Health experts are raising alarms over what they describe as a ‘war on science’ led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, whose anti-vaccine rhetoric and sweeping budget cuts are dismantling science-based policy at the agency. The concerns follow a Supreme Court decision that empowered Kennedy to implement mass firings, effectively politicising scientific decision-making.
Kennedy has cancelled a key meeting of the US Preventive Services Task Force and removed more than a dozen vaccine advisers, replacing them with a new panel half of whom share his distrust of vaccines. This panel quickly retracted recommendations for flu vaccines containing an ingredient falsely linked to autism by anti-vaxxers. The moves prompted the American Academy of Pediatrics to boycott the panel’s first meeting, citing an orchestrated effort to ‘sow distrust in vaccines’.
Professor Celine Gounder, an infectious disease expert at New York University, warned of ‘Orwellian doublespeak’ from public health agencies and said the administration is engaging in ‘active censorship of scientific discourse’. Measles cases have soared to a three-decade high, and vaccination rates are declining, leaving Americans more vulnerable to preventable diseases.
Dozens of researchers at the National Institutes of Health released the ‘Bethesda Declaration’ in June, warning that budget cuts are damaging the agency’s core missions. A federal court in Rhode Island has temporarily halted some of the restructuring and staff cuts after a lawsuit by 19 Democratic state attorneys general.
