Is RFK’s vaccine skepticism an ‘existential threat’ to public education?

The left has spent countless hours claiming conservatives are trying to undermine public education through school choice. Now they have a new target.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“RFK’s anti-vaccine zealotry is an existential threat to public schools,” a recent headline from far-left magazine The New Republic bizarrely proclaims. 

A reimagining of Democrats’ favorite standby – “Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy” – the article observes that if RFK is confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Serivces he will have “enormous influence over government guidance on vaccines.”  

“While he wouldn’t be able to scrap school vaccine mandates wholesale, which is a matter that’s currently decided on the state level, Kennedy could nevertheless do major damage to the public education system by using the power of his office to regularly fearmonger about the phantasmal threat of childhood vaccinations,” the author writes.  

Nor is New Republic the only publication quaking in its boots.  

NPR raised concerns about RFK causing “renewed, deadly epidemics of measles, whooping cough, and meningitis, or even polio.” 

And in November, EducationWeek warned that while states are responsible for setting school vaccine requirements, they usually rely heavily on CDC guidance.  

“Even if the incoming Trump administration doesn’t make concrete policy moves aimed at weakening vaccination requirements or discouraging vaccines,” Edweek writes, “Kennedy and other health officials aligned with the incoming president have the bully pulpit to further undermine confidence in vaccines at a time when immunization rates have been slipping.” 

What does RFK have to say for himself?  

After Trump’s victory, RFK told NBC he wasn’t trying to undermine access to vaccines, just to help Americans make informed decisions.  

“If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away,” he said. “People ought to have choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information. I’m going to make sure scientific safety studies and efficacy are out there, and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them.” 

Hardly the existential threat the left is warning of. Besides, if people need to have their arms twisted by doctors, media and the federal government just to get the jab, do they really believe in vaccines?  

Vaccines are losing Americans’ trust  

The reality is, the train of vaccine skepticism left the station a long time ago. RFK is just bringing up the caboose. 

Indeed, according to the Pew Research Center, trust in vaccines significantly dropped after the pandemic. 

In 2019, 82% of adults believed “healthy children should be required to be vaccinated to attend public schools,” while 16% said parents should be able to choose to vaccinate or not. But by 2023, the number of supporters dropped to 70%, and those in favor of parental choice rose to 28%. 

As Pew’s graphic shows, this change was mostly driven by Republicans. Democrats’ thoughts on vaccines remained roughly the same after the pandemic. 

Naturally, that change in trust was reflected in childhood vaccination rates. The CDC reported kindergarten immunizations dropped from 95% in 2019-20 to about 92.5% in 2023-24.  

Meanwhile, the exemption rate rose 10% – from 3.0% to 3.3%.  

Those numbers may seem minor, but they trouble public health officials who argue roughly 95% vaccination is required to create herd immunity.  

Meanwhile, the left’s sky-is-falling narrative ignores the fact that parents are already allowed to exempt their children from vaccines. A 2020 article from the American College of Physicians reported all states have medical exemptions for vaccines, 29 states offer religious exemptions and 17 have religious and philosophical exemptions. 

And only three states – California, Mississippi and West Virginia – do not offer families a vaccination exemption based on personal belief. 

The same article noted an increase in state legislation to either broaden reasons for exemption or require doctors to “provide more information on the risks of vaccines.” 

Not one of these exemptions prevents parents who want to immunize their children from doing so.  

Moreover, if the left were truly afraid of infectious diseases reemerging, their main target wouldn’t be the 3% of religious Americans defying CDC guidance; it would be the millions of illegal immigrants flooding the country, many of whom are not vaccinated and haven’t been required to get shots to attend public schools.  

According to a 2022 meta-analysis from a medical journal, foreign-born individuals residing in America are chronically “underimmunized.” The odds of immigrants being vaccinated were 38% less for HPV, 25% less for influenza, 41% less for hepatitis B and 34% less for pneumococcal.  

The immigrant community “has lower vaccination coverage when compared to those born in the US,” the authors observed, saying barriers to full vaccination include “language, poor access to medical care, and distrust for the medical system.”  

So, will RFK be “creating vaccine doubt [and] empowering people who are skeptics,” as EdWeek suggest?  

Likely, yes. But is that a bad thing – as opposed to proceeding as if parents need to be strong-armed into doing what’s best for their children, which is, at best, paternalistic and condescending?  

That puts public officials on moral high horses, and in the position of completely lacking faith in the ability of everyday Americans to make informed decisions for themselves and their children. 

A system that relies on censoring doubts and banishing skeptics isn’t a very robust – or, one might say, “healthy” – system.