Rates of routine vaccinations among children are dropping, the percentage of children who are exempted from vaccine requirements is at an all-time high and cases of measles are being reported across the country.
And it could soon get worse.
Doctors are now bracing for a future under president-elect Donald Trump’s and his administration, which has floated the idea of bringing in prominent vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr to lead the nation’s federal health agencies.
Kennedy, the former independent presidential candidate who bowed out of the race to endorse Trump, does not have a medical background, but his anti-vaccine Children’s Health Defense group and focus on chronic disease and chemicals in food — and promotion of misinformation and conspiracy theories — have drawn him enormous scrutiny and endorsements.
Trump has promised to appoint Kennedy to a key role in his administration. The Republican president-elect said he wants to “let him go wild on health” and on “the food and “the medicines.”
With Republican control of the Senate, Kennedy could potentially be easily confirmed to chief health jobs if Trump appoints him for them, including secretary of Health and Human Services, Food and Drug Administration commissioner or director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Trump said he would “make a decision” about whether to ban vaccines based on Kennedy’s recommendations, though he would not have unilateral authority to do so. Kennedy said this week that he is “not going to take them away” and that “people ought to have choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information.”
Pediatricians and public health experts are sounding the alarm over their grave concerns for the possibility that a vaccine antagonist could be in a massively influential position to cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of life-saving medicine, and potentially accelerate a trend of parents rejecting vaccinations for their children.
“I have watched a child die in the hospital of a vaccine-preventable illness because her parents refused to vaccinate her,” Dr. Catherine Ohmstede, a pediatrician at Novant Health in Charlotte, North Carolina, told NBC News. “Many parents today have not witnessed that — yet … If this trend continues, that is the reality we are going to face.”
Doctors have warned Trump’s campaign “about impacts on the party and the country of coming across as anti-science, and of having to manage and own a deluge of measles and polio outbreaks,” according to Trump’s former surgeon general Dr. Jerome Adams.
Adams told CNN that Kennedy could “spread misinformation and take us back to the dark ages in regards to vaccine-preventable diseases.”
Routine childhood vaccines — which have for decades fought against measles, chickenpox, polio and other illnesses — have prevented roughly 508 million illnesses and more than 1.1 million deaths among children born within the past 30 years, according to an August report from the CDC.
Last month, the agency reported that the percentage of children with exemption from vaccine requirements ticked up to 3.3 percent — up from 3 percent in 2023, marking an all-time high since such requirements have been in place.
At least 15 measles outbreaks totaling 272 cases have been reported this year, as of November 1, according to the CDC. More than half of those cases were among children under age 5, and another quarter were among children ages 5 to 19. Nearly 90 percent of those patients were not unvaccinated.
Putting Kennedy in a role that oversees those cases is “a potential catastrophe waiting to unfold,” according to Dr. Kavita Patel, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and a board certified internal medicine physician who served as director of policy for the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement in the White House under President Barack Obama.
“Imagine, if you will, giving the keys to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s data vaults to someone who has spent years spreading misinformation about vaccines,” she wrote. “It’s like asking a flat-earther to pilot our next mission to space.”
