Opinion
I’m an expert in vaccine safety. Here's what RFK Jr. doesn't get
Many of these statements are factually incorrect. For example, in a newscast aired on June 12, 2025, Kennedy told Fox News viewers that 97% of federal vaccine advisers are on the take. In the same interview, he also claimed that children receive 92 mandatory shots. He has also widely claimed that only COVID-19 vaccines, not other vaccines in use by both children and adults, were ever tested against placebos and that “nobody has any idea” how safe routine immunizations are.
As an infectious disease physician who curates an open database of hundreds of controlled vaccine trials involving over 6 million participants, I am intimately familiar with the decades of research on vaccine safety. I believe it is important to correct the record – especially because these statements come from the official who now oversees the agencies charged with protecting Americans’ health.
Do children really receive 92 mandatory shots?
In 1986, the childhood vaccine schedule contained about 11 doses protecting against seven diseases. Today, it includes roughly 50 injections covering 16 diseases. State school entry laws typically require 30 to 32 shots across 10 to 12 diseases. No state mandates COVID-19 vaccination. Where Kennedy’s “92 mandatory shots” figure comes from is unclear, but the actual number is significantly lower.
From a safety standpoint, the more important question is whether today’s schedule with additional vaccines might be too taxing for children’s immune systems. It isn’t, because as vaccine technology improved over the past several decades, the number of antigens in each vaccine dose is much lower than before.
Antigens are the molecules in vaccines that trigger a response from the immune system, training it to identify the specific pathogen. Some vaccines contain a minute amount of aluminum salt that serves as an adjuvant – a helper ingredient that improves the quality and staying power of the immune response, so each dose can protect with less antigen.
Those 11 doses in 1986 delivered more than 3,000 antigens and 1.5 milligrams of aluminum over 18 years. Today’s complete schedule delivers roughly 165 antigens – which is a 95% reduction – and 5-6 milligrams of aluminum in the same time frame. A single smallpox inoculation in 1900 exposed a child to more antigens than today’s complete series.
Since 1986, the United States has introduced vaccines against Haemophilus influenzae type b, hepatitis A and B, chickenpox, pneumococcal disease, rotavirus and human papillomavirus. Each addition represents a life-saving advance.
The incidence of Haemophilus influenzae type b, a bacterial infection that can cause pneumonia, meningitis and other severe diseases, has dropped by 99% in infants. Pediatric hepatitis infections are down more than 90%, and chickenpox hospitalizations are down about 90%. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that vaccinating children born from 1994 to 2023 will avert 508 million illnesses and 1,129,000 premature deaths.
Placebo testing for vaccines
Kennedy has asserted that only COVID-19 vaccines have undergone rigorous safety trials in which they were tested against placebos. This is categorically wrong.
Of the 378 controlled trials in our database, 195 compared volunteers’ response to a vaccine with their response to a placebo. Of those, 159 gave volunteers only a salt water solution or another inert substance. Another 36 gave them just the adjuvant without any viral or bacterial material, as a way to see whether there were side effects from the antigen itself or the injection. Every routine childhood vaccine antigen appears in at least one such study.
The 1954 Salk polio trial, one of the largest clinical trials in medical history, enrolled more than 600,000 children and tested the vaccine by comparing it with a salt water control. Similar trials, which used a substance that has no biological effect as a control, were used to test Haemophilus influenzae type b, pneumococcal, rotavirus, influenza and HPV vaccines.
Once an effective vaccine exists, ethics boards require new versions be compared against that licensed standard because withholding proven protection from children would be unethical.
How unknown is the safety of widely used vaccines?
Kennedy has insisted on multiple occasions that “nobody has any idea” about vaccine safety profiles. Of the 378 trials in our database, the vast majority published detailed safety outcomes.
Beyond trials, the U.S. operates the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, the Vaccine Safety Datalink and the PRISM network to monitor hundreds of millions of doses for rare problems. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System works like an open mailbox where anyone – patients, parents, clinicians – can report a post-shot problem; the Vaccine Safety Datalink analyzes anonymized electronic health records from large health care systems to spot patterns; and PRISM scans billions of insurance claims in near-real time to confirm or rule out rare safety signals.
These systems led health officials to pull the first rotavirus vaccine in 1999 after it was linked to bowel obstruction, and to restrict the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine in 2021 after rare clotting events. Few drug classes undergo such continuous surveillance and are subject to such swift corrective action when genuine risks emerge.
The conflicts of interest claim
On June 9, Kennedy took the unprecedented step of dissolving vetted members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the expert body that advises the CDC on national vaccine policy. He has claimed repeatedly that the vast majority of serving members of the committee – 97% – had extensive conflicts of interest because of their entanglements with the pharmaceutical industry. Kennedy bases that number on a 2009 federal audit of conflict-of-interest paperwork, but that report looked at 17 CDC advisory committees, not specifically this vaccine committee. And it found no pervasive wrongdoing – 97% of disclosure forms only contained routine paperwork mistakes, such as information in the wrong box or a missing initial, and not hidden financial ties.
Reuters examined data from Open Payments, a government website that discloses health care providers’ relationships with industry, for all 17 voting members of the committee who were dismissed. Six received no more than US$80 from drugmakers over seven years, and four had no payments at all.
The remaining seven members accepted between $4,000 and $55,000 over seven years, mostly for modest consulting or travel. In other words, just 41% of the committee received anything more than pocket change from drugmakers. Committee members must divest vaccine company stock and recuse themselves from votes involving conflicts.
A term without a meaning
Kennedy has warned that vaccines cause “immune deregulation,” a term that has no basis in immunology. Vaccines train the immune system, and the diseases they prevent are the real threats to immune function.
Measles can wipe immune memory, leaving children vulnerable to other infections for years. COVID-19 can trigger multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children. Chronic hepatitis B can cause immune-mediated organ damage. Preventing these conditions protects people from immune system damage.
Today’s vaccine panel doesn’t just prevent infections; it deters doctor visits and thereby reduces unnecessary prescriptions for “just-in-case” antibiotics. It’s one of the rare places in medicine where physicians like me now do more good with less biological burden than we did 40 years ago.
The evidence is clear and publicly available: Vaccines have dramatically reduced childhood illness, disability and death on a historic scale.
Jake Scott, Clinical Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases, Stanford University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
'Spiral of silence': Why so many Americans keep quiet about politics
A major factor in that downshift has been the concurrent rise in the polarization between the two major political parties. Supporters of Republicans and Democrats are far more likely than in the past to view the opposite side with distrust.
That political polarization is so stark that many Americans are now unlikely to have friendly social interactions, live nearby or congregate with people from opposing camps, according to one recent study.
Social scientists often refer to this sort of animosity as “affective polarization,” meaning that people not only hold conflicting views on many or most political issues but also disdain fellow citizens who hold different opinions. Over the past few decades, such affective polarization in the U.S. has become commonplace.
Polarization undermines democracy by making the essential processes of democratic deliberation – discussion, negotiation, compromise and bargaining over public policies – difficult, if not impossible. Because polarization extends so broadly and deeply, some people have become unwilling to express their views until they’ve confirmed they’re speaking with someone who’s like-minded.
I’m a political scientist, and I found that Americans were far less likely to publicly voice their opinions than even during the height of the McCarthy-era Red Scare.
The muting of the American voice
According to a 2022 book written by political scientists Taylor Carlson and Jaime E. Settle, fears about speaking out are grounded in concerns about social sanctions for expressing unwelcome views.
And this withholding of views extends across a broad range of social circumstances. In 2022, for instance, I conducted a survey of a representative sample of about 1,500 residents of the U.S. I found that while 45% of the respondents were worried about expressing their views to members of their immediate family, this percentage ballooned to 62% when it came to speaking out publicly in one’s community. Nearly half of those surveyed said they felt less free to speak their minds than they used to.
About three to four times more Americans said they did not feel free to express themselves, compared with the number of those who said so during the McCarthy era.
Censorship in the US and globally
Since that survey, attacks on free speech have increased markedly, especially under the Trump administration.
Issues such as the Israeli war in Gaza, activist campaigns against “wokeism,” and the ever-increasing attempts to penalize people for expressing certain ideas have made it more difficult for people to speak out.
The breadth of self-censorship in the U.S. in recent times is not unprecedented or unique to the U.S. Indeed, research in Germany, Sweden and elsewhere have reported similar increases in self-censorship in the past several years.
How the ‘spiral of a silence’ explains self-censorship
In the 1970s, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, a distinguished German political scientist, coined the term the “spiral of silence” to describe how self-censorship arises and what its consequences can be. Informed by research she conducted on the 1965 West German federal election, Noelle-Neumann observed that an individual’s willingness to publicly give their opinion was tied to their perceptions of public opinion on an issue.
The so-called spiral happens when someone expresses a view on a controversial issue and then encounters vigorous criticism from an aggressive minority – perhaps even sharp attacks.
People rally at the University of California, Berkeley, to protest the Trump administration on March 19, 2025.AP Photo/Godofredo A. VásquezA listener can impose costs on the speaker for expressing the view in a number of ways, including criticism, direct personal attacks and even attempts to “cancel” the speaker through ending friendships or refusing to attend social events such as Thanksgiving or holiday dinners.
This kind of sanction isn’t limited to just social interactions but also when someone is threatened by far bigger institutions, from corporations to the government. The speaker learns from this encounter and decides to keep their mouth shut in the future because the costs of expressing the view are simply too high.
This self-censorship has knock-on effects, as views become less commonly expressed and people are less likely to encounter support from those who hold similar views. People come to believe that they are in the minority, even if they are, in fact, in the majority. This belief then also contributes to the unwillingness to express one’s views.
The opinions of the aggressive minority then become dominant. True public opinion and expressed public opinion diverge. Most importantly, the free-ranging debate so necessary to democratic politics is stifled.
Not all issues are like this, of course – only issues for which a committed and determined minority exists that can impose costs on a particular viewpoint are subject to this spiral.
The consequences for democratic deliberation
The tendency toward self-censorship means listeners are deprived of hearing the withheld views. The marketplace of ideas becomes skewed; the choices of buyers in that marketplace are circumscribed. The robust debate so necessary to deliberations in a democracy is squelched as the views of a minority come to be seen as the only “acceptable” political views.
No better example of this can be found than in the absence of debate in the contemporary U.S. about the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis, whatever outcome such vigorous discussion might produce. Fearful of consequences, many people are withholding their views on Israel – whether Israel has committed war crimes, for instance, or whether Israeli members of government should be sanctioned – because they fear being branded as antisemitic.
Many Americans are also biting their tongues when it comes to DEI, affirmative action and even whether political tolerance is essential for democracy.
But the dominant views are also penalized by this spiral. By not having to face their competitors, they lose the opportunity to check their beliefs and, if confirmed, bolster and strengthen their arguments. Good ideas lose the chance to become better, while bad ideas – such as something as extreme as Holocaust denial – are given space to flourish.
The spiral of silence therefore becomes inimical to pluralistic debate, discussion and, ultimately, to democracy itself.
James L. Gibson, Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government, Washington University in St. Louis
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
This fuel is essential to Trump's survival. Here's how we cut it off
Hate killed a state legislator in Minneapolis, nearly killed Paul Pelosi with a hammer, and fuels the same violent rage that burned through Charlottesville, stormed the Capitol on January 6th, and has been stalking school board meetings and statehouses across America for the past two decades.
Hate brought Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) to his knees. Does anybody believe that if he’d been white he’d have been dragged out like that and beat to the ground? It inspired Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Elon Musk to essentially congratulate a would-be mass murderer. It just arrested the Comptroller of New York City for trying to defend a man seeking asylum in the United States.
Hate blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, took down the twin towers on 9/11, and keeps loading the chambers of mass shooters while whispering lies about enemies and conspiracies until blood spills in schools, synagogues, churches, and supermarkets.
So why does Donald Trump — and why do his followers, including those elected to federal and state office, and his cabinet members — so vigorously embrace hate?
Trump is the first president in American history to explicitly use hate as a campaign tool and then embrace it as the central focus of his rule. He launched his first campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists,” proposed a Muslim ban, called for violence at his rallies, and used dehumanizing language to describe immigrants, women, and political opponents. For Memorial Day, he posted a social media message calling the half of Americans who voted against him “scum.”
This wasn’t political strategy in the traditional sense — it was a revival of something far more dangerous: the politics of hate as a tool for seizing and maintaining power.
It works, in part, because hate can be intoxicating. It reduces complex issues to simple binaries grounded in scapegoating the hated. Economic anxiety becomes the fault of immigrants. Cultural change becomes a conspiracy by elites. Personal failures become the result of a rigged system designed to benefit “them” at the expense of “us.”
And Trump’s use of hate is unprecedented in American presidential politics. Previous presidents, even those who harbored prejudices or implemented discriminatory policies, worked to maintain a veneer of dignity and unity in their public messaging.
They understood that the presidency — the ultimate parental figure and role model for the nation, its citizens, and its children — demanded a certain moral authority, even when their actions fell short of their rhetoric.
Trump shattered that norm, showing other Republicans that explicit appeals to grievance and animosity — and the amplification of them by right-wing hate-based media — mobilized his base more effectively than traditional appeals to shared values or common purpose.
Why, after all, bother to fix things and make the country run better when you can hold power and massively enrich yourself by simply and constantly churning the rancid pool of hate that’s always deep in the underbelly of any nation?
This has worked for Trump because hate is intoxicating; it provides a rush of righteous anger that feels empowering to those who feel powerless. It creates a sense of belonging among those who’ve been marginalized by 44 years of Reaganism gutting the middle class.
Most dangerously, it absolves the haters of personal responsibility by moving the blame for society’s usually complex problems onto designated enemies like immigrants, trans people, and racial or religious minorities.
Authoritarian leaders throughout history have used hate as a unifying force; indeed, it’s the key to authoritarians seizing power in the first place. When a population is afraid, divided, or economically insecure, hate becomes a shortcut to loyalty.
“It’s not your fault you’re struggling,” the demagogue whispers. “It’s their fault — the Jews, the immigrants, the Blacks, the Muslims, the queer people, the intellectuals, the journalists, the protestors.”
Hate simplifies the world into “us” and “them,” and in doing so it becomes a weapon of distraction that keeps working people too angry at each other to realize they’re being ripped off and exploited by the very people stoking the flames.
That’s exactly what’s happening in America today.
While Trump and the GOP rage about immigrants, trans kids, and university protests, they’re shoveling trillions in tax cuts to billionaires, gutting environmental protections, slashing Social Security and healthcare funding, and selling off public lands to oil and mining companies.
This reinvented GOP — this party of hate — wants you looking at your neighbor with suspicion so you don’t notice the donor class that’s buying your government out from under you. Hate stood in a press conference last week and declared its mission was to “liberate” Los Angeles from its mayor and governor.
But there’s a deeper, psychological layer to this too. Hate feels powerful. It produces adrenaline, a rush of certainty, a sense of purpose. It gives people who feel small and angry a story where they’re not just victims; instead, they’re righteous warriors.
In a society where inequality has exploded because we still haven’t overturned Reagan’s neoliberalism and raised taxes on rich people, hate offers the illusion of control.
And Trump — with his narcissism, his need for revenge, and his boundless craving for applause — knows how to serve that illusion with a smile and a sneer. He doesn’t just deploy hate cynically. He needs it. It’s his fuel. It fills his rallies. It lights up his social media posts. It drives his movement. It’s intrinsic to his personality and has driven him throughout his life.
Tragically for the rest of us, the consequences are very real.
Black churches are being burned again. Jewish people are being murdered in synagogues. Asian American elders are being assaulted in the streets. Hispanic families are being torn apart. Queer teens are dying by suicide. Public servants — from school board members to election workers — are being harassed, threatened, and driven from their posts.
We’ve been here before. The Ku Klux Klan used Christianity and nationalism to justify lynching. Hitler used “traditional values” and economic anxiety to justify genocide. Rwanda’s broadcasters spent months using radio to call their political enemies “cockroaches” before the slaughter began. The pattern is always the same: dehumanize, divide, and destroy.
And it can happen here again — if we let it.
Already we see Republican governors like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott rewriting textbooks to whitewash slavery and justify bigotry. We see state legislators introducing laws that would imprison librarians, ban books, silence teachers, erase trans people, and outlaw protest. We see a Supreme Court that’s blessed voter suppression and gutted civil rights law. We see vigilantes armed with AR-15s patrolling polling places and border towns.
And we see a growing movement, led by Trump, that is explicitly preparing for violence. His allies talk about using the military against American citizens. They’re calling for mass deportations, camps, loyalty tests, and the criminalization of dissent.
This isn’t rhetoric. It’s a roadmap.
But hate is also fragile. Its political utility contains the seeds of its own destruction. Societies built on hatred eventually consume themselves: As we’re all experiencing right now, the energy required to maintain constant vigilance against enemies exhausts populations.
The paranoia that fuels hate movements creates internal fractures as former allies become new targets, something we’ve seen repeatedly among Trump’s lieutenants. No society based in hate can last long; just ask the ghosts of the Confederacy.
History provides numerous examples of this pattern. The French Revolution devoured its own children as revolutionary fervor turned to internecine purges. McCarthyism eventually collapsed under the weight of its own excesses. The Cultural Revolution in China destroyed countless lives before the leadership recognized its destructive trajectory. In each case, societies paid tremendous costs before finding ways to step back from the brink.
The antidote to hate isn’t silence or appeasement. It’s not cowardice or cynicism. It’s courage, as we saw during the No Kings Day protests.
Demonstrators protest against U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
It’s the courage to speak out, even when your voice shakes. It’s the courage to stand with your neighbors, especially the most vulnerable. It’s the courage to vote, to organize, to protest, and to tell the truth about the haters, even when the truth is unpopular and the haters threaten you.
America is not a perfect country. But we are a country with a long tradition of fighting back against hate, from the abolitionists to the Freedom Riders, from labor organizers to marriage equality activists. Every inch of progress this nation has seen over the past 250 years has come from people refusing to let hatred have the last word.
Now it’s our turn to confront and defeat hate. Our opportunity to remake America with compassion and the embrace of our fellow human beings, regardless of their race, religion, gender identity, or politics. It’s our obligation in this new century that’s been so badly despoiled by Trump’s pathetic attempts to turn us against each other.
Trump is betting that Americans are too numb, too tired, or too divided to stand up to the hate machine he’s building. He’s betting that we’ll be distracted by his and Fox’s manufactured outrage while he consolidates power behind the scenes.
But we can prove him wrong. We can show up — in the streets, at the ballot box, in our neighborhoods and online communities — and remind each other that decency still matters, that democracy still matters, that love and solidarity are stronger than hate and fear.
Our Founders remind us that this great country belongs to the people. All of us. United not by race or religion or ideology, but by a shared commitment to democracy, liberty, and justice for everyone.
Let’s make that commitment real. Let’s reject hate. Let’s choose courage. And let’s fight like hell for the America we still believe is possible.
Pass it along, speak out, and get active; tag, you’re it!