“I’ve grown deeply concerned,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), a physician, told Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during a blistering Senate hearing earlier this month. The Wyoming senator warned that “safe, proven vaccines like measles, like hepatitis B, and others, could be in jeopardy.”
Less than 200 days after Kennedy promised the Senate he wouldn’t touch vaccine access, he’s broken that pledge and now faces bipartisan backlash for putting ideology over the promises that secured his confirmation.
The three-hour Finance Committee grilling saw Kennedy face bipartisan fury over his Centers for Disease Control and Prevention purges and vaccine rollbacks. Democrats called him a “charlatan” and demanded his resignation. Republicans expressed unease about broken promises. The hearing devolved into shouting matches, with Kennedy accusing senators of speaking “gibberish” while defending his firing of then-CDC Director Susan Monarez after just 29 days because she refused to rubber-stamp his anti-vaccine panel’s recommendations.
The senators had good reason to be furious. Kennedy fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. This isn’t just another panel that sits around without doing much of anything: They hold real power, as their determinations affect which vaccines insurance must cover at zero cost. While they have not moved to strip them so far, several members have anti-vaccine histories, leading many to worry they may do so in the future to reduce vaccine circulation. It would be a cynical strategy: achieve through economics what you can’t through persuasion, using working families as pawns in an ideological game.
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This move violates the explicit promise Kennedy made to secure his confirmation. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who grilled Kennedy at the September hearing, had extracted a specific pledge from him: he wouldn’t touch the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee and wouldn’t take vaccines away from families who wanted them. That pledge lasted less than 200 days.
The math can be quite steep for a lot of Americans who depend on coverage to afford basic immunizations. The standard flu shot costs somewhere between $20 and $120 per person without insurance every year for every family member. The measles vaccine runs somewhere between $180 and $250 for the full course. COVID-19 vaccines hit as high as $140. For families with multiple children, we’re talking about potentially thousands of dollars in unexpected and completely unnecessary added expenses.
Kennedy’s new appointees aren’t just different. Several of them are longtime vaccine skeptics, which makes their selection far more than a coincidence. The American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, and National Medical Association all issued urgent warnings that this panel jeopardizes the scientific rigor underlying vaccine policy. ACIP meets later this month, where Kennedy’s appointees could start stripping vaccines from the coverage schedule with a simple committee vote.
The concern that this committee could start stripping insurance coverage from vaccines isn’t merely hypothetical. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, fired CDC Director Monarez revealed that Kennedy allegedly pressured her to preapprove whatever his vaccine panel decided, science be damned. When she refused, she was out. Four top CDC officials immediately resigned in protest, leaving America’s premier public health agency leaderless. Kennedy has gone on to call her a liar during his testimony to the Senate, but the concerns remain, and he hasn’t exactly gone out of his way to dissuade people of them.
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Some states have preemptively made moves to preserve vaccine access regardless of what happens at the federal level, but that is rather beside the point: Any move from ACIP to remove vaccines from the list of recommended vaccinations would be a complete breach of what Kennedy promised before Congress.
The Senate overlooked Kennedy’s anti-vaccine past in exchange for specific guarantees, guarantees he’s now shredding. The secretary would be wise to remember the pledges he made. Pricing working families out of vaccines they want violates the very terms of his confirmation. People didn’t sign up for that, and they won’t forget who enabled it.
Kyle Moran is a political commentator specializing in international affairs and national security. His research on the Middle East has been published in the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, and his commentary has been featured widely in outlets ranging from RealClearPolitics to the Washington Examiner.