Tom Levenson

I spent a fair amount of time over the weekend fuming over the combination of arrogance and malign ignorance involved in Kennedy’s latest vaccine before I realized that I was, once again, underestimating the secretary and his allies. What follows is speculation, but I think there is more to this matter than simply raising public doubts about vaccination.

Instead, it seems to me that this could be a significant advance in a campaign to ban many maybe all vaccines in the US—not by legislation or administrative rulings, but stealthily, death by one tort at a time.

Remember: just a week or so ago, The CDC’s vaccine and autism page told Americans that there was no connection between vaccination and neurological damages. Now that same page asserts that “The claim “vaccines do not cause autism” is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”°

That’s scary, and will likely further undermine public faith in vaccines. But that may not be the primary goal behind the shift. This is still very much a connect-the-dots story, not one with documentary proof, but there’s a scenario in which this shift becomes a big part of how the anti-vax movement eliminates access to some or many vaccines in the United States. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but do remember that old bitterly funny line: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t all after you.

To see what might be going on, start by going back to the last time there was an existential threat to vaccination in the US. In the latter half of the 1970s and into the 1980s there was a ginned up controversy over a possible connection between the pertussis (whooping cough) component in the combined diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus (DPT) shot that led to infant brain injury. There was no such connection, but under the law at the time, vaccine makers could still be sued—and lose—based merely on the coincidence in timing between vaccination and the emergence of neurological symptoms. The judgments that followed led one manufacturer after another to stop making DPT vaccines in the US. By 1985, only one company was left and it looked very likely that the inoculant would disappear from the US.

In response, Congress created the current vaccine injury reporting and compensation system, shielding vaccine producers from unlimited liability. The move was made to ensure sure we didn’t go back to those in-living-memory days when too many American parents had to bury a child who had died of a disease that by the ‘80s no one should have confronted.

Flash forward to this year. RFK Jr. has already announced his plans to “fix” the vaccine compensation system.‡‡ The next step is to re-expose vaccine makers to unlimited lawsuits, with plaintiffs’ cases bolstered by the CDC’s nod and wink that a vax-autism connection can’t be ruled out.

The step after that? The same as in the 1980s: vaccine makers will make the hard-eyed business judgment that the market ain’t worth the risk…and vaccines will become difficult if not impossible to source in these United States.

That’s speculation, of course: prediction is hard, especially about the future. But here’s one more morsel: during his confirmation hearings, Kennedy, refused to commit to not profiting from any future vaccine litigation. Every decision Kennedy has made so far on vaccine policy increases the odds that someone will make bank of such lawsuits.

In my mind’s eye I can see Mr. Kennedy staring with predatory satisfaction at a mirror, asking the age-old question: Why not him?

The thread is open. Maybe someone in the comments can make me feel that my dread is misplaced.

Image: William Hogarth, The Bench, c. 1758

Sources:
*https://apnews.com/article/rfk-jr-kennedy-cdc-vaccines-autism-4747916739c4bfeadaa7f209e81bae3d
°https://www.cdc.gov/vaccine-safety/about/autism.html?s=09
‡https://tomlevenson.substack.com/p/no-virginia-and-everywhere-else-in
ººhttps://ourworldindata.org/grapher/pertussis-cases-and-deaths-in-the-united-states
‡‡https://www.healthbeat.org/2025/08/20/rfk-jr-vaccine-access-compensation-fund/