Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is reportedly planning on making significant changes to recommendations for childhood vaccines, even as the country’s worst measles outbreak in 30 years continues to fester.
According to the Washington Post and The New York Times, HHS plans to stop recommending most childhood vaccines as Kennedy, a well-known vaccine skeptic, seeks to align the U.S. immunization schedule with Denmark’s. Danish public health officials, however, say the two countries can’t be compared because of different health needs and the fact that Denmark has universal health care.
It’s unclear which vaccines could potentially be affected.
The proposed changes come as measles — a disease for which there is a very effective vaccine and which was eradicated from the U.S. in 2000 — spreads, with a particular uptick in South Carolina.
There were 144 cases in the state as of Friday, mostly among unvaccinated school children, according to the South Carolina Department of Public Health. Another 224 people are in quarantine because they’ve been exposed and four are in isolation because they are contagious.
There have been 1,958 confirmed cases of measles this year, the largest outbreak since 1991, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Two unvaccinated children in Texas and one unvaccinated adult in New Mexico have died from the disease.
Kennedy has remained mostly quiet about the worsening situation.
Public health experts have long advised that the best way to protect yourself and your children from measles — a potentially deadly infectious disease that can cause rash and fever — is to get vaccinated.
But as anti-vaccine rhetoric has spread throughout the country in recent years, so have cases of measles. Vaccine rates are on the decline. Nationwide, 92.5% of kindergarteners were vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella during the 2024-2025 school year. The rate needs to be 95% in order to slow transmission.
Typically, the federal government plays a crucial role in ending epidemics with public campaigns about vaccination and federal funding to states experiencing outbreaks.
When a measles outbreak between 1989 and 1991 left 55,000 people infected and more than 100 people dead, the CDC embarked on a publicity campaign to encourage people to get vaccinated. In response to the outbreak, Congress created the Vaccine for Children program in 1993, which provided free vaccines to low-income children.
During a 2015 outbreak, Thomas Frieden, who was the CDC director during the Obama administration, publicly called for vaccination. He wrote an op-ed and appeared on television, urging parents to get their children vaccinated and to check their own status.
And although experts warn that silence from officials can spread misinformation even further, putting lives at risk, it’s hard to imagine the Trump administration, or even Congress, embarking on public health initiatives of that sort.
The CDC is tracking reported measles cases in South Carolina and across the country, but has not launched a broad public effort to encourage vaccines.
“Secretary Kennedy has been very clear that vaccination is the most effective way to prevent measles,” HHS press secretary Emily G. Hilliard told HuffPost when asked if the agency would be making any public statements about the situation in South Carolina. “Any attempts to spin this are baseless. Individuals should consult with their health care provider on what is best for them.”
Hilliard also said she was not concerned that the measles outbreak in South Carolina would rival that in Texas.
“CDC is not currently concerned that this will develop into a large, long-running outbreak as was seen in Texas earlier this year and whose outbreak has been declared over,” she said in an emailed statement to HuffPost.
When measles began circulating in Texas in January, Kennedy did say that infected people should get vaccinated, but he also pushed unproven treatments like vitamin A, which left some Texas patients with liver damage.
Kennedy has a long history of spreading skepticism about vaccines. He was the chair of the Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organization that promoted false claims about immunizations from 2015 until 2023. Kennedy went to Samoa, a remote island country in the Pacific Ocean, in 2019 to campaign against the measles vaccine. The country’s officials had suspended their program after two infants were killed when nurses prepared the vaccine incorrectly. The country suffered from a measles outbreak the following year.
When Donald Trump nominated him to be HHS secretary, he pledged to let him “go wild” with implementing health policies related to food, medicine, and even promoting baseless claims about links between vaccines and chronic disease.
Kennedy’s promotion of a potentially dangerous remedy is a symbol of the anti-vaccine sentiment coming from the upper echelons of government.