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Key figures who “spearheaded” the elimination of religious exemptions to vaccine mandates in Maine are now setting their sights on other states — and on ousting U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
American Families for Vaccines (AFV), launched last year, was originally founded in 2020 as the SAFE Communities Coalition. Based in Maine, the rapidly growing organization, registered as a nonprofit, has 14 state chapters.
It also has a national profile — in recent months, mainstream media have referenced the group when reporting on vaccine-related issues.
According to AFV’s mission statement, the organization works “at the grassroots” to “represent the pro-vaccine majority.”
And according to its “statement of independence,” AFV is not influenced by its funders or outside entities.
However, The New York Times reported last week that the organization “receives some of its funding from vaccine makers.” And AFV’s website lists several pharmaceutical companies, medical organizations and pharma industry groups as “partners.”
AFV’s fundraising platform is hosted on ActBlue, a Democratic Party advocacy website.
Research scientist and author James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., described ASV as “an industry front organization” representing “corporations wishing to simulate public or scientific support.”
Maine internist Dr. Meryl Nass agreed. In a Substack post, she characterized AFV as an “astroturf organization” promoting a political agenda.
“Maintaining the stellar reputation of vaccines, and destroying those who would tarnish them, is of critical importance,” Nass wrote. She said organizations like AFV view Kennedy as “the greatest challenge” the vaccine industry has ever faced.
The timing of AFV’s 2025 launch “is not coincidental,” said Sayer Ji, chairman of the Global Wellness Forum and founder of GreenMedInfo. It’s part of “a sequential escalation of coordinated opposition to Secretary Kennedy — each phase deploying different proxies while following the same strategic playbook.”
“The question is never whether these organizations exist independently. The question is whether they function independently. The evidence increasingly suggests they do not,” Ji said.
AFV ‘a front organization for Big Pharma’
AFV was granted IRS 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status in August 2025. However, it has not yet submitted an IRS Form 990, which would shed further light on the organization’s revenue and sources of funding.
The IRS does not require 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations to file until five months after the end of their first fiscal year.
According to AFV’s homepage, the organization was built on the foundations of its successful effort to eliminate religious exemptions in Maine. According to AFV’s Maine chapter, in 2021, the group played a key role in passing Public Law, Chapter 154, which ended religious exemptions.
Michael Kane, director of advocacy for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said AFV is “known in activist circles to have spawned out of Maine — and not as genuine decentralized ‘local grassroots’ organizing.”
“Astroturf” is a term that “perfectly describes what they actually are — a front organization for Big Pharma,” Kane said.
AFV’s mission statement states that the group’s approach “is informed by our own experiences as volunteer vaccine advocates.”
However, AFV is advertising for high-paying full-time positions, including a political director with an annual salary of $145,000 and a state director for its West Virginia chapter with a salary of $80,000.
Ji suggested that AFV would be unable to provide these salaried positions “without serious institutional capital behind it.”
AFV works with authors of ‘Disinformation Dozen,’ orgs trying to oust RFK Jr.
Institutional capital appears to include pharma-linked organizations, including the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), both listed by AFV as “partners.”
BIO and AAP are also involved in efforts to oust Kennedy.
In June 2025, a document purportedly containing the minutes of an April 2025 meeting of BIO’s Vaccine Policy Steering Committee showed that attendees described Kennedy as a “direct threat to public health” and discussed ways to target him. BIO denied the authenticity of the document.
In later months, several strategies allegedly discussed during the April 2025 meeting appeared to play out. These included a September 2025 U.S. Senate hearing questioning Kennedy’s actions as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and an October 2025 letter by six former U.S. surgeons general calling for Kennedy’s ouster. Kennedy was not invited to the September 2025 hearing.
Last year, the AAP sued Kennedy and other federal health officials and agencies, seeking to roll back changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) childhood vaccination schedule.
Last month, the AAP updated its complaint after HHS reduced the number of recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11. A federal court in Boston is weighing whether to grant the AAP a temporary injunction to reverse actions Kennedy has taken, including his restructuring of the panel of vaccine advisers to the CDC.
Last year, the AAP released its own “evidence-based” immunization schedule, diverging from the CDC’s new recommendations. Several states have adopted the AAP’s schedule. The AAP has also sought to end religious exemptions nationwide.
CHD and five other plaintiffs sued the AAP earlier this year, accusing the organization of running a racketeering scheme to defraud Americans about the schedule’s safety.
The AFV also promotes the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), listing the organization as a “resource” on its website.
CCDH authored “The Disinformation Dozen” list of “leading online anti-vaxxers,” including Kennedy, in 2021. CCDH now faces a congressional investigation, while its CEO, Imran Ahmed, faces deportation.
Other AFV partner organizations are also linked to Big Pharma:
- Voices for Vaccines, which lists Pfizer, Moderna, Merck, GSK, Sanofi and pharma industry lobbying group PhRMA among its funders. It is owned by the Task Force for Global Health Inc., whose donors include Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, USAID, the World Health Organization and the Gates Foundation.
- Vaccinate Your Family, which receives funding from Pfizer, Moderna, GSK, Sanofi, AstraZeneca, Novavax, the CDC, vaccine developer Dr. Paul Offit, and Claire Wardle, Ph.D., who was implicated in the “Twitter Files” for her efforts to censor “disinformation” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Immunize.org, which receives funding from Pfizer, Moderna, Merck, GSK, Sanofi, AstraZeneca, CSL Seqirus and Novavax.
- National Society for Infectious Diseases, whose funders include AstraZeneca, Bavarian Nordic, Moderna, Pfizer, GSK, Merck and Sanofi.
AFV board members have deep ties to pharma
A “revolving door” also appears to exist between members of AFV’s board, the board of the AFV Action Fund — AFV’s fundraising arm — and the pharmaceutical industry.
Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, Ph.D., a member of the AFV Action Fund’s board, is also a member of the Voices for Vaccines Family and Community Advisory Board.
Offit is on the organization’s Scientific Advisory Board, as is vaccine pioneer Dr. Stanley Plotkin, known as the “godfather of vaccines.”
Offit is also a member of Vaccinate Your Family’s Committee of Scientific and Medical Advisors. Richard Hughes IV, an attorney for AAP, is a member of its board.
Phyllis Arthur, a member of the board of the Infectious Disease Prevention Network, another AFV partner, is also BIO’s executive vice president, chief of global health. She previously served as managing/senior director of vaccines, immunotherapeutics and diagnostics policy for Merck.
“These organizations operate within a shared ecosystem of pharmaceutical funding, regulatory influence, and policy advocacy, giving them material stakes in the expansion of vaccine requirements,” Stand for Health Freedom wrote on Substack.
AFV leaders and board members also appear to be part of this web.
AFV President Northe Saunders and AFV Communications Director Caitlin Gilmet participated in Maine Families for Vaccines. AFV’s advocacy director, Jennifer Herricks, Ph.D., has co-authored a paper with vaccine advocate Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D.
AFV Board of Directors member Dr. Nirav D. Shah was the former principal deputy director of the CDC and former director of the Maine CDC. Pediatrician Dr. Laura Blaisdell co-chairs Maine Families for Vaccines and is vice president of AAP’s Maine chapter. She also conducted research on “vaccine-hesitant patients” and supported COVID-19 shots for kids.
Reiss, a professor at the University of California San Francisco School of Law, has published extensively on school mandates and policy responses to the unvaccinated, opposing parental choice and “abuse” of religious exemptions. In a 2012 paper, she wrote about the benefits of corporate capture of industry regulators.
Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle also sits on AFV’s board. Addressing Daschle’s participation and AFV’s alignment with the Democratic Party via its ActBlue fundraising platform, Ji said this shows that AFV is “not a nonpartisan public health effort,” but “a political operation with a public health veneer.”
AFV launches chapters in states with vaccine, medical freedom bills pending
AFV states that it accepts funding “only for activities that are consistent with the organization’s mission and vision,” and that accepting corporate funds does not imply AFV’s “endorsement of a grantor’s products, services, programs, or activities.”
Jill Hines, director of advocacy for Stand for Health Freedom, said AFV’s “statement of independence” is “essentially a statement of alliance with the vaccine industry.”
Lyons-Weiler said that while AFV’s combination of partners may “not imply wrongdoing, it does establish a high conflict-of-interest profile that warrants scrutiny.”
“AFV asks the public to accept its independence claim while it acknowledges private-sector sponsorship, lists vaccine manufacturers and major trade/medical organizations as partners, runs explicit political campaigns and staffs professional political roles,” Lyons-Weiler said.
An AFV “call to action” advocates for Kennedy’s removal, calling him “unfit” for the position and demanding the restoration of a vaccine policy that is “guided by science, not conspiracy theories.” Ji said this is further evidence of AFV’s conflicts of interest.
“You cannot be financially sustained by an industry, staffed by its allies, aligned with its litigation strategy and simultaneously claim to be free of its influence,” Ji said.
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Expansion strategy targets states weighing vaccine, medical freedom laws
Even though the group professes independence, AFV has been expanding its state-level advocacy and lobbying footprint — with a focus on states where key vaccine or medical freedom legislation is in play.
AFV has launched state-level chapters in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, where bills that would end religious exemptions are under consideration, and in West Virginia, where a dispute between state law that bans religious exemptions and an executive order permitting them is currently being litigated.
Hines said AFV’s work to combat religious exemptions “warrants concern, as it undermines long-standing protections for religious freedom.”
AFV has also launched chapters in Montana, where medical freedom bills are on the table, and Florida, where state surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo announced last year the end of vaccination mandates for school attendance.
The organization has also launched chapters in key electoral swing states, including Arizona, Colorado and Wisconsin. In several states, including Arizona, West Virginia, South Carolina and Massachusetts, AFV has hired and registered lobbyists. Among them is Saunders, who is registered in Massachusetts.
Lyons-Weiler noted that AFV’s Massachusetts lobbying is linked to McDermott, Quilty, Miller & Hanley, a law firm representing Merck and other pharma companies.
Saunders “traveled to Massachusetts last year to lobby in support of legislation that would remove that state’s religious exemption … boasting that the removal of religious exemptions in Maine was a policy win,” Stand for Health Freedom wrote. In 2023, Herricks testified against health freedom legislation in Louisiana.
Kane said AFV has set its sights on states where “medical freedom legislation is clearly on the offense” and that are “expanding the rights of bodily autonomy.”
“Americans deserve full transparency about who funds organizations calling for the removal of a sitting HHS Secretary,” Ji said. “AFV may be new, but the playbook is not. And the playbook is increasingly visible to the American public.”
Related articles in The Defender- Breaking: Children’s Health Defense Hits AAP With RICO Suit Over Fraudulent Vaccine Safety Claims
- Ex-Surgeons General Latest to Join RFK Jr. Smear Campaign
- Is Upcoming Senate Hearing a Ploy by Pharma, Big Media to Get RFK Jr. Fired?
- RFK Jr. Hit With Lawsuit Over Changes to COVID Vaccine Policies for Kids, Pregnant Women
- Vaccine Lobbyists Deny Calling RFK Jr. ‘Direct Threat to Public Health,’ Declare Support for MAHA
- American Academy of Pediatrics Wants to Shut Down Religious Vaccine Exemptions
