During the signing of an executive order on vaccines, President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a deluge of false and misleading claims about the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule.
In a contentious interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made several false, misleading and baseless claims about the origins of Lyme disease and the respiratory syncytial virus, the COVID-19 pandemic, and what the science shows about autism, vaccination and acetaminophen use during pregnancy.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has baselessly tied alleged declines in sperm counts among teenagers to a “fertility crisis” or an “explosion in infertility.”
In defending his record on measles, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. twice said during a recent Senate hearing, “We promote” the measles vaccine. While it’s true that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to recommend the shot, Kennedy has rarely made an unequivocal endorsement of it, even as the nation has seen an alarming rise in measles cases.
The Food and Drug Administration in recent months has approved a small number of drugs quite quickly under a new expedited review program. But Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has overstated the impact of the program by making misleading comparisons to the pace of drug approvals in the past.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will reduce federal Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion over a decade. But in a series of congressional hearings last month, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. misleadingly claimed that “there are no cuts to Medicaid” as a result of that 2025 law.
During an April 17 congressional hearing, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called for retraction of a new Danish study that didn’t find a link between Tylenol and autism, repeatedly calling it “garbage” and baselessly suggesting that it was industry-generated and “fraudulent.”
It’s a common, misleading refrain in anti-vaccine circles: Childhood vaccines may be unsafe because few if any have been tested in placebo-controlled trials before being approved. But that claim misunderstands the vaccine safety testing process and takes advantage of a narrow definition of a placebo, scientists told us.
Following an executive order from the Trump administration that promotes production of glyphosate, some Democrats have claimed that the herbicide causes cancer. The science, however, is nuanced. While there is some evidence linking glyphosate to cancers in lab animals or to the blood cancer non-Hodgkin lymphoma in agricultural workers, the findings have been inconsistent.
The Food and Drug Administration on March 10 changed the approval for a version of the prescription drug leucovorin to include people with a very rare genetic condition. FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary had previously implied that the drug’s new label would cover a much broader group of people with autism, saying that “hundreds of thousands of kids” would benefit.