s ok, because in the old days the ones who survived were the strong ones.’”
At the same time that Kennedy has brushed off measles deaths as the expected fate of unhealthy children, he has also continued stoking the thoroughly debunked idea that childhood vaccinations are linked to the rise in autism diagnoses. He has been publicly pushing junk science on vaccines and autism for at least 20 years (as evidenced by his now-retracted 2005 Rolling Stone article). Most recently, Kennedy hired David Geier, a notorious antivax crusader, to lead HHS research into the supposed connection. Geier has faced sanctions and a $10,000 fine for practicing medicine without a license and — alongside his father — subjecting children to unproven “treatments” for autism.
Most scientists attribute the largest share of the rise in autism diagnoses to increased awareness and shifts in diagnostic criteria. The initial 1998 paper suggesting an association between vaccines and autism was retracted in 2010 and the lead author, Andrew Wakefield, lost his medical license in disgrace over fraud and data manipulation. The supposed link between vaccines and autism has been thoroughly disproved in more than a dozen studies since, but Kennedy won’t let it go.
In a recent press conference, Kennedy announced his intent to identify the cause of the “autism epidemic” by September. “I think what that means is he’s already figured it out,” Offit says. “He’s just going to try and shoehorn data into this hypothesis, which for him is non-falsifiable, immutable, and science resistant, which is that vaccines cause autism,” Offit adds.
During the press conference, Kennedy asserted that autism “destroys” families and children. He said that children with autism, “will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
“It doesn’t get much closer, that I can imagine, to ‘useless eaters’ than that,” says David Gorski, a surgeon and oncologist at Wayne State University and prolific health blogger, who cofounded the website Science-Based Medicine. “Useless eaters” was a phrase coined by German eugenicists Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche in a 1920 book that advocated for culling people with disabilities — which the Nazi regime would later use to justify mass murder.
Comparisons to Nazis are obviously loaded and liable to be overused. “Sometimes [I’m] accused of overreacting,” says Gorski. But he’s not alone in pointing out the parallels. Appleman also heard echoes of “useless eater” discourse in Kennedy’s speech. “I think that is what RFK is, if not saying specifically, I think he is signaling,” she says.
Autism exists on a spectrum. About a quarter of people diagnosed with autism have significant, lifelong need for support. Most others live, work, and function independently. Even if they didn’t, the level of assistance some people with autism require does not preclude a fulfilling life. “It’s, forgive me, crazy talk to say that people with any sort of disabilities have lives that are not worth living,” Appleman says.
It’s “a rhetoric that communicates lesser value,” says Jacqueline Fox, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who focuses on health law and bioethics. “He described autistic people in a way that was shocking. First of all, it was wrong. And second of all, it [suggested] as though people who don’t do that laundry list of things have no worth.”
Shortly after the press conference, Jay Bhattacharya, newly appointed director of the National Institutes of Health, said his agency would be compiling a massive database of information on people with autism, combining federal data with private medical records and commercial data like smartwatch and insurance information. After significant public pushback and privacy and ethics concerns over the concept of an “autism registry,” HHS seemed to walk the plan back. However, Hilliard told The Verge that HHS still plans to create a “real-world data platform,” which “will link existing datasets to support research into causes of autism and insights into improved treatment strategies.”
In response to questions about the autism press conference, the HHS press secretary Hilliard told The Verge, “Secretary Kennedy remains committed to working toward a society where people with autism have access to meaningful opportunities, appropriate supports, and the full respect and recognition they deserve. His statements emphasized the need for increased research into environmental factors contributing to the rise in autism diagnoses, not to stigmatize individuals with autism or their families.”
Yet Kennedy and other HHS officials have announced no new measures for supporting people living with autism. Instead, the Trump administration has proposed cutting $880 billion from the Medicaid budget. “They never suggest the solution to [actually] make America healthy again: universal healthcare,” Gorski says. “In fact, they’re doing everything they can to chip away at what little social safety net we have.”
Additionally proposed and already enacted cuts within HHS include eliminating the national suicide hotline’s program for LGBTQ youth, ending programs focused on preventing childhood lead poisoning, eliminating domestic HIV prevention efforts and research, and scrapping multiple measures for treating drug addiction and opioid overdoses, including grants for supplying emergency responders with Narcan.
Altogether, the changes fit cleanly with the idea that certain lives aren’t worth investing in or protecting, Fox says. “All of these things could be explained through that lens,” she notes — the lens of acceptable death. Refracted through the looking glass, “a lot of things come into focus,” and the road to an America made “healthy again” looks treacherous.