By Carl P. Leubsdorf / The Dallas Morning News
Donald Trump’s more controversial personnel choices have prompted fears that Tulsi Gabbard would compromise intelligence operations and Pam Bondi and Kash Patel would target political enemies over dangerous criminals.
But the nominees who may ultimately pose the greatest long-term danger to the well-being of Americans are Trump’s choices to head agencies intended to protect their health: Health and Human Services Secretary-designate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his picks to run the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.
Kennedy has gained a well-deserved reputation as a vaccination critic, though his record is more complicated than that. In a 2023 Fox News interview, he said, “I do believe that autism does come from vaccines.” And in a 2023 podcast, he said “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.”
But he also maintains, “I have never told the public to avoid vaccination.”
One instance his critics cite is his possible role in exacerbating a 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa, which followed a well-publicized visit, in which he met with anti-vaccine advocates, and a subsequent letter to Samoan health officials in which he suggested the measles vaccine may have been responsible.
“It’s a real-life example of what this individual will (do) as the nation’s leading health care official,” Hawaii Democratic Gov. Josh Green, a physician who responded to the outbreak, told The Washington Post.
The biggest common problem within Kennedy’s team may not be their controversial, sometimes contradictory, views. It’s their support of greater personal autonomy in decisions about vaccinations and their resistance to the traditional approach of having health and school officials mandate required protective measures.
“I’m going to make sure scientific safety studies and efficacy are out there, and people can make individual assessments,” Kennedy told NBC in a recent interview.
Critics fear with reason that greater autonomy would encourage further withholding of immunizations at a time when the numbers have declined below safe levels, inevitably precipitating the comeback of diseases once considered largely eradicated, like measles and polio.
That situation would inevitably worsen without top officials maintaining a firm stance that immunizations are necessary to ensure health standards and schools should enforce the requirements for students to have them.
CDC data based on state and local immunization programs found that, in the 2023-24 school year, fewer than 93 percent of kindergartners were vaccinated with all state required vaccines, including MMR (measles, mumps, rubella); DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis); polio; and varicella (chicken pox), down from the pre-pandemic 2019-2020 level of 95 percent.
A 2024 Gallup survey showed that just 40 percent of Americans considered childhood vaccines “extremely important,” compared with 58 percent in 2019. The percentage who believe vaccines can cause autism doubled, to 13 percent, while just 36 percent understood that vaccines don’t cause autism.
“I think if RFK follows through on his intentions, and I believe he will, and I believe he can, it will cost lives in this country,” Dr. Scott Gottlieb, Trump’s first Food and Drug Administration commissioner, told CNBC.
“You’re going to see measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rates go down,” he said, adding that “if we lose another 5 percent, which could happen the next year or two, we will see large measles outbreaks.”
The evidence is overwhelming that modern vaccines have succeeded in eradicating or reducing the cases of debilitating, sometimes fatal, diseases.
A study by an international team of 21 physicians, timed for the 50th anniversary of a World Health Organization program to increase availability of life-saving vaccines, concluded last spring that, since 1974, vaccines averted 154 million deaths, including 146 million children under five.
The study, published in the international medical journal The Lancet, concluded that 40 percent of the decline stemmed from vaccines, including those against smallpox, tuberculosis, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), polio and measles.
Over the years, Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit that Kennedy chaired, has filed nearly 30 federal and state suits, many challenging vaccines and public health mandates. Aaron Siri, a lawyer helping Kennedy pick other new officials, petitioned the government to revoke approval of polio vaccines credited with protecting millions from the virus that killed thousands and crippled many others.
I’m old enough to remember the crippling impact of polio outbreaks in summer camps and the resulting fear among parents in the decade before Dr. Jonas Salk developed the first polio vaccine in the early 1950s.
Of the various health agencies, the most important in ensuring that children get necessary vaccinations is the CDC, which regularly updates guidance for parents and schools on the need for vaccinations including detailed schedules of when children should receive various kinds.
Trump’s choice to head the CDC, former Florida Rep. Dave Weldon, was a founder of the Congressional Autism Caucus. According to The Washington Post, his record showed he “emphasized the experiences of individuals while dismissing dozens of studies based on data from hundreds of thousands of patients that showed no link between vaccines and autism.”
Dr. Martin Makary, Trump’s choice to head the FDA, attacked various aspects of the agency’s response to the 2020 covid pandemic. He argued against lockdowns and masking for children, questioned the benefits of vaccine boosters, and predicted incorrectly there would be herd, or natural, immunity by April 2021.
Trump’s choices augur weakened federal support for life-saving vaccines; and a strengthened likelihood of the diseases they’re designed to prevent.
Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Readers may write to him via email at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com. ©2025 The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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