Vaccine Shortages. Viral Outbreaks. Widespread Illness. More Death.

I am not the first to try to look at a crystal ball on the future of vaccines in America. In January 2025, during the Kennedy confirmation hearing, senator Elizabeth Warren began to trace the actions he could take as secretary, given his a history of profit from the proceedings against vaccines:

You can publish your anti-vaccine plots, but this time on the header of the US government, which a jury could be impressed. You can name people in the CDC vaccine panel that share your anti-Vax views and let them make your dirty job. You can tell the CDC vaccine panel to withdraw a particular vaccine from the vaccine calendar. You can withdraw vaccines from special remuneration programs, which would open manufacturers to mass crimes. You could make more injuries eligible for compensation, even if there is no causal evidence. You can modify the processes of the vaccination courts to facilitate the obtaining of unwanted proceedings. You can give FDA data to your law firm’s friends, and they could use it, but that benefited them. You can change vaccine labeling, you can change vaccine information rules, you can change compensation requests in the vaccine injury compensation program.

In the end, Warren added: “Kennedy can kill access to vaccines and win millions of dollars while he does. Children could die. But Robert Kennedy can continue to collect.”

Indeed, part of this happened. In an X video in May, Kennedy announced that the CDC changed its recommendations for the cocovio vaccine. The agency has transformed the recommendation of childhood “should” to “May” and qualified the process of “shared clinical decision -making”, while eliminating the recommendation entirely for pregnant people, who have a much higher risk of serious illness and death.

I asked the experts: could other vaccine recommendations be softened like this? “I think it is a real possibility – I think that in many ways, it is an objective,” said Paul Offer, professor of pediatrics at the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania. Project 2025, the right plan for the second Trump administration, specifically called to eliminate the CDC as a recommended body. If a vaccine is no longer recommended, “it means that it could not be necessary for entering school.” (School mandates have long been a target of anti-vaccine activists.)

Others thought it could be even worse. “”[Kennedy’s] The final objective is to delete most or all infant vaccines – to make them inaccessible, is my point of view, “said Dorit Reiss, professor at UC Hastings College of Law.” Your scenario is therefore plausible, although you are very careful by saying that it could move to shared clinical decision. They could say “it is no longer recommended”. The new ACIPS advisers could stop recommending certain vaccines entirely: the shots of HPV, influenza and hepatitis B have all been targeted by anti-vaccine activists.