How RFK Jr. Is Influencing America's Vaccine Playbook

Since taking the helm of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has both backed vaccination as a public health tool and taken steps to undermine it.

By Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder  Senior Writer

April 23, 2026, at 11:51 a.m.

ILLUSTRATION BY USN&WR | SOURCE: GETTY IMAGES

Since his confirmation to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has toed the line between backing vaccination as a preventive public health tool and making statements or overseeing developments that threaten to undermine that tool.

Here's a look at notable vaccine-related moves and remarks made by Kennedy or under his authority since he was sworn in as head of HHS in February of 2025.

Jump to a section:

Changing Vaccine Policy
Replacing the Panel That Recommends Vaccines
A Federal Study of the (Debunked) Link Between Vaccines and Autism
Re-examining the Childhood Vaccine Schedule
Vaccine Official Shakeups
Conflicting Comments on the Measles Outbreak
Cutting Research and Delaying Studies on Vaccines
Plan to Shake Up Vaccine Injury Program
Childhood Vaccine Task Force Revival

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HHS splurged more than $22B on grants for migrants — including cash for cars, home loans and startups

By
Josh Christenson

Published Feb. 13, 2025, 12:18 p.m. ET


The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) ramped up grants for migrants from 2020 to 2024 — which included cash assistance to buy cars, homes and even build credit for startup businesses, according to a shocking watchdog report that found taxpayers were left on the hook for $22.6 billion.

HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) — which came under fire last year for having lost track of 32,000 migrant kids in the US — handed out the high sum to a host of nonprofits, effectively acting as a “giant magnet” for those crossing the US border and claiming asylum, auditors from the money monitor OpenTheBooks revealed exclusively to The Post.

Tasked with settling migrants, asylum seekers and other refugees in America, ORR drastically increased the number of noncitizens eligible to receive funding over the bulk of President Joe Biden’s term, with more than $10 billion shelled out to grant-receiving organizations just in fiscal year 2023.

The OpenTheBooks audit comes after FEMA came under fire for sending around $80 million, which was subsequently clawed back by the Trump administration, to put migrants up in New York City hotels and provide other services.

Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Post

That coincided with all-time records being set for southern border crossings into the US, with 2.4 million apprehensions by Customs and Border Protection over the same period.

Non-governmental groups bilked taxpayers for up to $1.7 billion in services including dollar-for-dollar matching savings plans for cars, homes, college educations or startups; small-business loans of up to $15,000; loans to repair credit history of up to $1,500; “cultural orientation,” “emergency housing support,” legal assistance and Medicaid care.

HHS Spent Hundreds of Millions of Dollars on DEI Initiatives Under Biden, Watchdog Finds

President Joe Biden speaks before signing executive orders at the White House, January 28, 2021. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

By Alex Welz

November 12, 2024 6:19 PM

The Department of Health and Human Services has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds carrying out President Biden’s DEI initiatives, according to a new nonprofit government watchdog report released Tuesday.

Biden issued an executive order in June 2021 calling for federal agencies to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion in recruits and when considering promotions. DEI quickly became a dominant theme within the federal government over the next four years.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) currently employs 294 DEI employees, costing the agency $38.7 million in taxpayer funds each year, according to a report from OpenTheBooks. In Fiscal Year 2023, 247 of those workers made over $100,000, while four took home double that sum.

An additional 207 HHS employees oversee Biden’s “health equity” efforts in the Offices of Minority Health at a cost of $29.4 million for salaries alone each year.

“At the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion is organized like its own corporation,” OpenTheBooks wrote in a statement. “It has separate departments for Guidance, Education & Marketing, Data Analytics & Customer Outreach, and an ostensibly redundant Diversity & Inclusion Division.”

Some of the spending choices that are receiving the most blowback include $5 million to “diversify the doula workforce” and another $25 million for “nursing workforce diversity.”

Since Biden assumed the Oval Office in 2021, grant applicants for the Rural Communities Opioid Response have been required to complete a “Disparate Impact Statement” that explains how systemic racism will inform their efforts in addressing the opioid crisis. Applicants remain encouraged to defer to groups that have suffered from disproportioned historical iniquities.

Another controversial program is Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST), which “awards grants to top universities to hire scientists from minority backgrounds — specifically considering a scientist’s ‘commitment to diversity’ as equally important to their academic ability.” The NIH Common Fund has committed $241 million to the program over the course of nine years.

A $102 million allocation was given to the Health Resources and Services Administration for “training for diversity.” Part of this allotment is also to be spent on the FIRST program, funding “Centers of Excellence” on campuses seeking to advance “recruitment, training, and retaining underrepresented minority students and faculty at health professions schools.”

Variations of the term “equity” could be found 829 different times in HHS’ 2025 congressional budget request, the report uncovered. OpenTheBooks also discovered 92 DEI employees working under the direct oversight of HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.

“One recent CDC program pushed for ‘vaccine equity’ in Atlanta, Georgia by distributing 5,500 monkeypox vaccine doses to Black ‘LGBTQ+ men who have sex with men’ to help ‘celebrate diversity and the impact of distinctly Black gay and queer culture on the community,’” the report read.

Thousands of black church leaders were even recruited to serve as “vaccine advocates and influencers.”

“Records of both vaccine equity programs have been removed from the CDC’s website,” the report claimed.

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Millions Made: Exposing Non-Profits In Border Crisis Scandal (w/ Maddie ...

White house to shield health workers who refuse services on moral grounds

January 18, 2018

(HealthDay)—Health workers who refuse to perform abortions or sex-change operations on religious or moral grounds will now get more protection from the Trump administration.




Any medical professional who feels his or her rights have been violated can file a complaint with the new conscience and religious freedom division of the office for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, The New York Times reported Thursday.

The move, which comes one day before the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., was a priority for anti-abortion groups, according to the Times.

Roger Severino, director of the new civil rights office, told the newspaper that he and his staff would investigate each and every complaint.

The federal government has typically ignored such complaints or treated them with "outright hostility" for years, Severino added.

While supporters of the new office welcomed it as a way to protect the religious rights of medical professionals, critics said the Trump administration is giving health workers a license to discriminate.

Some fear there will be doctors who deny fertility treatments to lesbian couples and pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for certain types of contraceptives, the Times reported.

"Donald Trump's administration is handing out permission slips for hospitals and providers to deny individuals, including women and LGBT patients, access to a full range of health services including lifesaving emergency care," Dawn Huckelbridge, director of the Women's Rights Initiative at American Bridge, told the newspaper.

HHS Acting Secretary Eric Hargan said during a media briefing that the new initiative simply follows an executive order issued last year by President Trump, who said that people of faith would no longer be bullied or silenced.

Conservative groups applauded the move.

"For more than 40 years, federal law has protected the conscience rights of all Americans in the context of health care," the Heritage Foundation said in a statement. "These protections have allowed for a diversity of values in health care and ensured that individuals can work and live according to their moral and religious beliefs.

"This new HHS division will help ensure that health care professionals enjoy the same rights they have had for decades—to not face coercion or discriminatory actions if they decide not to participate in certain procedures because of moral or religious objections."

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EXCLUSIVE: HHS Bankrolled Catholic and Baptist Church from 2010 to 2013 to Prepare for Obama’s 2014 Invasion!

By Eric Odom278
11:16 pm July 10, 2014




A month or two ago news broke that Obama’s HHS was calling for private contractors to help transport illegal aliens throughout the interior United States. What made this already big news even bigger is the fact that the original call for proposals came out in January, long before the bulk of the illegal alien surge began.

The breaking news you’re about to read is ten times bigger, because the following proves the Obama administration was bankrolling America’s churches back in 2010. And the tens of millions were flowing in to prepare for the invasion currently underway.

The following is a small taste of what’s out there in grant records. This is just the tip of the iceberg, folks.

Between Dec 2010 and Nov 2013, the Catholic Charities Diocese of Galveston received $15,549,078 in federal grants from Health & Human Services for “Unaccompanied Alien Children Project” with a program description of “Refugee and Entry Assistance.”

Last year, the Catholic Charities Diocese of Fort Worth received $350,000 from Department of Homeland Security for “citizenship and education training” with a program description of “citizenship and immigration services.”

Between September 2010 and September 2013, the Catholic Charities of Dallas received $823,658 from the Department of Homeland Security for “Citizenship Education Training” for “refugee and entrant assistance.”

From Dec 2012 to January 2014, Baptist Child & Family Services received $62,111,126 in federal grants from Health & Human Services for “Unaccompanied Alien Children Program.”

Any questions?

Document about Unaccompanied Alien Children Project located here.

H/T Terri Harris Hill for the tip and initial research.

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#Obamacare: Sebelius’ history of IT failures in Kansas

Posted by: Phineas on October 24, 2013 at 3:38 pm

**Posted by Phineas



“A track record of epic failure”

Naturally, this is the person you want leading the biggest, most complicated information technology project in US government history, involving a full takeover of 16% of the nation’s economy. For that, my friends, only the best will do:

Obama administration Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ failure at designing websites to provide government services began during her term as governor of Kansas, long before the Obamacare website debacle, Kansas political insiders told The Daily Caller.

Sebelius oversaw numerous costly and disastrous government website projects during her six-year governorship (2003-2009), including a failed update of the Department of Labor’s program to provide unemployment pay and other services and similar updates pertaining to the Department of Administration and the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) services.

The Department of Labor’s overhaul of its computer programs was a notable boondoggle, according to 14-year former Kansas state senator and former state Labor Secretary Karin Brownlee.

“In the Kansas Senate, I chaired the Commerce committee. We had oversight over the Department of Labor. For years, we watched as the Department of Labor under Sebelius worked on that computer program. After seven years and $50 million, something should work,” Brownlee told TheDC.

“In Kansas if you have a 40 or 50 million dollar project, that’s a lot of money,” Brownlee said, noting that the Labor Department project was funded by federal money while other Sebelius website projects sucked up state taxpayer dollars. “They started and stopped that project with at least 3 different major contractors.”

When Brownlee was appointed to head the state’s Department of Labor under new Republican governor Sam Brownback in 2011, she was tasked with cleaning up Sebelius’ technical mess.

Read the article for several example of Sebelius’s managerial incompetence. This line, though, poses a very good question:

“We pretty much expected HealthCare.gov to fail, because she has a pattern of failing on these big initiatives. We thought that was why she was not nominated originally,” Schwab said.

In other words, why did the administration hire someone with such a miserable performance record in just these kinds of projects?

Perhaps we shouldn’t wonder, though. Obama’s first nominee for HHS Secretary, former Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD), had to withdraw from consideration under pressure of ethics and tax questions. And who can forget “Turbo-Tax” Timothy Geithner, whose nomination for Treasury Secretary was almost derailed by questions of tax evasion… until he convinced people he was just too dumb to work a simple tax program right.

Vetting is obviously not the President’s strong suit. After all, no one ever asked any tough questions about his background and qualifications (in either election), so why should he do the same for his own nominees? In fact, this excerpt from The New York Times via The Federalist makes one wonder if he was ever really interested in doing the job at all:

Even as the debate about arming the rebels took on a new urgency, Mr. Obama rarely voiced strong opinions during senior staff meetings. But current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum. In private conversations with aides, Mr. Obama described Syria as one of those hellish problems every president faces, where the risks are endless and all the options are bad.

That was in reference to Syria this last summer, which had turned into a genuine crisis for the administration. But we know Obama isn’t really interested in foreign affairs, except for the occasional apology tour. But Obamacare is his baby, the thing he’s most likely to be remembered for in the history books. It’s his New Deal, his Great Society, the great liberal project. Wouldn’t he want to be danged sure the person he put in charge was qualified to carry it out?

In real life, I manage a small staff. I hire, train, evaluate, and, if needed, get rid of each of them. We have a job to do, and seeing that they do their job right is part my job. And I am judged in part on how well my staff does their jobs. The same can be said of any boss, any manager, any…. Chief Executive.

Shouldn’t President Obama be held to that same standard?


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Is Sebelius shaking down health-care execs to finance Obamacare?

Geoffrey Cowley, @geoffreycowley




U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius speaks during the opening plenary of the National Health Policy Conference organized by The AcademyHealth February 4, 2013 in Washington, DC. Sebelius spoke on the Obama Administration’s health policy priorities. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Health care reform may be President Obama’s signature legislative achievement, but it’s still a work in progress. The Affordable Care Act’s most ambitious provisions—the expansion of Medicaid , the rollout of 50 state-based insurance exchanges, the enforcement of a law requiring everyone to find coverage—are all set to kick in on January 1. The deadlines would be daunting even in a friendly political environment, but the path is now littered with landmines.

A small one exploded last weekend, after the Washington Post reported that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was soliciting private donations to help implement Obamacare. Congressional Republicans have forced the administration to go begging by rejecting its funding requests. But the same Republicans pounced when the HHS effort came to light—and the critics’ predictable questions have left the administration on its heels.

At issue is whether Sebelius has requested donations from industries her agency regulates—a practice that would be ethically improper and possibly illegal. The Post story forcefully asserted that she has. Under the headline “Sebelius turns to health executives to finance Obamacare,” the paper reported that she had spent the past three months hitting up insurance, hospital and pharmaceutical officials for “large financial donations” to help the government shepherd consumers into the nation’s new health system. The claim was attributed to an anonymous HHS official and an unnamed “industry person familiar with the secretary’s activities.”

The paper quoted agency spokesman Jason Young denying that Sebelius had “solicited funds from industries that HHS regulates.” But the charge set off a flurry of news coverage and righteous outrage. “To solicit funds from health-care executives to help pay for the implementation of the President’s $2.6 trillion health spending law is absurd,” Sen. Orrin Hatch said in a statement. “I will be seeking more information from the administration about these actions to help better understand whether there are conflicts of interest and if it violated federal law.”

Lamar Alexander, the senior Republican on the Senate health committee, went further, likening the secretary’s fundraising effort to the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Reagan administration officials secretly sold arms to Iran and funneled the proceeds to right-wing insurgents in Nicaragua. “Secretary Sebelius’ fundraising . . . should be fully investigated by Congress,” he told reporters in Nashville on Saturday.

Will these charges stick? Is a cabinet secretary really shaking down the very industries she regulates? HHS acknowledges that she has asked them to help raise public awareness. The agency also confirms that she has asked business leaders from outside the health sector to help finance groups like Enroll America, a nonprofit foundation set up to educate consumers about the new health care law. Those activities are all kosher under the Public Health Service Act.

But Young, the HHS spokesman, still disputes the central premise of the Washington Post story and all the criticism it has sparked. “The secretary has made no fundraising request to entities regulated by HHS,” he says. “We’ve worked with a wide range of stakeholders. But when it comes to fundraising, we ask only non-regulated entities”—that is, no one from the health-care industry.

If that’s true, HHS could quickly clear the air by releasing a log of the calls Sebelius has made. Young says the agency is busy preparing one and will release it shortly.

This scandal-plagued administration should hope it vindicates her, but the congressional Republicans calling for her head should reflect on their own role in the affair. After failing repeatedly to repeal or overturn Obamacare, they’re now working to thwart its implementation: that’s why Sibelius is begging business leaders for the funds to secure the nation’s health. The richest country in the world should be able to do better.


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Stand Up for Religious Freedom—One More Time!

June 7, 2012 By Kathy Schiffer

Our work isn’t done, folks.

Apparently, some in the White House and the media think that the Church’s opposition to the HHS Mandate has lost steam. But just to be sure you know how great this is for women, the White House staged a June 7 “Women’s Health Town Hall” which they describe as “an interactive, open dialogue about how the health care law, the Affordable Care Act, is improving the health of women and their families.”

Tomorrow, June 8, is your chance to let them know how wrong they are, and how women and men value their First Amendment freedom of religion.

In March 2012, concerned Americans gathered in 163 cities across America in defense of religious liberty, and to protest the HHS Mandate. At noon on June 8, there will be a second rally. Concerned Americans in at least 160 cities will once again come together in a sign of solidarity.

For information about the events and the speakers, and to find a rally in your community (or to start your own), visit StandUpforReligiousFreedom.com.

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