Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent years campaigning against vaccines, but with the flu shot, he’s suggested it’s personal. Kennedy has linked his strained, raspy speech to the vaccine, despite several medical experts saying there is no scientific evidence to support that claim.
Federal guidance revised under Kennedy last month, while the United States is experiencing a hard-hitting flu season, no longer recommends routine flu vaccines for children and adolescents. The day after he assumed office a year ago, he ordered the end of a government ad campaign encouraging flu vaccination.
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Kennedy has repeatedly said he suspects the flu vaccine triggered his spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological voice disorder, and that he stopped getting flu shots in 2005.
Although he acknowledges he is unable to prove a connection, he said his eyes were opened to a link after reading vaccine inserts while he was engaged in litigation against flu vaccine manufacturers.
In a 2020 appearance on the web show run by the anti-vaccine group he founded, he said, “I got [spasmodic dysphonia]. That’s what’s wrong with my voice, and it is a listed side effect of the flu vaccine.” Now in his role as the most powerful public health official in the nation, he continues to say that the vaccination may have caused his condition. He told USA Today in mid-January: “It’s a potential culprit that I cannot rule out.”
It’s the sort of statement that alarms public health experts, who have protested Kennedy’s pattern of raising doubts about vaccines that they say have proved to be safe and effective with decades of evidence.
The vast majority of children who die of the flu are not vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the current season, pediatric deaths have reached 71, about a 4 percent increase from last season at this time. Among those eligible for vaccination and whose status was known, about 90 percent who died were children who were not fully vaccinated, the CDC said.
HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon did not respond to questions about Kennedy linking his vocal problems to vaccines.
“The Secretary directed a review to ensure federal messaging reflects evidence and earns credibility,” Nixon said in a statement, noting after years of heavy CDC flu advertising, vaccine uptake has stagnated and trust in public health has fallen.
Three top voice medical experts as well as the nonprofit Dysphonia International said in interviews that there is no scientific basis for the claim that the flu vaccine is behind Kennedy’s condition.
“Having seen over 300 patients with this condition over the course of my 30-year career, no one else has ever claimed or felt that they developed this condition due to a vaccination of any kind,” said Steven Bielamowicz, professor of surgery and director of the Voice Treatment Center at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.
A type of dystonia, spasmodic dysphonia is a central nervous system and neurological condition of the brain that affects the muscles of the voice box and vocal cords.
It is distinct from dysphonia, which means an abnormal voice. A Washington Post review of 11 vaccine inserts for flu vaccines found dysphonia listed as a possible side effect on one type of flu shot, but not spasmodic dysphonia.
“Dysphonia just means abnormal voice. That’s all what dysphonia means,” said physician Michael Johns III, director of the University of Southern California Voice Center with Keck Medicine of USC. “So that’s a symptom. I’m hoarse: I have dysphonia. So it’s not the same thing.”
While there is no known cause for spasmodic dysphonia, brain injuries such as stroke and in rare cases genetic factors have been associated with the disorder.
There is evidence to suggest a potential association between dystonias and certain drug use, three otolaryngologists told The Post. Kennedy has publicly discussed his past addiction to heroin.
The voice experts noted there is some evidence that dystonias associated with drug use can be permanent or temporary.
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‘Little seed of doubt’
Influenza vaccines are less effective in preventing infections than other vaccines such as the one for measles, mumps and rubella, which the CDC says prevents measles in about 97 percent of cases when patients have received two doses. But multiple studies have shown the flu vaccine reduces the disease’s severity and averts hospitalizations and deaths. Under Kennedy’s leadership, the government’s rationale for downgrading the recommendation that children and adolescents routinely receive flu vaccine is at odds with those findings.
“HHS will put rigorous science and public trust first, every time,” Nixon said.
Elizabeth Murray, a pediatric emergency medicine doctor at the Golisano Children’s Hospital at the University of Rochester, said she was bewildered by the administration’s decision to stop recommending the flu vaccine. She said she has already seen an uptick in parents refusing the flu shot in the last few months, and she worries the trend will only worsen with Kennedy’s directives.
“Once you’ve kind of planted that little seed of doubt, it can be really challenging to come back from,” she said of Kennedy’s comments on the flu vaccine. “It’s just so disheartening to see the false information being spread by people who should be reputable.”
Public health advocates, physicians, and families impacted by flu death warned Kennedy’s actions could lead to more death and misery.
“We’re going to see declining vaccination rates as a result, and we’re going to see more and more families suffer,” said Gary Stein, the president of the advocacy group Families Fighting Flu, which promotes vaccination.
Stein’s daughter Jessica – a 4-year-old who loved swimming, ballet and gymnastics – died of flu complications in 2002. The vaccine was not recommended by the CDC at the time for her age group, and Jessica was unvaccinated.
“There aren’t many people that would put a toddler in the back seat without a car seat or not use a seat belt,” he said. “I could live my life without the flu vaccine, and my family could and I might survive it. But why would I roll the dice with my child’s life?”
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A history of attacks
Kennedy worked as an attorney for the plaintiffs on a 2020 lawsuit against the University of California that alleged the school overstepped when requiring students to receive the flu vaccine, which was dismissed. He has publicly disparaged the flu vaccine or linked it to his voice condition in at least 21 appearances, according to a Post analysis of hundreds of his media appearances from May 2020 to the end of his presidential campaign in August 2024.
In 2023, he disputed the number of flu deaths, saying they are only about 2,000 to 3,000 in the worst years, blaming the CDC for manipulating data by conflating flu and pneumonia deaths.
The CDC’s website says flu deaths typically can be much higher, ranging from 6,300 to 52,000 annually. Pneumonia deaths are included in the CDC’s numbers because it can be a complication of the flu, several medical experts said.
Kennedy also argued in 2021 that some people can be more likely to die if they receive the flu vaccine as opposed to getting the flu, a claim medical experts say is not based on evidence.
William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, pointed to additional evidence that the flu vaccine can reduce hospitalizations and death.
“It’s just the opposite,” Schaffner said.
Vaccination in the 2019-2020 season reduced children’s risk of severe life-threatening influenza by 75 percent, according to a study the CDC has listed on its website.
A 2018 study published in the journal Vaccine showed that from 2012 to 2015, flu vaccination prevented the most severe forms of flu and reduced the risk of being admitted to an ICU with flu by 82 percent.
Kennedy edited a book over a decade ago that linked the thimerosal in multi-dose flu vaccine vials to autism. In 2023 he said that flu vaccines are “destroying their brains” in reference to children and called the vaccines “horribly dangerous.” Since becoming secretary, he has overseen the elimination of the thimerosal preservative from multi-dose flu vaccines despite medical experts deeming it safe.
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‘Direct ask’
It took one day in office for Kennedy to begin reversing decades of government support for flu vaccines. On Feb. 14, 2025, the day after he was sworn in as Health and Human Services secretary, he moved to shut down federal ad campaigns encouraging the shots.
That “request was a direct ask from Secretary Kennedy,” wrote Nixon to a CDC official on Feb. 14, 2025, in a previously undisclosed email. The edict ended the CDC’s paid flu vaccine promotions as the country was experiencing a second spike in cases. Flu season typically goes from October until May. The 2024-2025 flu season was the worst in more than 15 years, resulting in the deaths of 289 children.
When Kevin Griffis, CDC’s then-director of communications, received the request to end advertising promotion of vaccine, he emailed several members of his staff: “Given that this is the worst flu season in years,” this action “presents significant reputational risk to the agency,” according to a copy of his email obtained by The Post.
The CDC’s “Wild to Mild” initiative, which used animal imagery to compare wild animals – for example, a wolf – with domesticated ones such as a puppy to describe how vaccines tame the flu, was pulled down.
HHS said it wanted a campaign to instead emphasize informed consent, a core medical ethics principle that vaccine skeptics often invoke to emphasize vaccine risks over benefits. No alternate campaign was created in place of the “Wild to Mild” initiative.
Griffis left a little over a month later, writing an op-ed in The Post decrying the politicization of science at the agency.
“The message we got was that the government was getting out of the business of encouraging vaccination, and that has proven true,” Griffis said in an email. “Today, HHS leadership is more focused on promoting vaccine risks than its benefits, even though in this case in particular, the data are unambiguous that the flu vaccine lowers the risk of hospitalization and death from flu infection.”
When asked to comment, HHS’s Nixon said: “CDC data also show flu vaccine effectiveness has averaged about 40 percent since 2009, underscoring the need for honest communication, not slogans.” Flu vaccines typically reduce the risk of cases requiring medical care by roughly 30 to 60 percent in most years, according to the CDC. Effectiveness fluctuates based on how well the vaccine matches the circulating viruses.
Dan Jernigan, who headed the CDC’s influenza division for six years and resigned last year as director of the agency’s center on emerging and infectious diseases, said the change ordered by Kennedy was a major departure from how the agency has communicated about influenza vaccines.
He called it “a complete reversal from my experience with every Secretary of HHS I have worked with over my 31 year career.”
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‘Cherry-picking’
On Jan. 5, then-acting CDC director and top Kennedy deputy Jim O’Neill took the unprecedented step of reducing the number of vaccines the United States routinely recommends for every child. In taking flu immunizations off that list, O’Neill cited a Cochrane review, part of an independent global network that produces systematic reviews of health research, which said it found no evidence that vaccines reduce hospitalizations or death.
Several physicians who are flu vaccine experts who reviewed the administration’s decision memo told The Post the document was deeply flawed and scientifically unsound. They said the memo gave too much weight to the Cochrane report and ignored other important studies that contradicted the report’s conclusions.
Medical experts, including Carolyn Bridges, a physician and former associate director for adult immunizations in CDC’s center responsible for immunization and respiratory diseases, said that the Cochrane review looked at too narrow a type of studies to show the effectiveness of the flu vaccine against hospitalization and death.
“It’s completely misleading what they’re saying,” Bridges said of the administration.
But Kennedy’s team dismissed other studies, including one that said vaccination reduced hospitalization, calling it “notoriously biased” in the memo. The HHS memo also said those studies highlighting the benefits of flu vaccines were not randomized control trials, which experts said cannot be done on the scale needed to identify a significant reduction on hospitalization and deaths for children who contract the flu.
Edward Belongia, a former member of the federal vaccine advisory committee and a retired infectious-disease epidemiologist with a focus on flu research, said that when it came to administration officials, “They’re not taking an objective, unbiased view of this question of what are the risks and benefits of influenza vaccination in children.”
One of the authors of the Cochrane review, Tom Jefferson, had previously told a Post reporter that HHS had accurately represented the group’s findings, but he did not respond to follow-up requests.
The decision memo also cited a flu vaccine that it said caused narcolepsy among children and adolescents during the 2009-2010 H1N1 influenza pandemic and was used widely in European countries.
“We didn’t even use that vaccine in the U.S., so they’re cherry-picking,” said Sean O’Leary, a physician who heads the American Academy of Pediatrics’ infectious-diseases committee.
Ten days after scaling back the childhood vaccine recommendation, the CDC tweeted a message about the flu that did not mention vaccination. In the accompanying video, Ralph Abraham, the new No. 2 at the agency who had drawn criticism for stopping flu vaccine promotion as the top health official for Louisiana, encouraged people to take advantage of antiviral treatments but did not explicitly recommend a flu shot.
The Food and Drug Administration declined to review Moderna’s application for the first mRNA-based flu vaccine, the company said last week, a decision experts said raises concerns about shifting guidance from the agency. The agency reversed the decision this week.
“Everything we’ve done is unraveled,” said Doris Stein, who became a board member of Families Fighting Flu after her daughter Jessica died. “We’re going to go backwards again, and now hospitalizations and deaths are going to increase because of all of this.”
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Paige Winfield Cunningham contributed to this report.
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Video: The Trump administration on Jan. 5 overhauled the list of routine shots recommended for all babies and children in the U.S. Health reporter Lena Sun explains what this means for families.(c) 2026 , The Washington Post
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