Vaccinations provide significant protection for the public against infectious diseases and substantially reduce health care costs. Therefore, it is noteworthy that President-elect Donald Trump wants Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading critic of childhood vaccination, to be secretary of Health and Human Services.
Doctors, scientists and public health researchers have expressed concerns that Kennedy would turn his views into policies that could undermine public health. As a case in point, news reports have highlighted how Kennedy’s lawyer, Aaron Siri, has in recent years petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw or suspend approval of numerous vaccines over alleged safety concerns.
I am a biochemist and molecular biologist studying the roles microbes play in health and disease. I also teach medical students and am interested in how the public understands science.
Here are some facts about vaccines that Kennedy and Siri get wrong:
Vaccines are effective and safe
Public health data from 1974 to the present conclude that vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives worldwide over the past 50 years. Vaccines are also continually monitored for safety in the U.S.
Nevertheless, the false claim that vaccines cause autism persists despite study after study of large populations throughout the world showing no causal link between them.
Claims about the dangers of vaccines often come from misrepresenting scientific research papers. In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Kennedy incorrectly cited studies allegedly showing vaccines cause massive brain inflammation in laboratory monkeys, and that the hepatitis B vaccine increases autism rates in children by over 1,000-fold compared with unvaccinated kids. Those studies make no such claims.
In the same interview, Kennedy also made the unusual claim that a 2002 vaccine study included a control group of children 6 months of age and younger who were fed mercury-contaminated tuna sandwiches. No sandwiches are mentioned in that study.
Similarly, Siri filed a petition in 2022 to withdraw approval of a polio vaccine based on alleged safety concerns. The vaccine in question is made from an inactivated form of the polio virus, which is safer than the previously used live attenuated vaccine. The inactivated vaccine is made from polio virus cultured in the Vero cell line, a type of cell that researchers have been safely using for various medical applications since 1962. While the petition uses provocative language comparing this cell line to cancer cells, it does not claim that it causes cancer.
Vaccines are continuously monitored for safety before and long after they’re made available to the general public.
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Vaccines undergo the same approval process as other drugs
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