Kennedy's CDC-antivax panel votes for schedule change that will kill children.
I hope the title of this newsletter got your attention. There is a massive scandal in American healthcare unfolding in plain sight, with little public outcry. We need to begin using words of one syllable to combat the antivax double-speak that is meant to confuse anxious parents.
Vaccine skeptic Robert Kennedy, Secretary of Health & Human Services, fired the entire membership of the CDC vaccine panel (called ACIP) in June 2025 and installed hand-picked anti-vaccine advocates who are sowing baseless doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. They are doing so by attacking the vaccine schedule for infants and children, a schedule that has been monumentally successful in eradicating and suppressing childhood diseases.
Underlying the push to “delay” scheduled vaccines is the disproven theory that the frequency of childhood vaccines causes autism. That claim has been repeatedly refuted by high-quality studies. See JAMA Pediatrics (“[C]hildren with autism spectrum disorder were less likely to be fully vaccinated for vaccines recommended between ages 4 and 6 years.”); Danish National Study (2025) (“Analyzing data from over 1 million children, the study found no increased risk of autism, asthma, or autoimmune diseases in vaccinated children.”)
But Kennedy and his antivaxxers have never let scientific proof stand in their way. Yesterday, Kennedy’s hand-picked CDC anti-vaccine panel recommended delaying the administration of the hepatitis B vaccine for infants.
The journal STAT News is one of the leading health science news journals in the world. Here is STAT’s reporting on the decision to delay the vaccination for hepatitis B: RFK Jr.’s ACIP panel recommends delay in newborn hepatitis B vaccination:
The birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine was adopted to try to prevent as many babies as possible from contracting the virus. An estimated 90% of babies infected in infancy become chronically infected, which can lead to liver disease and premature death from liver cancer or cirrhosis.
When the universal birth dose recommendation was adopted in 1991, infections in infants plummeted, going from hundreds a year to fewer than two dozen.
A modeling study posted online late last month estimates that delaying the start of hepatitis B vaccination by two months could lead to more than 1,400 babies becoming chronically infected with hepatitis B in the first year of the change, which could result in 304 cases of liver cancer and 482 hepatitis B-related deaths among those children as they age.
The meeting of the CDC’s antivaxxer panel was a travesty. Katelyn Jetelina (Substack) described the meeting as follows:
The two-day meeting of ACIP . . . was something else. Disgraceful. Unprepared. Dysfunctional. Incompetent. Terrifying. Embarrassing. Opaque.
Our children deserve better. Period.
[We] counted more than 60 falsehoods, distortions, and outright lies being megaphoned from one of the nation’s highest committees. The potential damage from that alone is staggering.
During the meeting, decades of favorable risk/benefit priorities were replaced by pseudoscience, baseless skepticism, and by non-experts.
Unbelievably, our government’s most trusted scientific agency, the CDC, has been captured in a hostile takeover by quacks and conspiracy theorists who are hell-bent on harming Americans, especially children. The attacks on democracy and the scientific method are horrific. Killing our children is unforgivable. That will be Robert Kennedy’s legacy. Let’s remind everyone of that fact, starting now.
[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]
