Health and Medicine
PUBLISHED
Robert F Kennedy, Jr has been hitting the headlines pretty regularly since being sworn in as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) back in February 2025. That’s thanks, in a large part, to his longstanding personal war on vaccine science – and the ongoing legal battles between him and multiple US health and medical organizations that have sought to curb some of his more radical changes to national health policy.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Now, a cache of hundreds of internal emails from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and HHS has been released by Senator Bernie Sanders, the Independent from Vermont who serves as Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP).
They reveal what appears to be a concerted effort by the Secretary to redirect US vaccine policy along far more conspiratorial lines.
“Secretary Kennedy has been intent from Day 1 on destroying our nation's vaccine policy apparatus,” said Richard H Hughes IV, a Health Care and Life Sciences lawyer at Epstein Becker Green and lead counsel in the ongoing case against RFK’s vaccine changes. “The emails demonstrate a pattern of political interference that underscores the very essence of our claims in AAP v Kennedy.”
Taking the “vaccines” out of “vaccines for children”
The 2024-2025 flu season was particularly intense in the US. It began in October, surged in December, and saw a second peak in February, with that month seeing one in 50 deaths nationwide being caused by the flu – more deaths, for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, than from Covid.
It was amid this backdrop that Robert F Kennedy, Jr reportedly sent one of his first orders as the new HHS Secretary: stop promoting flu shots.
“Andrew Nixon/HHS gave me a call and asked that we pull out of circulation all campaign ad buys related to flu or anything encouraging shots or vaccinations,” wrote Nicole Coffin, then a senior advisor and communications official at the CDC, in an email to her supervisor dated February 14, 2025 – less than 24 hours after Kennedy’s confirmation to his position. “He said this request came directly from the Secretary.”
Her supervisor, Kevin Griffis, took the query higher. “Given that this is the worst flu season in years, halting a campaign currently in the field presents significant reputational risk to the agency,” he warned in an email to his own managers, including Susan Monarez, the acting CDC director at the time. “There are also likely legal issues”.
Despite all misgivings, however, RFK Jr’s spokesman was clear: “This was a direct ask from Secretary Kennedy,” he confirmed. Flu vaccine campaigns, including those already paid for and disseminated, were to be pulled, including one specifically aimed at pregnant women and parents of kids.
If that latter detail is shocking, it shouldn’t be. The emails also revealed enquiries from Kenneth Callahan, then the Senior Advisor to Secretary Kennedy, as to “what legally needs to happen or should be considered if a vaccine is going to be removed from the VFC program [Vaccines for Children, which provides vaccines at no cost to eligible children] at CDC?”
The answer he received: that’s the domain of ACIP, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Barely two months later, and less than three weeks before it was set to convene to discuss future vaccine policy for the US, HHS fired all 17 members of the Committee and replaced them with a group of just 8 people, including noted vaccine deniers and medical conspiracy theorists.
It was a move that went directly against Kennedy’s promise, explicitly made in his confirmation hearing to Senator Wyden, to “do nothing as HHS Secretary that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking vaccines.”
Nevertheless, argued Hughes, it’s hardly unexpected behavior: “I'm not at all surprised to learn he went so far as to explore removing vaccines from the Vaccines for Children program while telling the public he didn't want to take away vaccines,” he said.
Pushing conspiracy theories
Flu vaccines weren’t the only vaccines in Kennedy’s firing line. Between March and July of 2025 it became apparent that he had directed staff to allow David Geier, a notorious anti-vaccine activist whom Kennedy hired to head up a federal enquiry into the nonexistent link between vaccines and autism, access to more than 100 million confidential, non-anonymized patient records held in the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD).
Set up in 1990, the VSD was originally intended to monitor rare and unrecognized vaccine reactions, and it’s always been available to outside researchers who submit a successful study proposal to the CDC.
But Geier submitted no such proposal: “we do not have clarity on the study question, the analytic plan, the study endpoint, the timeline for completion, the use of parallel work to demonstrate replicability of findings, collaborators, review/clearance, or publication product,” wrote Daniel Jernigan, the veteran director of the CDC's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases who has since resigned in protest of the agency’s new, less scientific direction.
Further, it seems Geier – who has twice been barred from accessing VSD for misusing the data held there – never signed the assurance of confidentiality that all CDC staff and VSD investigators agree to. It wasn’t clear if he had a scientific ethics verification number or had taken the required training to access CDC datasets. “We are allowing less assurance than is currently in place,” Jernigan cautioned.
Geier isn’t the only name in the emails familiar to those following vaccine misinformation.
Also present is Mark Blaxill, an anti-vaccine activist known for claiming that every vaccinated child is in some way injured by it, and who it appears CDC staffers were tasked with hiring as a Distinguished Consultant in May 2025. As neither a physician nor a scientist, Blaxill – who has an MBA – was unqualified for that appointment, but by September he had nevertheless been hired as a senior adviser at the agency.
The debunked link between vaccines and autism is ever-present in the cache. Action plans are shared for programs to search for evidence to support the claim. Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer at the time, can be found sending out multiple email blasts countering such conspiracies, sometimes in direct response to statements and social media posts made by Kennedy himself.
Meanwhile, anti-vax folk hero William Thompson and, later, Daniel O’Connor, founder of vaccine skeptic favorite TrialSite News, were pushing for source data from a 2004 study that found no link between vaccines and autism. As a live measles outbreak rampaged through the country, the pair needed this old data as “a starting point for beginning to […] test alternative hypotheses” from the negative result, Thompson emailed in June. “This is a high priority for Secretary Kennedy”.
Politics over science
The emails don’t only show a worrying diversion away from established medical and scientific thinking, they also reveal an HHS Secretary willing to overrule or flat-out ignore subject matter experts or officials in his quest to remake the CDC in his own image.
“In prior administrations, TPs, slides, etc were sent to programs and science for review,” Houry pointed out after the April press conference in which Kennedy infamously claimed that autistic people “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."
Two weeks previously, Houry had already expressed confusion over statements Kennedy made on Fox News about inter-agency reorganization: “Secretary Kennedy […] mentioned transferring vaccine injury compensation to CDC,” she wrote in a March 31 email. “We are not aware of any proposed reorganization for this and [are] flagging that this would have the potential to create several unintended consequences.”
With this, the sweeping changes to ACIP and leadership, and an insistence on political staff having final say over major decisions at the CDC, it was only a matter of time before the agency started to crumble.
In August, “Secretary Kennedy fired Director Monarez for failing to rubber stamp recommendations from ACIP […] ‘regardless of the scientific evidence’,” notes Senator Sanders’s office, prompting Houry and several other CDC leaders to resign.
A month later, Houry testified to senators at a HELP hearing. Amid scathing reports of Kennedy’s behavior and suitability for his post, she also agreed to provide the emails now made public by Senator Sanders, so it’s her we have to thank for this worrying glimpse into the new CDC and HHS.
Like her fellow staffers, who said in interviews that they wrote the emails to document what was happening for posterity, Houry’s motivation was transparency. She wanted, she said, to “shine the light” on public health decisions she considered dangerous.
The emails are published here, but be warned: there are more than 250 pages of them. A memo summarizing the emails can be read here.
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