Robert Kennedy Jr. Must Go
By Wendy Orent Published 11/4/25
Robert F. Kennedy Jr has a dual life in the public consciousness: health enthusiast and anti-vaxxer. The environmental lawyer, formerly head of the anti-vaccine organization “Children’s Health Defense,” who visited Samoa and stood with anti-vaxxers amid a measles outbreak that led to the deaths of 83 unvaccinated people, mostly children, now serves as Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Donald J. Trump. During his campaign, Trump vowed to let Kennedy “go wild” on public health.
And that’s exactly what Kennedy has done. But the secretary, and those in the Senate permitting this ongoing insult to the history of medicine, ought to remember that he must answer to the American people. And the American people must remember that they still have a voice and the power to fight back.
Kennedy casts himself as a caretaker of America’s children: he vows to Make America Healthy Again by combating obesity, eliminating food dyes, preventing pregnant women from taking Tylenol, and changing the long-established vaccine schedule. But by propelling doubts on vaccine safety,Kennedy has tarnished the one glittering legacy of Trump’s first term, the successful campaign to develop and deploy, in less than a year, two safe, effective vaccines against the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus. Furthermore, by staffing all the agencies under his purview with men who are compliant or anti-vaccine themselves, and by firing anyone who stands up to him, Kennedy has riddled the American public health system with weak, ineffective, malignant cronies. He’s fired the carefully-vetted vaccine experts who advised the CDC, and appointed a team shockingly lacking in expertise. And instead of the pummeling Kennedy and his lackeys deserve, too many in the press play both sides, giving Kennedy credit for trying to “make America healthy again” by looking into the “causes” of autism, and by keeping us safe from food dyes.
In the face of this total degradation of U.S. public health institutions, scientists are doing their best to fight back. Six surgeon generals joined together to publish an opinion piece in the Washington Post denouncing RFK Jr.’s anti-science, anti-vaccine decisions on October 7th, 2025. The organization Stand Up for Science delivered hundreds of rubber ducks (Quack! Quack!) to Congressional offices. A major demonstration involving 11 pro-science organizations has been planned for November 5th in Washington (with support from AJI). But nothing yet has altered Kennedy’s status, which seems cemented into the current administration. The President seems happy with his HHS director, and gains nothing by removing him. There is only one potential avenue leading to the impeachment or forced resignation of Kennedy. That is on the local level. Only pressure by masses of constituents on their senators and representatives can rid the nation of this threat to public health.
But that’s easier said than done. The dual image of Kennedy as health magnet and disease spreader sows only confusion. Who doesn’t want America to be healthy again? And how many vaccines do children really need? Some studies have reported that routine vaccination rates have slumped: parents don't know whom to listen to, as public health no longer speaks in one voice.
But if you talk to public health and vaccine experts, you hear anguish—because experts know what happens when infectious diseases long eliminated come streaming back. Measles and whooping cough cases are exploding across the U.S., and several children have died. Scientists can only watch and fear what may come next, much like people in Renaissance England did every few years, as plague waves in France, in Belgium, in Holland crept closer to English shores.
American public health experts face two problems: first, persuading vaccine-hesitant parents that this flawed man risks their children’s lives, and second, convincing senators and Congress that their political futures may be jeopardized by failing to impeach the most unqualified, dangerous man ever to serve as HHS director. The Senate, notably Dr. William Cassidy, a physician who knows better, abdicated its responsibility for caring for the nation’s children by confirming the rogue appointee in the first place. They need to be held accountable.
Alarmed parents and local activists must insist to their representatives that Americans will not sit passively by while children’s health and future are jeopardized. According to a 2024 survey done by Harvard University and the de Beaumont Foundation, 79% of Americans support not just access to vaccination, but vaccine requirements for children. That is a force to be reckoned with. Ordinary citizens can’t afford to remain silent. This burden is on us.
Despite his denials, his insistence that he’ll keep vaccines so long as they are safe, Kennedy and his lackeys have begun tinkering with the vaccine schedule. They have eliminated the four-in-one live vaccine virus shot that used to include live weakened virus vaccines for chickenpox, measles, mumps, and rubella. Now, chickenpox vaccine must be given separately. Kennedy, and Trump, argue that the Hep B shot, the only vaccine given to newborns, should be administered at four years, meaning infants can still contract the deadly disease. Kennedy’s attorney Aaron Siri has even argued for elimination of polio vaccination, and he has the secretary’s ear. Every move Kennedy and his team make tightens the rope around vaccination. Given enough time, it seems, he’ll come for them all.
As of now, America seems to be sleep-walking into a public health catastrophe. But American parenthood is a slumbering giant. When enough parents understand that their children’s health is threatened by vaccine-preventable diseases—influenza, Covid (long Covid or death), polio (paralysis or death), diphtheria (death), mumps (which can sterilize young boys), chickenpox (rarely, death, but also shingles in later life),rubella (major birth defects if acquired during pregnancy), measles, HiB (often-fatal epiglottitis), tetanus (high death rate), rotavirus (a dangerous diarrheal disease), as well as Hepatitis B(liver cancer), HPV (cervical, vaginal, throat, anal, and penile cancers); bacterial meningitis (rapid death or brain injury)—that giant will awake.
Congressmen and Senators who don’t support removing Kennedy from HHS must suffer the consequences, paying for their callous negligence in installing and tolerating a duplicitous charlatan as the caretaker of American health. Only a roused and angry public has the power to exact political retribution. And if not now, when?
