Inside RFK Jr.’s ‘Backdoor’ Approach to Stop Vaccines

On Sept. 9, 2025, the two sides faced off. The setting — a U.S. Senate hearing — was a bit of an unusual arena for this kind of showdown. But it was filled with dueling claims, raised voices, and loosely veiled rancor nonetheless. 

The hearing, before the Committee on Homeland Security & Government Affairs, aimed to illuminate “How the Corruption of Science has Impacted Public Perception and Policies Regarding Vaccines.” In one corner: Toby Rogers, a political economist whose research focuses on “regulatory capture and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry,” with the aim of “stop[ping] the epidemic of chronic illness in children,” according to a self-authored biography. In the other: Jake Scott, a dyed-in-the-wool academician and infectious disease specialist based at Stanford University. 

Rogers took the first swings. In reference to self-led research he performed as a doctoral student upon learning that his then-partner’s son was diagnosed with autism, he said he “quickly discovered that the CDC’s narrative did not add up.” As Rogers continued his digging, he gradually concluded, as he put it to senators, “that the autism and chronic disease epidemics are primarily caused by toxicants — mostly from vaccines and about a dozen additional toxicants.”

Scott shared a different view with the committee. “The scientific evidence supporting vaccine safety and efficacy represents one of the most extensive and transparent bodies of medical research ever assembled,” he testified. “If vaccines caused a wave of chronic disease, our safety systems — which can detect one-in-a-million events — would have seen it. They haven’t.” 

A few months after the hearing, Rogers was brought to hallowed federal halls once again — this time to present for a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention committee that decides the national vaccine schedule. He alleged that agencies like the CDC were turning a blind eye to an insufficient safety record for vaccines: “Hepatitis B vaccines have killed an astonishing number of children in the U.S. over the last 35 years,” Rogers said, and “should be removed altogether from the CDC childhood schedule.” (He cited a figure of 643 child deaths since 1990 to justify his claims — a figure drawn from a database of unverified reports that the CDC warns “may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable … [and] can also be biased.” Prior to the vaccine, at least 10 times as many people died from hepatitis B annually, studies show.)

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Rogers’ repeated invitations to Washington represent an escalation in the administration’s platforming of vaccine skeptics. The economist is, of course, not the first example of how Donald Trump and his allies have elevated anti-vaxxers since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took over the Department of Health and Human Services. But to bring in Rogers — who has no medical background and whose only research paper published in a peer-reviewed journal deemed credible by the National Library of Medicine was subsequently retracted for misrepresentation and overstatement of data, among other issues — that’s new. It’s one of a growing number of indicators that the administration is pursuing another, perhaps less visible angle in its war on immunizations, one that is typically waged with rhetorical flashbangs, loud, proud, and out in the open.

The first driver behind the shift may be a political one, with midterm elections rapidly approaching. In January, HHS, under the RFK Jr.’s purview, proposed several changes to the vaccine schedule, including recommending against the universal administration of shots like hepatitis B, meningitis, and flu. But in February polling suggested that the majority of Americans disagreed with RFK Jr.’s changes to the vaccine schedule, believing those alterations would cause more harm than good. Later in February, the White House pushed for a leadership shakeup at the HHS in order to “stabiliz[e] an agency rattled by internal fights and controversial messages,” according to The Washington Post.  

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Collectively, that had meant RFK Jr. “go[t] the word to shut up because of the election,” says Ezekiel Emanuel, physician and former health policy adviser for the Obama White House. The administration had tried, he added, “to quiet down discussion of vaccines, because that loses votes.”

This could be why they were shifting from in-your-face policies (like rejiggering the schedule) to more subtle ones. That is, at least, until early August, when Trump signed an executive order that claimed to “support maximal parental choice over childhood vaccines,” by once again rescinding recommendations for universal immunization; breaking up previously combined shots into separate ones; encouraging states to walk back vaccine requirements in schools; and directing the Department of Justice to sue states with contravening policies, among other measures.

“Countless parents have had their questions and concerns about America’s childhood vaccine schedule ignored if not outright mocked,” White House spokesman Kush Desai wrote in a statement to Rolling Stone in response to questions about the administration’s vaccine policies. “President Trump is finally giving these parents a voice using Gold Standard Science.”

The second driver behind the shift may be a practical one. That’s because, in recent months, the secretary’s agenda has been stymied. In March, a federal judge halted RFK Jr.’s proposed changes to the childhood vaccine schedule that would significantly cut the number of shots kids — especially those without pre-existing conditions — get as a matter of course. (Nine days after the order, a group associated with Children’s Health Defense — the organization founded and previously run by RFK Jr. before his government appointment — appealed the ruling.) 

“Implementation of my Administration’s prior directives regarding childhood vaccines has been delayed due to litigation,” Trump wrote in the August executive order.

Those hurdles — hurdles that will likely come to bear upon the executive order, too — have in part led the secretary to consider other “backdoor” strategies to implement his anti-vaccine agenda, Joshua Michaud, associate director of Global and Public Health Policy, says.  

To understand what may be a new guerilla strategy for the war on vaccines first requires a stroll back in time, Michaud says. Back in the 1980s — think MTV, AIDS, Gordon Gekko — things weren’t so hot in immunization-land. In 1982, an NBC affiliate aired a documentary called Vaccine Roulette, which portrayed a set of children afflicted by seizures and learning challenges, among other issues, after taking the combined diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus vaccine.  

The teledoc ignited a furor around the shot and, amid growing concerns that it was causing neurologic injury, “vaccine producers were facing an avalanche of lawsuits, and many were going to be put out of business,” says Michaud. The hundreds of lawsuits pouring in — each, on average, demanding tens of millions in damages — would make vaccines exorbitantly expensive, Michaud adds, if not put them out of reach entirely.  

Then-President Ronald Reagan caught wind of the brewing crisis. In 1986, he passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which established a mechanism of limited liability for vaccine producers in situations of alleged harm: the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, or VICP. If a loved one suffered a proven side effect of the immunizations within six months of the shot, families could be reimbursed out of a general fund — de-risking the business of any one vaccine maker in particular. 

Back to RFK Jr.’s refocused approach. If you make that reimbursement fund run out of money — because more side effects are covered, or because the ones that are covered entail high payments, or both — you rewind the clock, Emanuel says. “If you could bankrupt the compensation fund, we know historically from the ‘70s and ‘80s that [vaccine makers] will get out of the market,” he adds. 

According to Paul Friedrichs — a physician and inaugural director of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy under President Joe Biden — one of the key details relates to what is determined to be a “proven” side effect. For example, as it stands under the program, conditions like autism allegedly caused by vaccines do not meet that criteria. (An official document promulgated by HHS — the so-called “Vaccine Injury Table” — lays out which side effects are sufficiently associated with a given vaccine to warrant payouts.) But if a condition is declared to meet that threshold of evidence, “those sorts of actions could create the grounds for more suits,” Friedrichs says.  

Previously, determining whether autism met that threshold “relied on a series of experts,” Friedrichs says — namely, those on the CDC vaccine schedule committee Rogers presented for in December 2025, in addition to another committee whose mandate is more tightly focused on injuries themselves. But RFK Jr. has tried to purge both of those committees, installing his own people, a number of whom have a long resume of anti-vaxxing. 

“Experts [were] almost completely replaced by people who not only have dubious qualifications in this area,” Friedrichs says, “but who have long-standing, publicly stated beliefs that vaccines cause injury — even in the absence of objective evidence to support that.”  

This pathway has met some roadblocks. In the March decision halting RFK Jr.’s changes to the vaccine schedule, the judge also reversed the secretary’s changes to the vaccine committee. The secretary’s actions “undermined the integrity” of the committee through the “abandonment of the technical knowledge and expertise embodied by that committee,” the judge wrote.  

Amid these roadblocks, another path toward getting conditions like autism covered under the program is altering the very mission of the old committees to focus on the risks, rather than the benefits, of vaccines. For example, one week after the judge’s decision to freeze RFK Jr.’s actions on the vaccine committee, Aaron Siri — a self-labeled “vaccine and civil rights attorney” who has been repeatedly tapped to testify before Congress as well as federal agencies — sent a letter to HHS proposing changes to the CDC vaccine schedule committee’s charter, redirecting its focus toward vaccine harm and recommending non-vaccine therapies (like antibiotics). The proposed changes also seek to rebalance the composition of the panel away from solely individuals with the kind of technical expertise described by the judge and in favor of those with “direct and substantial experience advocating for and/or treating those injured by vaccines” — people who by definition, can’t have worked for any “government or industry funded program, research, or project,” as Siri wrote, in the recent past. 

Siri, for his part, wrote in a statement to Rolling Stone that he believes reforming the committee would represent an important step toward “being objective about what the data reflects about [vaccine] safety and efficacy.” At the same time, experts like Scott, the Stanford infectious disease doctor, say rewriting the committee’s charter would allow RFK Jr. to subvert the judge’s ruling and reinstall his own people on the panel. “The old charter required real expertise in vaccine use, vaccine research, or vaccine safety and efficacy,” Scott told CIDRAP news in June. “It is hard to read [the proposed changes] as anything other than retrofitting the rules to fit the people who failed” the previous criteria, he added.

Alternatively, RFK Jr. could go around the old committees altogether. For example, in January, RFK Jr. inaugurated the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee to, among other things, “support breakthrough innovations in autism … prevention.” That new committee — composed of individuals unilaterally selected by RFK Jr., many with a long track record of linking vaccines to autism — could promulgate documents based on consensus rather than statistics. “It’s under RFK Jr. — and under RFK Jr., data are irrelevant,” Emanuel says. (Rogers, the political economist, was on the IACC before “Susie Wiles kicked me off,” he said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “Political purges don’t come with detailed performance evaluations,” Rogers added when asked for additional details behind that decision.)

Such documents “with the imprimatur of the federal government” — if construed as scientific evidence in the same way as empirical research — could be enough to tilt the balance toward adding autism and other conditions without proven links to vaccines to the reimbursement fund, Friedrichs says. That’s because, even if RFK Jr. can’t get his own people installed on the old committees, producing alternative, new forms of literature from alternative, new committees could allow HHS to claim there is enough evidence to propose changes to the Vaccine Injury Table — whether or not that evidence is cherry-picked, or based on any data at all.  “This path that Secretary Kennedy is charting out,” Friedrichs adds. “He doesn’t actually have to ban the vaccines.”  

Meanwhile, RFK Jr.’s people — like Rogers — have not been subtle about their intentions as they relate to the vaccine schedule, or mainstream medicine more generally. “I am calling on President Trump, Secretary Kennedy, NIH Director [Jay] Bhattacharya, and FDA Commissioner [Marty] Makary to immediately halt and permanently end the CDC Child and Adolescent Vaccine Schedule and the CDC Pregnancy Vaccine Recommendations,” Rogers wrote in May, “and I am calling on all parents who currently use mainstream allopathic pediatricians to fire that provider and instead find a functional, integrative, or naturopathic medical doctor who doesn’t vaccinate in their practice.”

Rolling Stone asked Rogers for comment about his perspectives on vaccines and role in the administration’s immunization agenda. “Anti-vaxxer is just a lazy slur,” Rogers said, adding both he and RFK Jr.’s stances on vaccines are “nuanced” — a claim he supported by linking to a Substack post in which he writes “that I have become a vaccine abolitionist.” When asked about his research paper on the “social cost of autism” getting retracted from a peer-reviewed journal for misrepresentation and overstatement of facts, Rogers claimed it was “wrongly retracted” and called it an “extraordinary case study in corporate capture of an academic medical journal.”

Some lawmakers allege that RFK Jr. potentially opening the floodgates for lawsuits against the vaccine fund are about more than dogma — it’s about money.  

The secretary, in his previous role at Children’s Defense Fund, made millions of dollars through his affiliations with law firms that sue vaccine makers and federal agencies on behalf of those alleging harm from immunizations, according to his financial disclosures. (Before his confirmation last year, RFK Jr. said he planned to continue collecting fees from an ongoing lawsuit against Merck, the pharmaceutical giant, for a case related to its human papilloma virus vaccine.)

Rolling Stone reached out to HHS for comment about RFK Jr.’s actions related to immunizations, whether political pressures changed the administration’s approach to vaccine policy, or whether the secretary’s apparent financial conflicts of interest impact these policies. “The Secretary is focused on restoring the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to its original congressional intent: ensuring that people injured by vaccines are compensated quickly and fairly,” Emily Hilliard, an HHS spokesperson, wrote in a statement. 

Siri, the RFK Jr.-allied lawyer who has testified about vaccines and autism, has meanwhile sued federal agencies to the tune of nearly 500 pending injury lawsuits — exactly the kind of lawsuits that might be more likely to succeed with broader definitions of vaccine side effects. (He has also sued toothpaste producers for harm related to fluoride, another early target of RFK Jr.)   

“If you understood anything about vaccine injury litigation, you would understand that going into these cases for pecuniary gain is bad business,” Siri wrote in a statement to Rolling Stone. “The purpose of adding these harms is so that those injured can actually have some chance at getting compensation.”

Some lawmakers disagree that such lawsuits — and the proposed changes that may support them — would solely aim to serve patients. “RFK Jr.’s recent actions show potential conflicts of interest that are deeply concerning,” Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “His allegiance to overhauling HHS — including VICP — may not just reflect his own quackery, but an attempt to further enrich his family, former colleagues, and anti-vaccine allies.”  

Potential financial motives aside, even if RFK Jr.’s new strategies fail to pass legal muster, they may achieve their desired effect of making vaccines harder to get, Friedrichs says. 

“It’s plausible that we’ll face a scenario where the series of cascading legal cases that take years to reach a final conclusion,” Friedrichs says, in which case “we’ll create enough uncertainty in the market that more drug companies will follow the path of those who have already stopped producing and selling vaccines in this country.” 

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Friedrichs fears it won’t just be the companies reckoning with that uncertainty. The years those cases take to weave their way through the courts will fundamentally impact “where parents can turn for accurate information,” he says. “Charlatans who want to score political points or sell snake oil will misrepresent the truth and try to confuse people.”  

To lawmakers like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the end result of RFK Jr.’s actions is increasingly clear. “This reckless attack on our public health system risks vaccine shortages,” Warren said in a statement to Rolling Stone, “and Americans’ health.”