Kennedy’s plans were just getting started. The staunch anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist launched his most brazen attack on vaccines in January, slashing the CDC’s childhood vaccination schedule from 17 vaccinations to 11 in line with recommendations for Denmark, a very small country with a relatively homogeneous population and universal health care. The United States now leads its peers in recommending so few childhood vaccines.
Conspiracy theories and political risk
Although these and other changes to vaccine recommendations by Kennedy and his subordinates have been widely condemned by medical and public health experts, they have not been enough for his staunch anti-vaccine followers, who want to eliminate all vaccines in no uncertain terms.
On Monday, the MHA Institute, a think tank that grew out of Kennedy’s Make America Health Again movement, hosted an event packed with prominent anti-vaccine activists. They include Dale Bigtree, a prominent conspiracy theorist who leads the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network, and Mary Holland, who is CEO of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, which Kennedy founded.
The event reportedly focused on the “widespread epidemic of vaccine injury”, a non-existent health crisis that the MHA institute wants to sell to the American public, branded as the catchphrase “Mewi”. The six-hour event was essentially an extravaganza of anti-vaccination talk, featuring false claims, misinformation and disinformation about vaccinations, including that vaccines cause autism and autoimmune diseases and that COVID-19 vaccines are deadly.
At the start of the program, MAHA Institute President Mark Gordon expressed his grand belief that the medical community has orchestrated an elaborate, global, decades-long conspiracy to hide the dangers of vaccines, which he has called poison, and falsify data showing their benefits. “Vaccines are the biggest scam in medical history,” one of his slides declared.
They concluded that “the childhood vaccination program needs to be abolished and all vaccines need to be removed from the market.”
While Gordon and other speakers were not concerned about the popularity or political impact of their beliefs, it appears that the Trump administration is concerned. The Post said Trump’s top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, has concluded that vaccine skepticism “has been rejected by a majority of voters” and that skepticism over vaccine requirements is “politically risky.” His polling data, like that of many others, has found widespread support for vaccines and vaccine requirements. Fabrizio warned in a December memo that politicians who supported eliminating vaccine recommendations “will pay the price at the elections.”
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