Saunders: Even if RFK Jr. wrong on vaccines, he’s right on autonomy

By Debra J. Saunders / Las Vegas Review-Journal

As he sat in the hot seat during a Senate hearing last Thursday morning, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recognized that he was in the center of a religious debate on vaccines.

On one side were finance committee Democrats and a couple of Republicans who are staunchly pro-vaccine. (I support covid-19 vaccines too. I just think the health care establishment ought to be a little more humble.)

On the other side were Republicans who loved Kennedy for resisting the establishment orthodoxy; or what Democrats refer to with their reverent voice as “The Science.”

As I watched the hearing, I felt as if I had gone back in time to 2020, when there were two distinctly different ways of looking at covid policy.

When covid first hit America, blue-state politicians focused on the death toll from covid as they forced extended school closures, restaurant and church shutdowns and mandatory masks for children. In their panic, they failed to consider the long-term effects of their measures.

Their approach was especially bad for healthy children who suffered a worse toll from isolation and a stunted education than from the virus. And guess who did not apologize to America’s children.

Like President Donald Trump in late 2020, RFK Jr. in 2025 was more focused on the big picture than jabs. When Democrats talked about his vaccine skepticism, he countered with the rise in U.S. infant mortality rates after decades of decline. Ditto autism and chronic illnesses.

He does not share the left’s belief in covid vaccines for healthy children and young adults.

On CNN later, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary recognized how the early covid vaccines “reduced the severity of the illness.” Makary had a better handle on the jabs than former President Joe Biden, who said in 2021 that vaccinated people would not be hospitalized or die. That was misinformation.

Makary said that “There have been children that have died from the covid vaccine,” though many disagree.

There is a small risk of mild myocarditis from the mRNA vaccines (especially to young men), which is smaller than the risk of myocarditis from covid. Kennedy Jr. says that if you overdeliver vaccines to this group, you nonetheless expand the number of males who might contract the disease.

Senate scolds talked as if all reasonable people who respect “The Science” get vaccinated. They’re wrong. As Makary told the American Hospital Association in May, 85% of health care workers did not get the last covid booster shot.

In households that are not immunocompromised, it can make sense to not vaccinate healthy kids. Parents would be well-advised to listen to their doctors more than politicians.

Kennedy certainly has made his share of misstatements as well, most notably when he claimed in 2021 that the covid shot was the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” That’s preposterous.

During the hearing, Kennedy testified that Susan Monarez — whom he picked to be his CDC chief, then fired 29 days later — was “lying” when she wrote in The Wall Street Journal that he had pressed her to rubber-stamp the recommendations of his handpicked and like-minded vaccine advisory panel. He looked like an amateur.

When Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., asked the secretary if he accepted that more than a million Americans died from covid, Kennedy countered, “I don’t think anybody knows that because there was so much data chaos coming out of the CDC.” Kennedy sees a difference between dying from covid and dying with covid.

In 2025, the controversy is an inside-the-beltway obsession that has little purchase in the American mindset.

While RFK Jr. talks about chronic disease and Democrats see all of U.S. health care through a vaccine lens, many Americans are no longer spellbound to the bureaucracies which they heeded so carefully in 2020. Most are not getting the jab.

In March, the Pew Research Center found that more U.S. adults said they had flu shots (42%) than covid shots (27%). More than half said they had gotten neither.

It’s as if Americans sent a postcard to the D.C. health care establishment: “Thanks for the advice. We’ll take it from here.”