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U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has “brought a series of once-unthinkable public-health proposals to the highest levels of the Trump administration,” particularly in relation to vaccine policy, Reuters reported Tuesday.
The Reuters report suggests Kennedy’s vaccine policies are putting public health at risk — but it also presents a comprehensive outline of his vaccine-related initiatives since taking over the helm at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
According to Reuters, Kennedy “agreed to avoid talking publicly about vaccines, bowing to the request of several senior White House aides.” He’s also “been unable to implement several elements of his vaccine agenda in the face of resistance from different corners of the government.”
However, “behind the scenes,” Kennedy has “continued to seek evidence for his theory that many vaccines have not been properly tested and can cause a range of dangerous side effects.” This corroborates a May report by The New York Times that Kennedy was leading an “intense” effort to study childhood vaccine safety.
Citing interviews with 16 current and former officials in the federal government, Reuters highlighted Kennedy’s effort to study a possible link between vaccines and autism, his efforts to revise the recommended childhood immunization schedule and his efforts to revamp the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP).
According to Reuters, Kennedy also meets regularly with President Donald Trump to discuss vaccine-related policies and the possible link between vaccines and autism.
In a post on Substack, internal medicine physician Dr. Meryl Nass, founder of Door to Freedom, wrote that while Reuters’ report on Kennedy was intended to act as a “hit piece,” the story will actually “endear him to his followers,” including supporters of the administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda.
“RFK did not sell out, as some have claimed,” Nass wrote. She separately told The Defender that the Reuters report is the first article she has seen “that discusses many of the efforts that Kennedy has made that have been thwarted.”
“We can see that he has many enemies within the White House staff and the HHS staff, and this article gives us a peek into the cauldron in which he has found himself,” Nass said.
She noted that James C. Smith, chairman of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, is a member of Pfizer’s board of directors.
Attorney Aaron Siri, cited in the story for his role advising Kennedy on vaccine-related issues, agreed. He told The Defender he was “pleased” with the story’s coverage of Kennedy’s efforts to reform the VICP.
Reuters acknowledges that Kennedy “has pushed through some of the biggest changes to U.S. vaccine policy in decades” and has “sought to go much further than previously known to dismantle the status quo.”
Reuters also noted in its report that the news outlet is a defendant in a lawsuit by Children’s Health Defense and others against the Trusted News Initiative — a partnership formed by Reuters, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, BBC and others.
The suit alleges the news organizations violated antitrust laws by colluding with tech platforms to censor alternative viewpoints, which put smaller, independent news sites at a competitive disadvantage.
HHS did not respond to The Defender’s request to comment on the Reuters report by press time.
Reuters highlights several of RFK Jr.’s vaccine-related achievements
According to Reuters, key highlights of Kennedy’s vaccine policies include “winding down mRNA vaccine development, withdrawing funding for an international vaccine alliance and tightening access to COVID shots.”
In August 2025, Kennedy canceled $500 million in federal contracts and grants earmarked for the development of mRNA vaccines. Reuters didn’t include in its story that last month, advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended the agency approve Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine.
In June 2025, Kennedy announced that the federal government would stop funding Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a public-private partnership that promotes childhood vaccination globally.
The Gates Foundation is the largest private donor to Gavi. The foundation, which also funded Gavi’s launch in 1999, holds a permanent seat on Gavi’s board. The Gates Foundation and Gavi are also two of the largest donors to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The Trump administration formally withdrew the U.S. from the WHO earlier this year, making good on a pledge it made soon after Trump took office in 2025.
Last year, the U.S. adopted new COVID-19 vaccine guidance after a vote by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) to recommend “individual-based decision-making” for COVID-19 vaccination for people ages 6 months to 64 years. ACIP advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on vaccine policy.
In May 2025, the CDC stopped recommending the COVID-19 shot for healthy children and healthy pregnant women. That change, and subsequent changes, prompted the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups to sue Kennedy and HHS.
In March, a federal court stayed the changes to COVID-19 vaccine policy, along with other vaccine policy changes the agency had approved. In May, HHS appealed the federal court’s ruling. The appeal is pending.
HHS denies claim RFK Jr. sought to eliminate the childhood vaccine schedule
Kennedy’s changes to COVID-19 vaccine recommendations and the recommended childhood vaccination schedule — and the obstacles he faced in implementing the policies — were a central focus of Reuters’ report.
This included a previously unreported assertion that Kennedy sought to eliminate the entire childhood immunization schedule and instead recommend “shared clinical decision-making” between physicians and parents or guardians.
Reuters cited several unnamed officials, who said former FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, who resigned in May, and Tracy Beth Høeg, M.D., Ph.D., who served as acting director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research before her firing that month, were “alarmed” by Kennedy’s plans and tried to “steer” him away from a full elimination of the childhood schedule.
HHS spokesperson Courtney Spencer disputed the accuracy of those assertions, Reuters reported. Høeg did not respond to The Defender’s request for comment.
According to Reuters, as part of Kennedy’s deliberations to revise the childhood immunization schedule, he and his advisers debated removing the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and the polio vaccine from the schedule.
However, Kennedy ultimately walked back those ideas due to “possible political blowback” and “pushback from White House officials,” Reuters reported.
RFK Jr. sought to ‘elevate’ research on possible vaccine-autism link
Reuters also focused on Kennedy’s efforts to study the possible link between vaccines and autism. According to Reuters, Kennedy sought to “elevate” this issue.
Citing two unnamed officials, Reuters reported that earlier this year, Kennedy floated a plan to National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya to earmark $5 billion for research examining the possible link between vaccines and autism, a hypothesis that Reuters claims has been “refuted by scientists worldwide.”
Kennedy dropped the plan, according to Reuters, as it would have required congressional approval and because it overlapped with the NIH’s $50 million research initiative, launched in September 2025, to study the vaccine-autism link.
That month, HHS announced it would study all possible causes of autism, including vaccines. In November 2025, the CDC revised its autism webpage to say there is no evidence to support the blanket claim that vaccines do not cause autism.
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Reuters acknowledges faults with current vaccine injury compensation system
The Reuters report also highlighted Kennedy’s efforts to “change VICP from within the government,” highlighting the “limited amount of damages” claimants alleging vaccine injury can potentially receive under the current system.
According to Reuters, a government-run vaccine injury compensation system such as VICP is necessary because holding vaccine makers directly liable for injuries could force them out of business “if patients could file lawsuits without restraint.”
However, the report acknowledged that the current system is faulty and that pharmaceutical companies “don’t have this protection for other medicines.”
Last year, Kennedy described the current VICP as “heartless.” Last week, Kennedy announced that HHS would develop a COVID-19 vaccine injury table, which could make it easier for people injured by COVID-19 vaccines to receive compensation from another federal program, the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program.
According to Reuters, Kennedy appears to have Trump’s support, meeting with him “every few months, most recently in June” to discuss vaccine-related efforts.
Perhaps indicating this support, Trump signed an executive order in May directing public health agencies to align the U.S. childhood immunization schedule with “scientific evidence and best practices from peer, developed countries.”
Related articles in The Defender
- Trump Signs Executive Order Backing HHS on Childhood Vaccine Reform — Will It Matter?
- RFK Jr. Leading ‘Intense,’ Multi-Agency Study on Childhood Vaccine Safety, New York Times Reports
- RFK Jr. to Create COVID Vaccine Injury Table — Will More People Finally Be Compensated for Injuries?
- Federal Government Appeals Ruling in AAP Lawsuit that Struck Down RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Policies
- ‘Uncompromising and Relentless’: HHS to Study All Possible Causes of Autism, Including Vaccines
- DOJ Backs Children’s Health Defense in Antitrust Suit Against Big Media
