RFK Jr. tasks researchers with studying vaccine injuries

By Sarah Owermohle, Meg Tirrell, Deidre McPhillips, CNN

(CNN) — The US Department of Health and Human Services launched a program this week to study and capture the breadth of vaccine injuries, reviving a longtime priority for HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and stoking concerns from some public health advocates.

The health secretary unveiled a new vaccine injury research center Monday during a visit to the US National Institutes of Health, where the program will be housed.

“Vaccine injury is an invisible disease, and it is purposely invisible,” he said during the event, according to footage shared by HHS. “We have not done the studies that need to be done to understand who’s vulnerable to those kind of injuries.”

The announcement also comes with a range of proposals to reform the federal system for reporting adverse events and reimburse doctors who report suspected vaccine injuries, a move HHS said will “encourage” health care workers to make reports.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says on its website that there is a “very remote chance” of vaccines causing serious reactions, injuries or death. But Kennedy’s claims that federal scientists have ignored possible side effects – including debunked theories linking immunizations to autism – have energized his “Make America Healthy Again” base.

Last month, Kennedy previewed the proposed changes during a speech before Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group he co-founded and helped lead before he stepped away to run for the presidency.

Kennedy said during the speech that the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System is “very bad” and that although vaccine injuries could be “very rare,” we don’t know under the current system.

“In our country, we care about rare illnesses and deaths. We care about every child who dies from measles. They get headlines. We should care about the children — shouldn’t we, I’d ask you, care about children who are dying or suffering or being injured by vaccine injuries?” he asked the crowd on September 17.

Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, told CNN that the system the US has in place already works well.

“The US already has the most advanced sophisticated system of vaccine monitoring the world has ever seen, with multiple redundant systems in place,” said Hotez, who is also dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine.

He pointed to the surveillance system’s ability to pick up “extremely rare side effects of Covid vaccinations” during the pandemic, such as myocarditis in young men who received mRNA vaccines – at a rate of about 1 in 20,000 – and blood clots associated with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine – at a rate of about 1 in 500,000.

Hotez said he sees the new moves from HHS as an effort to sow doubt in vaccines at a time when vaccination rates continue to decline, leading to a resurgence in vaccine-preventable illnesses.

Pennsylvania is currently the center of the nation’s worst measles outbreak in decades. HHS officials have publicly sparred with state authorities over how many people have died from the disease this year; Pennsylvania has reported five measles-related deaths, all in unvaccinated people, amid more than 1,000 cases across the state.

In announcing the vaccine injury actions, Kennedy said it was another bid to restore public trust in health care institutions.

Yet Americans’ trust in the CDC has fallen amid Kennedy-led shakeups to the agency, according to KFF polling in February. And most voters, across political parties, said last fall that they felt confident in the childhood vaccine schedule, according to Pew Research Center polling. That polling was done before Kennedy launched a narrowed-down immunization schedule in December and reintroduced the plan this summer.

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, said the new HHS initiative gives Kennedy a platform to promote beliefs that haven’t been proved by science.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a bias. His bias is that vaccines cause chronic disease diseases, and it doesn’t matter how many studies show he’s wrong,” Offit said. “Now he’s in a position to be able to create the kinds of studies that fit that bias.”

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