Kennedy Moves Set Stage for Renewed Vaccine Push After Midterms

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has already rewritten federal vaccine policy once, and the question now is whether his softer public tone signals a reset or a pause before another push after the midterms.

In June 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it had “totally reconstitut[ed]” the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the CDC panel that recommends which vaccines are safe, effective and clinically needed. The move mattered because CDC says ACIP recommendations become official agency policy once the CDC director adopts them. Kennedy fired all 17 committee members and replaced them with eight new members, giving his team new leverage over the machinery that turns vaccine science into federal guidance.

The changes did not stop at staffing. On May 29, 2025, CDC updated the child and adolescent immunization schedule to reflect an HHS directive on COVID-19 vaccine recommendations. HHS later said Kennedy had announced in May that COVID-19 vaccines were removed from CDC’s recommended immunization schedule for healthy children and pregnant women. In July, HHS said Kennedy signed off on ACIP’s recommendation to remove thimerosal from all U.S. influenza vaccines after a 5-1 vote at the committee’s June 25-26 meeting.

That record has given Kennedy a set of policy tools that could be used again if political conditions shift. On Dec. 5, 2025, President Donald Trump directed HHS and CDC to compare U.S. childhood vaccine schedules with those of peer developed nations and update the American schedule if better approaches were found abroad. The order opened another avenue for revisiting vaccine recommendations without framing the debate as a direct attack on vaccines.

Public opinion still creates a constraint. A KFF poll found 59% of adults said they would “definitely not” or “probably not” get the COVID-19 vaccine that fall, but 48% of parents said they were unsure whether healthy children were still recommended to get one. KFF also found that 33% of adults worried vaccines might not be available, while 34% of insured adults worried about insurance coverage. CDC vaccination-trend data for the 2025-26 COVID-19 season were updated through March 28, 2026, showing the debate remains active as the latest vaccine season plays out.

At hearings in Washington in April 2026, Kennedy emphasized nutrition and food safety while largely sidestepping vaccine policy questions, even as lawmakers pressed him on his vaccine agenda and health-budget cuts. That contrast is the central test now: whether Kennedy is truly recalibrating in response to public skepticism, or simply waiting for a more favorable political moment to press the same agenda again.