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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
What to know about RFK Jr., the MAHA movement and vaccines in a pivotal
week
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN
Updated:
6:00 AM EDT, Tue September 16, 2025
Source: CNN
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign
to change how US children are vaccinated against serious diseases faces
multiple major tests this week.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director he ousted last
month, Dr. Susan Monarez, will about her abrupt firing and her
allegation that he is undercutting vaccine standards.
Separately, a key Kennedy reconstituted with his own picks —some of
whom have made unproven claims about vaccines — will hold a meeting
that could lead to drastic changes in vaccine recommendations.
For all the questions raised about , he maintains some broad bipartisan
support for his Make America Healthy Again efforts to change the way
Americans eat.
I spoke with CNN health policy and politics reporter about the
dichotomy of Kennedy and what to expect from this week.
Our conversation, conducted by telephone and edited for length, is
below.
What is MAHA?
WOLF: Kennedy’s agenda is MAHA – Make America Healthy Again. What
does that mean in practice?
OWERMOHLE: While the MAHA agenda is this huge tent of different people
coming in with different priorities, I would put it into three buckets:
food, pharmaceuticals and the environment.
On the food part, Kennedy has spearheaded calls to phase out artificial
dyes, crack down on ultraprocessed foods, improve school lunches and
improve SNAP, our food stamp program. That’s the most popular and
approachable part of this.
Then there’s the pharmaceuticals and vaccine side. I think a lot of
people associate Kennedy most with the anti-vaccine rhetoric. He’s
been very active on questioning whether certain vaccines are safe and
whether children especially should be required to have them.
And then there’s the environmental side, which is another one that is
divisive. He was an environmental lawyer for a long time before
pivoting to MAHA, this broader idea that all of these factors are
causing the rise in chronic disease.
I don’t know how many people know that, but before this, he was a
lawyer. He was part of the legal team that won a huge for a man who had
terminal cancer.
That third leg is this idea that there’s all these things we’re
exposed to in the environment —from to forever plastics — that he
wants to take a harder look at.
The issue with that third part is that’s not under his purview as HHS
secretary.
Kennedy’s moves on vaccines
WOLF: What are the specific things he’s done with regard to vaccines
that have public health experts so worried?
OWERMOHLE: Dismissing an advisory panel, CDC’s , this June. These are
experts who advise CDC on who should get vaccines and when they should
get them, and CDC generally takes up what that panel recommends — he
dismissed all those people, and pretty soon after replaced them with
his , many of whom have made critical remarks in the past, questioning
the safety of Covid-19 vaccines, MMR vaccines, hepatitis B vaccines.
That new panel is set to convene this week to talk about those three
vaccines.
What recommendations they make there, especially since now Kennedy has
and has installed his deputy there, could have real ramifications for
access to those vaccines.
One of the most significant things that has happened so far under his
tenure has been the . The FDA and CDC made changes that essentially
mean that you and me, as healthy people, cannot go into a pharmacy to
get them. Even though the eligibility is now 65 and up, our parents
might still have to go to the doctor’s office.
We’re finding out from reporting that some of our colleagues have
done that a lot of doctors are not stocking these vaccines. There’s
ton of confusion about, if I did want to get a Covid-19 booster shot,
could I get it? And how could I get it?
In terms of his , Kennedy has talked about reassessing how many people
have been injured by vaccines and whether they should be compensated
for those injuries. He talks about making the childhood vaccine
schedule the most ideal it can be for children, which a lot of people
interpret to mean reducing the amount of vaccines that children get in
first six months to few years of their life.
I think the end goal here, he really laid out in the that came out last
week. In the part under vaccines, they wrote that this is about
ensuring medical freedom. I think that’s the overall ethos here. What
he would tell you, if he was in front of you right now, is, “I’m
not trying to take away your vaccines. I’m just trying to give people
a choice about vaccines.”
Kennedy wants to reexamine legal immunity for vaccine producers
WOLF: A lot of people probably don’t know there already is a federal
system – the —to compensate the very small minority of people who
suffer serious side effects from vaccines. Does he want to expand that
or change it, or has he even talked about, has he gotten that specific?
OWERMOHLE: He has gotten pretty specific about that, the . He believes
it is too narrow a system that ignores a lot of the claims that people
make, or reviews them in a biased way.
One of his big targets is the idea that vaccine manufacturers are
shielded from liabilities in a lot of circumstances.
This is a parallel to the pesticides issue. MAHA people have also
railed against the idea that pesticide manufacturers could possibly get
these same sort of liability shields in legislation that’s in
Congress right now, and he hasn’t weighed in on that, but the very
same thing liability shields that they rail against with vaccine
manufacturers could happen for pesticide manufacturers.
There’s already a system to detect issues with vaccines. Kennedy is
changing it.
WOLF: What does the evidence actually say about the number of people
injured by vaccines?
OWERMOHLE: There are two different ways that we track that. The FDA has
the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, which is a self-reporting
system. So if I went in and I fainted, or something more serious
happened, myocarditis or something like that, I could report myself
into the system.
Then there’s a Vaccine Safety Datalink, which is this huge repository
of different health systems and patient records. That’s not a
self-reporting system. That’s an overview of everybody in the system.
If certain unusual things start to pop up, like myocarditis — is this
linked to a vaccine or to something else?
We already have these two reporting systems, and what we know from
those is that serious injuries, serious side effects, are exceedingly
low from vaccines. What Kennedy has argued is that the people who are
reviewing that data are not giving us the full extent of it,
essentially, and that there are flaws in the way that these are being
reported and analyzed.
Kennedy made assurances to get confirmed. Has he kept his word?
WOLF: Kennedy made some pretty clear promises to Sen. Bill Cassidy, the
Louisiana Republican, who is a medical doctor and chair of the Senate
Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Has Kennedy done
anything specifically to violate those assurances that he made?
OWERMOHLE: It would depend on who you ask. Sen. Cassidy had a pretty
lengthy list of things that he said he got assurances on.
One was that they would closely collaborate and talk all the time. I do
think that they talk fairly often. From what I have heard, even from
Sen. Cassidy, when certain things have happened, he has said, you know,
“I spoke to the secretary about this.” Cassidy has said Kennedy
would ask for his input into hiring decisions, that he would work
within the vaccine approval process and not create like his own
parallel processes.
Importantly, the two things that everyone that everyone’s watching,
though, are:
WOLF: Hep B, specifically?
OVERMOHLE: That was just an example, but I think as we go into that
committee’s meeting, if they recommend things that change the
recommendations for longtime, widely used vaccines, that that could be
the red line that actually breaks the promise to Cassidy.
Will Cassidy turn on Kennedy?
WOLF: I suppose if you keep the system but fire everybody on the
advisory panel, you have not changed the system, but you’ve changed
how it is going to operate.
OVERMOHLE: Exactly. That’s why it’s up to interpretation whether
Kennedy has broken a promise to Cassidy. I think Cassidy is in quite a
bind now, because he’s the chair of the HELP Committee, and they are
going to have a hearing with Dr. Susan Monarez, which will be
interesting to see how Cassidy navigates it. But he has the authority
to bring Kennedy in front of him again and ask, “Are you breaking
your promises?” He hasn’t done that yet, and he’s avoided
questions about whether he’s going to.
WOLF: He has not turned on Kennedy.
OWERMOHLE: Notably, no, he hasn’t. MAHA voters have expressed
long-term frustration with Cassidy. He’s up for reelection next year.
I think he’s in a politically tenuous position, and he’s trying to
navigate how to keep people happy but also not go back on what he said
he would do.
What about food dyes?
WOLF: Part of what he wants to do, like , when you hear him talk, it
sounds very much like he would mandate these things. But nothing that
he’s done so far would be any sort of requirement for food companies.
He’s not taking a more collaborative approach. How is he influencing
food companies?
OWERMOHLE: One of the funny things to me is he put out this plan, or
the FDA did under his leadership, to phase out There were two that they
wanted out of all food by 2026, and others had a longer runway. And
that starts this wave of companies being like, “Well, we’re going
to do this. We already have a plan.” They had this event in front of
USDA where they celebrated with ice cream companies. And the whole big
announcement was that the ice cream companies were going to phase these
out by 2028. OK, so they bought themselves two years by holding an
event. Is that a win? I don’t know, but it’s mostly been
voluntelling people to “do this, and then we won’t crack down on
you.”
The Kennedy conundrum
WOLF: The conundrum of Kennedy is that he’s pushing for these popular
things. I think everybody would love to see dyes out of these
ultraprocessed foods. At the same time, he’s doing things that are
genuinely scary to public health professionals. How do you separate
those two tracks of his agenda? Or should we separate them?
OWERMOHLE: That’s the most interesting part of this whole MAHA phase.
There’s such a wide coalition of people. It brings in all these
different people who are motivated by maybe one thing to start, and
then they get into the others or they resent the others for taking more
attention from the priority that they have.
The food and nutrition work is definitely some of the most bipartisan
and broadly popular that you’ll see. Some people that I’ve talked
to from that corner of the movement have expressed frustration about
the vaccine rhetoric and worry that it’s distracting from or
discrediting the food and nutrition motivations, or leading people not
to take Kennedy so seriously.
The focus on vaccines might surprise anyone who saw his confirmation
hearing
WOLF: He has focused on vaccines to a degree that his confirmation
hearing suggested that he would not. Is that right?
OWERMOHLE: Absolutely. He is focused most strongly in terms of actions
at HHS on vaccines. We were just talking about the food aspect, where
they’re asking companies to be proactive in this arena. But they have
changed vaccine policies. They have changed Covid-19 vaccine labels.
There’s real action there, and there hasn’t been real action so
much in food.
Democrats especially are struggling with that question of, “do we
separate these tracks or take MAHA as a whole?” Because the food
aspect, there’s a lot of bipartisan support for that. And then
there’s the whole environmental thing, going back to pesticides and
forever plastics. That has traditionally been a Democratic priority,
and that’s been an area where they probably could work with MAHA
people if they could stomach the rest of this.
What does Kennedy mean by “interventions” and autism?
WOLF: When Kennedy says “interventions” will be shown to be the
cause of autism, what does he mean by that? Is that a phrase that has
been commonly used, or did it catch people off-guard?
OWERMOHLE: The use of the word “intervention” caught me a little
bit by surprise, because medically, the word intervention means a
treatment or therapy. The first thing I would think of if I heard the
word “intervention” would have been a pharmaceutical drug, maybe
even more a drug than a vaccine He could have been using it more
broadly. He could have been referring to environmental toxins, but
that’s not quite a medical intervention.
These last few weeks, there has been some swirling about . Tylenol
would be something that a doctor would tell you is an intervention.
It’s a pain intervention. So is that what he was referring to?
SSRIs (antidepressants) have been a really big focal point for him, and
the potential risks that he sees there. Those are interventions. With
that comment, he expanded it beyond vaccines.
Is this like Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move”?
WOLF: Back to food. The last person who launched a public effort to get
people to eat healthier was then-first lady . But she ran into a lot of
opposition on the right, particularly with school lunches. What’s the
difference between her plan 15 years ago and Kennedy’s plan today?
OWERMOHLE: There really are not that many differences. Her plan maybe
wasn’t quite as ambitious in the things it was going to tackle. But
they are remarkably similar, down to how they started. Michelle Obama
started by working with brands to say, “Can you improve your food
labels, and can you reduce fat and sugar in school foods?” Brands
were proactively doing that just the way that things are happening with
Kennedy and these brands right now. Exact same thing.
Hers started to get that Republican backlash once regulatory action
started. There was this 2010 law that imposed new federal standards for
milk and whole grains and sodium in school lunches. And that’s really
when the rhetoric around her “Let’s Move” initiative kicked into
overdrive.
There have been lots of subsequent Republican efforts to soften those
standards, even as recently as 2018. In the first Trump administration,
Sonny Perdue, the USDA secretary, tried to roll back that standard,
even though it was it was . It speaks to how this has changed
politically, but I also think it speaks to the appeal that Kennedy has
had to bring all these different people into the fold with him and make
this now a Republican priority. It’s also a reminder that Kennedy was
a Democrat.
WOLF: He’s also a celebrity. Have we ever had a celebrity HHS
secretary before? (No offense to Kathleen Sebelius, Tom Price, Alex
Azar or Xavier Becerra.)
This is a part of the government that has such great importance, but
having Kennedy there has actually upped its profile.
OWERMOHLE: It’s so true. He’s definitely the most high-profile HHS
secretary in recent history, maybe ever. When I talk to MAHA voters,
they say that they won Trump the presidency. Whether or not that’s
true, that’s what they believe. And they will tell you they’re not
loyal to a political party; they’re loyal to Kennedy. I can’t think
of another Cabinet secretary that has that type of pull in any
administration.
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