Donald Trump’s health secretary, was speaking at a convention of Children’s Health Defense, which he led for nearly a decade – and was introduced by disgraced British ex-doctor Andrew Wakefield
Robert F Kennedy Jr told members of an anti-vaccine group he founded that they have a “steadfast friend at the White House”.
RFK, who is Donald Trump’s health secretary, was speaking at a convention of Children’s Health Defense, which he led for nearly a decade. His speech came after four people died of measles in Pennsylvania, in the worst outbreak of the disease in decades.
“Let me be clear: You have a strong and steadfast friend in the White House. We’ve accomplished in 19 months things that would have seemed unthinkable two years ago,” he said.
Kennedy, who is not a medical professional, raised a string of baseless questions about long-established vaccine safety. He boasted about how the Trump administration, under his guidance, had limited the number of life-saving vaccines routinely given to children in the US – including scrapping regular shots for hepatitis A and B and meningococcal, the rare virus that causes meningitis.
President Trump has made repeated and unfounded claims that the vaccine scheme was “dangerous” and contributed to increased autism diagnoses. And Trump suggested falsely that the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine could be “quite lethal” if taken as combined injection, and called for it to be split in to three separate shots.
Some 3,294 cases of measles have been confirmed in the US so far in 2026, up from 2,289 in the whole of 2025. according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Nearly half of the 2026 cases (45%) were in children and young people aged 5-19, with 18% of the cases affecting the under 5s.
Some 95% of the cases were in unvaccinated people, or people whose vaccination status was unknown. Just 3% had had both doses of MMR. Of the 2026 cases, 267 people were hospitalised, including 66 children under 5.
In 2024, the year before Trump returned to office, there were 285 cases, and in 2023 just 59. More cases of measles have been confirmed in the US so far this year than in the decade from 2014 to 2024.
RFK spoke alongside Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced British former doctor whose fabricated research first popularised the false claim that the MMR vaccine is linked to autism. After being struck off in the UK, and ostracised by the medical community, Wakefield moved to the US, where he has since become a minor celebrity in the anti-vaccine world.
“I could not have imagined two years ago that Bobby [Kennedy] would be in the White House and that President Trump would be saying ‘divide up the MMR into three different’,” Wakefield told the conference.
In his speech, Kennedy said: “We have not taken vaccines away from anybody. We have preserved access. But we have started asking the questions that you and millions of American parents have been asking for years.”
Pennsylvania officials have reported four measles-associated deaths this year. None of the four were vaccinated, according to the state health department. When state officials last month announced the first two of those deaths, it ignited a public feud between Kennedy and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.
Shapiro blasted Kennedy’s appearance, saying Kennedy “chose to spend his time today addressing the premier vaccine-denial conference in America.” Shapiro said RFK should have encouraged people to get vaccinated for measles, “yet he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he pushed a narrative that continues to stoke fear and mistrust.”