RFK Jr. won’t back CDC director on vaccines as agency scraps positive data

Kennedy replied without hesitation: “I’m not going to make that kind of commitment.”

“Because you probably won’t,” Ruiz said. “You’ll probably fire her, too, like you did director Monarez, because you will not accept the recommendations based on science.”

Suppressed science

A report from the Washington Post on Wednesday seemed to support Ruiz’s concern for Kennedy’s continued anti-vaccine interference. The Post reported that the CDC has decided to entirely scrap a scientifically vetted study that identified significant health benefits from the 2025–2026 COVID-19 vaccine. While Kennedy has called COVID-19 vaccines the “deadliest vaccine ever made,” the study found that the shot reduced the risk of emergency department or urgent care visits by 50 percent, and reduced the risk of COVID-19-associated hospitalizations by 55 percent, compared with healthy adults who did not get this season’s shot.

The study had previously cleared scientific review and was set for publication in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on March 19. But the study was instead held up by acting CDC director Jay Bhattacharya, who said he had concerns about the study’s methods. The study used a standard, widely accepted design. A flu vaccine study using the same design was published in the MMWR earlier in March.

Last month, Andrew Nixon, spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said that CDC scientists were working to address Bhattacharya’s concerns. But this week, Nixon told the Post that an “editorial assessment identified concerns regarding the methodological approach to estimating vaccine effectiveness and the manuscript was not accepted for publication.”

The Post’s sources said that was not an accurate account of what happened.