For years, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. championed families whose children were injured by the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. He challenged federal health agencies and Big Pharma, popularized censored research, and co-authored a book exposing severe risks of childhood vaccines.
Now, as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Kennedy is urging parents to administer the very vaccine he once warned against, while attributing the measles outbreak to disruptions in childhood vaccination during the Covid pandemic.
The reversal raises an uncomfortable question: What happened to the concerns about MMR safety that Kennedy spent years bringing to public attention?
Missed Vaccinations
Last Thursday, Kennedy visited Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he participated in a healthcare roundtable. Asked about measles-linked deaths in Pennsylvania, Kennedy attributed the resurgence of measles to disruptions in childhood vaccination during the Covid pandemic.
“We’re having a global measles outbreak right now,” Kennedy said, pointing to rising infections across multiple countries.
He continued:
The measles outbreak is occurring because so many people went unvaccinated during the Covid pandemic. And this is something that Anthony Fauci, in fact, predicted.
Kennedy referred to a May 2020 journal entry by former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director and presidential advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci.
This was the same Fauci whom Kennedy portrayed in his bestselling 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci, as a central figure behind deadly Covid policies, the suppression of alternative treatments, pharmaceutical profiteering, and the erosion of medical freedom, among other serious abuses of power.
Kennedy characterized Fauci’s prediction as a warning that more children could die from measles than would be saved from Covid during the shutdowns.
Kennedy made similar arguments in August. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked whether his years of vaccine skepticism had contributed to the outbreak, he replied, “Absolutely not.”
He again blamed pandemic lockdowns and invoked Fauci’s warnings. Kennedy singled out children who missed their scheduled MMR shots at 18 months, saying, “they’re the ones being infected.”
Presenting no evidence, he also pointed to communities that traditionally reject vaccination:
The communities that are suffering from measles are almost all religious communities that just don’t vaccinate.
When Bash pressed him about his own influence on vaccine hesitancy, Kennedy insisted,
I have never questioned the efficacy of the MMR vaccine.
But he did — and was right to do so. More on that later.
Kennedy’s Record
Kennedy’s earlier activism paints a much different picture.
As founder and chairman of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), he became one of the country’s most prominent advocates for parents whose children were injured or killed by the vaccines.
In 2018, Kennedy and Rolf Hazlehurst, the father of a child diagnosed with autism, petitioned the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate alleged misconduct involving expert testimony in federal vaccine litigation.
They accused government attorneys of concealing evidence relevant to claims that vaccines could cause autism in certain children. The DOJ subsequently rejected the allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.
Kennedy also defended Dr. Andrew Wakefield, whose 1998 paper pointed to a likely connection between MMR vaccination and autism.
In their 2023 book Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak, Kennedy and scientist Brian Hooker wrote:
The MMR vaccine is the tip of the spear regarding the modern debate around vaccine safety.
The book also references the “CDC secret data.” That is the official information originally withheld from the public and which contributed to the concerns about the vaccine-autism link.
Indeed, that debate was one of the central pillars of Kennedy’s public career before he took charge of HHS.
The Measles Scare
Kennedy now appears to embrace the mainstream narrative of a “historic” measles outbreak. Yet CHD has long challenged how public health agencies portray the dangers of the disease.
In its “Vaccine Secrets” presentation, it cites a 1962 paper by Dr. Alexander Langmuir, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) former chief epidemiologist, who described measles as a
self-limiting infection of short duration, moderate severity, and low fatality.
CHD contrasts that description with the CDC’s later emphasis on measles as a dangerous, potentially deadly disease following the introduction of the first measles vaccine in 1963.
It also cites a 2013 study documenting how measles mortality had declined substantially before vaccination began in 1963. The authors attributed the decline to antibiotics and improved living conditions. Many parents and physicians regarded measles as an unpleasant but largely unavoidable childhood illness.
The organization further questions the CDC’s estimates of measles complications, noting that commonly cited figures rely on data from 1985 through 1992. Those estimates include pneumonia in six percent of cases, brain inflammation in 0.1 percent, and death in 0.2 percent.
By contrast, more recent U.S. mortality records show no childhood measles deaths between 2015 and 2019, despite more than 2,000 reported infections during that period, CHD notes.
It also draws attention to the MMR manufacturer’s package insert. It lists reported adverse events ranging from fever and seizures to neurological conditions, including encephalitis and Guillain-Barré syndrome, and even “atypical measles.”
These arguments formed part of the broader vaccine safety debate Kennedy once championed.
What About the Recent Measles Deaths?
The CHD has also challenged official accounts of deaths attributed to recent measles outbreaks. It points to underlying medical conditions, secondary bacterial infections, and alleged hospital treatment failures.
In March 2025, CHD obtained medical records of a six-year-old Texas girl whose death authorities attributed to measles. Critical-care physician Dr. Pierre Kory reviewed them. Per CHD:
According to Kory’s analysis of the records, the girl died from a secondary bacterial pneumonia that had “little to do with measles.”…
Kory said the girl “died of a medical error — and that error was a completely inappropriate antibiotic” for treating the kind of pneumonia she had.
The following month, eight-year-old Daisy Hildebrand died during the same outbreak. But was it measles that killed her? According to CHD:
Kory … told The Defender that the child’s medical records showed she died from “[acute respiratory distress syndrome] secondary to hospital-acquired pneumonia,” which he said she likely developed during a previous hospital stay.
CHD has also highlighted underlying health conditions in other reported measles deaths, including immunosuppression and serious existing illnesses.
Failing Vaccines
In another recent article, CHD pointed to numerous cases of vaccinated individuals contracting measles, arguing:
The real issue is not a failure to vaccinate but a failing vaccine.
CHD maintained that natural measles infection historically provided lifelong immunity, while vaccine-induced immunity wanes over time.
The organization has also highlighted the CDC’s acknowledgment that MMR vaccination does not guarantee protection against measles.
Kennedy himself once condemned the vaccine in far stronger terms. Consider the uncompromising language he used in his 2021 foreword to The Measles Book:
The book rips the cloak off pharma industry slogans to reveal a disease that is rarely life threatening, and a vaccine that is largely unnecessary — but which carries real risks for the children forced by mandates to take them.
He also wrote that
the benefits of the measles vaccine [have] been exaggerated.
Even after becoming HHS secretary, Kennedy told Sean Hannity in March 2025 that the vaccine’s protection “wanes about 4.5% per year,” leaving older recipients effectively unprotected.
Kennedy’s Flip on MMR
Kennedy’s public messaging shifted almost immediately after he took office in February 2025.
On March 3, he published an op-ed urging MMR vaccination amid the Texas measles outbreak. While maintaining that vaccination should remain a personal choice, he said that the
MMR vaccine is crucial to avoiding potentially deadly disease.
In April, after meeting the families of children who died during the outbreak, Kennedy declared:
The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.
His department continues to recommend two MMR doses for children, as the CDC’s March 2026 guidance confirms.
HHS — which, as it is always worth reminding, has no constitutional authority over healthcare — also continues purchasing MMR vaccines through the federal Vaccines for Children program. The government pays $26.93 per dose for Merck’s M-M-R II and $28.23 for GlaxoSmithKline’s Priorix. Merck’s combined MMR and chickenpox vaccine, ProQuad, costs $194.95 per dose. The total federal expenditure remains undisclosed.
These purchases continue directing taxpayer money into the coffers of the same pharmaceutical giants Kennedy once blasted for profiting from liability-protected childhood vaccines.
