In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio. A top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.
The Department of Health and Human Services is planning to propose a new childhood vaccine schedule. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came close to promoting Denmark's slimmed-down recommendations before pulling back on Friday, Politico reported. But the change is still likely to happen — a risky political gamble, but one seemingly in sync with President Trump's recent directive to top health officials to "align U.S. core childhood vaccine recommendations with best practices from peer, developed countries."
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[Antivax physician Robert] Malone wrote a Substack post on the U.S. adoption of the Danish schedule on Thursday, concluding that "this could be ... the biggest Christmas present ever for Children's Health Defense, The Informed Consent Action Network, a wide array of smaller organizations representing vaccine injured, and the trial lawyers of America."
The change could lead directly to fewer vaccinations and more vaccine-preventable diseases. It could also effectively gut the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which provides compensation to the relatively small number of people who actually have vaccine injuries while shielding manufacturers from lawsuits. Without the program, companies would simply stop making vaccines, which are not very profitable to begin with.
Kennedy has said he wants to "fix" the program. And anti-vaccine activists who've long made it a target contend it removes the incentive for drug companies to put out safe products. (These same activists also make claims about widespread vaccine harms without reliable evidence and contrary to the findings of the scientific establishment.)
Getting rid of it altogether would require an act of Congress, which is highly unlikely at this point.
But in a video he posted on X, anti-vaccine lawyer and past Kennedy ally Aaron Siri claimed that "there is a way to get rid of the [manufacturers'] immunity without Congress," saying that to be covered a vaccine needs to be "routinely recommended." Siri worked with Kennedy for years on vaccine-related lawsuits. He recently gave a presentation on the childhood vaccine schedule at a meeting of the CDC advisory committee. Siri noted that COVID vaccine, which is no longer recommended for children, is as a result no longer protected by the federal liability shield and that "if you took the other vaccines ... and you made them non-routine, they would be out."
