RFK’s Anti-Vaccine Zealotry Is an Existential Threat to Public Schools

As teachers, students, and parents grapple with rapidly spreading vaccine disinformation and a burgeoning number of state-level proposals to furnish childhood vaccine exemptions, one of the biggest stars in the anti-vax movement might be leaving the fringes and coming to Washington, where the incoming Trump administration plans to hand him a brand new federal microphone.

If confirmed, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a perch that would give him enormous influence over government guidance on vaccines, the pace of developmental research on vaccines and other drugs, and the way data is used to communicate to the public about all manner of medical research, including vital information about the immunizations that help prevent many adults and children alike from getting seriously ill.

There are limits to the power that would be put into Kennedy’s hands. But 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.

Kennedy comes to Washington having already used his celebrity to spread harmful notions about childhood vaccination. He is a serial propagator of a common myth about vaccination being tied to autism, a fraudulent notion that lacks any grounding in science. As recently as a 2023 Fox interview, Kennedy has backed these debunked theories, saying, “I do believe that autism does come from vaccines.” Beyond the autism rhetoric, Kennedy has been keen to promote paranoid ideas about childhood vaccination. In 2021, Kennedy called the vaccine for Covid-19 “the deadliest vaccine ever made” in a Louisiana state House hearing on child vaccination requirements—relying on a distortion of vaccine science.

Although Kennedy has lately striven to align his rhetoric with the mainstream—telling NPR in a November interview that vaccines would not be “taken” from people—public health advocates, parents, and students have grave concerns for what his leadership would mean for childhood vaccines and public education.

His ascension to the head of HHS would come at a time when schools are already facing a significant decline in childhood vaccination, the influence of a stronger anti-vaccine movement, and a media environment ripe for misinformation and disinformation. Childhood vaccination coverage was lower for kids born in 2020 and 2021 compared to 2018 and 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The fall in vaccination rates ranged from 1.3 to 7.8 percentage points.

The anti-vax movement had already begun to shift rightward well before the Covid-19 virus hit these shores, but the partisan treatment of the pandemic that kicked off in 2020 only helped to supercharge this trend, as researchers detailed in a 2023 article for The Lancet. Public health researchers have also found that efforts to battle vaccine misinformation on social media have been swamped by the vaccine misinformation itself.

Saanvi Arora, a student at the University of California, Berkeley and the executive director of the Youth Power Project, an organization that pushes for youth-centered policy changes at the federal, state, and local level, said she’s concerned about Kennedy’s potential impact on how young people will be socialized to receive vaccines.

“I think that we’ll see a lot more disinformation. I personally know I’ve heard a lot of people who used to be pro-vax kind of start questioning the effectiveness and the harms of a vaccine. That is something that I’ve been seeing firsthand,” she said.

Anti-vax movements align well with conservative designs for public education. Under Project 2025, which is essentially the agenda of Trump’s second term, concocted by the Heritage Foundation, the Trump administration plans to greatly weaken the public education system through several policy changes, such as having states eventually take over Title I funding, which provides financial assistance to school districts with a high concentration of low-income students.

Trump has said he would dismantle the U.S. Department of Education—though it’s unclear how long this planned deconstruction will take. In the meantime, his choice of Linda McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, is at the very least a demonstration of Trump’s commitment to reducing education funding. She is the chair of the board at the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank that supports a “cut in federal education spending and redirected resources toward school choice.”

Right-wing social media accounts have only brought more scrutiny to public education through fearmongering and anger, usually projected in anti-LGBTQ and racist directions, as well as threats of violence toward public school teachers, which sometimes results in them losing their jobs or quitting the profession. In this way, conservatives are driving toward their goal of ginning up regular social media outrage about the public school system as part of its “parental rights” campaign, the better to exhaust and discourage public school teachers, a frequent target of Republicans over the years.

The movement for parental rights is no grassroots campaign. It’s spawned wholesale from conservative think tanks and advocacy groups such as the Heritage Foundation and American Principles Project, which have helped power legislation opposing all mention of LGBTQ people and people of color in schools. Some of the groups and activists involved in stoking the parental rights movement have been vocal opponents of public schooling more broadly. This lines up well with long-standing conservative pushes for more school privatization and less support for public schools.

When asked whether she thinks Kennedy as head of HHS could hurt public schools as a whole, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, or AFT, said it calls to mind a 2022 quote from Chris Rufo, a well-known conservative activist.

“I think you want to create the conditions for fundamental structural change,” Rufo said. “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust because in order for people to take significant action, they have to feel like they have something at stake.”

“When there’s all these conspiracy theories swirling around the science, people don’t know what to do,” Weingarten said. “So every time there is a question about the science, every time there’s a culture war around this, the aim is not to solve the problem. The aim is to create more fear, more distrust and undermine public education.” (In the interests of full disclosure, the AFT has sponsored or co-sponsored events with The New Republic in the recent past.)

In 2024, there were 16 reported measles outbreaks compared to only four in 2023, with 89 percent of total cases being either in unvaccinated patients or people of unknown vaccination status, according to the CDC. Forty percent of these cases were hospitalized. Measles is even more contagious than Covid-19. Before routine vaccination against measles, 450 people died in the U.S. each year from the disease, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

In November, public health officials in Clark County, Oregon, said outbreaks of whooping cough and chicken pox were affecting three of the county’s schools. These cases of whooping cough were 30 times higher in the county than in 2023, with most of the whooping cough and chicken pox cases hitting unvaccinated children.

“The childhood vaccines—for example, measles, mumps, and chicken pox—these diseases are not benign,” said Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “They cause severe disability and death. We have, of course, forgotten about that because the good news is [vaccines] work so well that most folks don’t have the experience of seeing kids get sick from these diseases and how bad they can be.”

Benjamin said that when the public doesn’t get the right information in a well-articulated way, it creates chaos—ultimately the kind of chaos that will cause people to make decisions on the wrong information, get sick, and die. Although the debate over vaccines isn’t new, the level of moneyed support for the anti-vax movement has hit new heights in recent years.

“What is new is that you have a much more well-financed group of individuals who are either skeptical or against vaccines for a variety of reasons. And they are well organized and spend a lot more time than the pro-vaccine side of the house, which is less well organized and less well financed, in particular, to push back on that,” he said.

Many anti-vax groups saw increases in revenue that were likely boosted by the Covid-19 pandemic, including Kennedy’s own outfit, Children’s Health Defense, which more than doubled its revenue in 2020. (Though it should be noted that the outfit struggled to meet these fundraising heights during Kennedy’s failed presidential run: As NBC News reported last month, a more than 30 percent drop in revenue last year has cut deeply into the pandemic-era windfalls that the organization enjoyed.)

Kate Bilowitz, the parent of a 10-year-old who attends public school in Michigan, said she can understand how people began believing anti-vax messages early in the pandemic and shifted to opposition to childhood vaccines. She moderates a Facebook group called Vaccine Talk, which has existed since 2017 to promote discussion and education around vaccines.

“Now people are saying, well, if the Covid vaccine is so dangerous and bad, what about childhood vaccines? Maybe we should start questioning those. So I think for a lot of people, it kind of started with questioning Covid vaccines and now has evolved into questioning childhood vaccinations,” she said.

When the Facebook group started, the focus was on childhood vaccines and it shifted to focus more on Covid-19 vaccines for a few years. Now she said the group is back to talking more about childhood vaccines.

“I’m concerned because I know there’s a reason why people are thinking more about childhood vaccines and having questions and being doubtful. And it’s because there’s more doubt being put out there by our political climate and by our elected and unelected officials,” she said.

Conor Williams, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, an education policy expert and a working father of three kids, said the stress families have been put under because of the pandemic is probably no small factor in the rise of anti-vax political power.

“Anybody who is involved in trying to raise a kid right now, whether they can articulate it or not, came through something that I think left a lot of us more anxious and stressed out and less certain about where our kids were going and whether they were doing OK,” he said. “Then, in that moment when you’re already feeling uncertain and worried and scared, maybe it’s more instinctive to look for alternative answers to what used to seem like settled questions.”

Kennedy, who has already been active in state discussions around vaccines, could head the agency at a time when states have pushed dozens of bills to weaken vaccination requirements for kids, Stateline reported. In a few states, including Idaho and Tennessee, such measures have already passed.

The National Association of School Nurses told The New Republic that immunizations are an essential primary prevention of disease from infancy through adulthood and that it supports elimination of all exemptions except those necessary for valid medical contraindications.

For her part, Arora says that she is going to continue to push for young people to have greater say in vaccination so that kids can protect themselves and others from serious illness. “From a policy perspective, I am very much worried about the growing parents’ rights movement across the states and what that means for young people who might want to get vaccinated because they might be informed and their parents might not be as informed,” Arora said.

If we see more relaxation of childhood vaccinations, partly influenced by a Kennedy-led HHS, Arora said it would seriously hurt the reputation of vaccines. “To create this idea that vaccines do not actually safeguard public health, it’s almost like schools are endorsing an ideology around vaccines being harmful. It’s almost like they’re delegitimizing the previously accepted credibility around vaccines,” she added.

Williams said there’s a connection between anti-vax efforts and political messages about leaving public schools as a result of parental grievances—an abdication of responsibility toward others.

“Sometimes you’ll hear these people opting out because they believe that this is an exit move that should serve to improve the public system too. It’s a threat. If you don’t do things our way and we leave,” he said. “It’s conceptually the same thing, that you’re resigning from public responsibility, public participation, and even in a small way, your own accountability to and within the public to be part of the same country.”