When Science Illiteracy Comes with Deadly Consequences

In June of 2025, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—a vital panel of experts that advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that reviewed vaccine information and data and then made recommendations on who should be eligible to receive certain vaccines and whether insurers should cover them (Constantino, 2025). This was just the opening salvo fired by politically inspired voices within the Trump Administration, determined to dismantle nearly 100 years of progress in the global fight against preventable, crippling, and often fatal diseases.

Since that time, the Trump Administration has worked tirelessly to slander, punish, and remove highly regarded physicians and scientists (Yousif, 2025), and has instead elevated a seemingly endless parade of scientifically illiterate “vaccine skeptics” to positions of power, all while making scientifically false claims about the nonexistent link between vaccines and autism spectrum disorder (Stein & Huang, 2025), purposely stoking fears about the imaginary dangers of the childhood vaccine schedule (Horton & Drenon, 2026), and openly lying about how vaccines are tested (Manto, 2026).

Rather than go through a point-by-point refutation of every false or misleading claim made by the Trump Administration about vaccine science and vaccines themselves, PlusInc will instead highlight the real-world consequences of “vaccine skepticism” by giving a brief history lesson.

Did you know that the 1900 and 1910 U.S. Census asked families for the number of children born and the number still living?

It’s true!

In 1900, the Census began asking adult women to report the number of children they had ever given birth to and how many were still living (Haines & Preston, 1996).

You see, childhood mortality was so common prior to the widespread utilization of vaccines that it was not uncommon for families to give birth to multiple children, but have only a few survive to adulthood. A prime example of this is the Sherman Clark household, from Royalton, OH.

Mary C. Clark, wife of Sherman Clark, reported in the 1900 Census that she had given birth to 5 children, of whom 3 survived; in the 1910 Census, she reported that she had given birth to 8 children, of whom 5 survived. This indicates that she gave birth to three additional children between 1900 and 1910, but only one survived (Crow, n.d.).

Although the U.S. Census Bureau collected this information, it never reported the 1900 findings. The 1910 Census findings were released with the 1940 federal Census, but the Census Bureau never tabulated or released the child-survival information (Haines & Preston, 1996).

There are thousands of anecdotal stories of families with a dozen or more children born, but only a handful surviving, and many of those children died of preventable diseases, including pneumonia, diphtheria, dysentery, measles, various types of influenza, and other vaccine-preventable diseases (North, 2025). So high were the child mortality rates in the early-1900s that more than 18% of children never made it to the age of 5 (Haines & Preston, 1991).

Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2007 found that, after the production, distribution, and deployment of various vaccines, many diseases that were previously fatal were all but eradicated in America by 2006 (Table 1):

Source: Roush & Murphy, 2007

These aren’t imaginary numbers.

Implementing vaccine science in the American population led to more than 99% declines in cases of diphtheria, measles, paralytic polio, rubella, congenital rubella syndrome, and smallpox by 2006.

Beyond just preventing the deaths of children, vaccines also prevent the chronic, lifelong impacts that accompany these diseases. For example, mumps can lead to sterility (the inability to have children), encephalitis (brain swelling), pancreatitis (pancreas swelling), meningitis (swelling of the brain and spinal cord coverings), and hearing loss. Measles can permanently damage the immune system, making people more susceptible to pneumonia, encephalitis, and blood clotting disorders (Let’s Get Real, 2024).

This was widely accepted science in the U.S. government for over 100 years.

And then came the “vaccine skeptics.”

In 2025, there were 2,289 confirmed cases of measles in the United States, including 48 outbreaks (defined as 3 or more related cases), of which 90% of confirmed cases were part of an outbreak. In 2026, as of August 20th, there have been 2,777 confirmed measles cases, including 36 new outbreaks, with 94% of confirmed cases part of an outbreak (CDC, 2026). By comparison, there were just 285 measles cases, including 16 outbreaks, of which 69% of confirmed cases were part of an outbreak (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1 - Reported Measles Cases in the United States from 1962-2026:

Source: CDC, 2026

Figure 2 – Yearly Measles Cases, 2000-Present:

Source: CDC, 2026

Plainly put, it didn’t have to be this stupid. But it’s going to get stupider and deadlier.

According to data released by the CDC, the vaccination exemption rates for the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine in U.S. kindergartens have steadily increased since 2013, from 1.6% to 4.2% in 2025, with a 17% increase in exemptions between 2024 and 2025, from 3.6% to 4.2%—the largest year-over-year increase ever recorded (Glenza, 2026). That’s nearly 280,000 children who are at risk of contracting these preventable diseases, passing them along to others, suffering the symptoms, and potentially dying.

Again…it didn’t have to be this stupid.

But, that’s where we are.

And we’re going to pay the price.

Hepatitis B Vaccination Rates in Newborns Drop Precipitously

Vaccinations in newborn infants against the Hepatitis B virus (HBV) have declined by more than 10 percentage points in just two years, from a peak of 83.5% in 2023 to 73.2% in 2025 (Rothman et al., 2026).

For those working in public health, this raises serious concerns about efforts to eliminate Hepatitis B transmission worldwide, as HBV can be transmitted with relative ease in people who are unvaccinated through blood and bodily fluids, including through sexual encounters, the sharing of syringes in Persons Who Use Drugs (PWUDs), and through close contact with shared surfaces as HBV can survive for up to a week outside the body (Rosen, 2025).

This rapid decline in vaccination among newborns follows a long trend of decreasing confidence in childhood vaccination requirements, specifically, and in vaccine science, generally. A 2024 Gallup poll found that just 40% of Americans responded that it was “Extremely Important” that parents vaccinate their children, down from 64% in 2001. More concerning was the precipitous decline in those who responded that it was “Extremely to Very Important” from 94% in 2001 to just 69% in 2024 (Figure 1, Jones, 2024).

Figure 1 - Americans Are Less Likely to Say It Is Important for Parents to Have Their Children Vaccinated

Source: Jones, 2024

While declines occurred across the political spectrum, respondents who self-identified as Republicans or Republican-Leaning Independents accounted for the significant decline in the perception of vaccination importance, decreasing from 62% of those respondents saying that it was “Extremely Important” in 2001 to just 26% in 2024. This is compared to 66% of Democrats and Democrat-Leaning Independents responding this way in 2001, and 63% in 2024 (Figures 2 & 3, Jones, 2024).

Figure 2 - Republicans and Republican-Leaning Independents Account for the Decline in Perceived Importance of Childhood Vaccinations

Source: Jones, 2024

Figure 3 - Importance of Parents Having Their Children Vaccinated, by Political Party Identification and Leaning

Source: Jones, 2024

These changes in public perception of vaccines come after a nearly-three-decade campaign on the parts of anti-vaccination activists and influencers to sow distrust in and fear of vaccines, themselves, as well as the science behind vaccinations, the development and testing/trial process, and the vaccine manufacturers, themselves.

A 2021 study released by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that just 12 people were responsible from the bulk of misleading claims and outright lies about COVID-19 vaccines across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, including:

• Dr. Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician who regularly peddles supplements and “wellness” products

• Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the current Secretary of Health and Human Services in the United States

• Ty & Charlene Bollinger, who promoted a conspiracy theory that Bill Gates planned to inject microchips into everyone using COVID-19 vaccines

• Dr. Sherry Tenpenny, an osteopathic physician who regularly makes false claims about vaccine safety and efficacy

• Rizza Islam, who has regularly opposed vaccines to his audience of primarily Black people

• Dr. Rashid Buttar, an osteopathic physician who actively spread disinformation that the COVID-19 vaccine increased susceptibility to HIV

• Erin Elizabeth, the romantic partner of Dr. Mercola who own and operates the website “Health Nut News”

• Sayer Ji, owner and operator of “GreenMedInfo.org”

• Kelly Brogan, the romantic partner of Sayer Ji

• Christiane Northrup, an obstetrician and gynecologist who has used her position as a medical authority to claim that the COVID-19 vaccine caused an “800% increase in chronic illnesses”

• Ben Tapper, a chiropractor

• Kevin Jenkins, who has posited that vaccines are a conspiracy among elites to eliminate Black people (Center for Countering Digital Hate, 2021)

Secretary Kennedy, who has been working to spread disinformation about vaccines since 1990s, succeeded in convincing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to adopt an “individual-based decision-making” approach to HBV vaccinations among infants. This decision, reached in December of 2025, included the following statement:

“Individual-based decision-making, referred to on the CDC immunization schedule as shared clinical decision-making, means that parents and health care providers should consider vaccine benefits, vaccine risks, and infection risks, and that parents consult with their health care provider and decide when or if their child will begin the hepatitis B vaccine series. Parents and health care providers should consider whether there are infection risks such as a household member who has hepatitis B or frequent contact with persons who have emigrated from areas where hepatitis B is common” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2025).

However, a recent ruling from a federal judge in the U.S. District Court of the District of Massachusetts issued a stay that would:

• Temporarily block Kennedy’s appointment of 13 new members to the highly influential Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)

• Block all votes of the new constituted ACIP

• Prevent the current ACIP from meeting until the case is resolved, saying that ACIP “…as currently constituted” cannot meet (Haelle, 2026).

This ruling also means that any recommendations and federal policy changes made by the currently constituted ACIP since May 2025 are undone (Haelle, 2026).

An Argument in Favor of Competence

“Autism is totally out of control,” Donald Trump told reporters on Friday. “I think we, maybe, have a reason why.” (Röhn, Burns, & Paun, 2025).

The reason why, according to the brain trust hired by the arguably least competent U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary in American history?

Tylenol.

No…we’re not kidding.

One of the most popular analgesic over-the-counter medications is being blamed for the fact that, over 80 years after Dr. Leo Kanner first described a pattern of “abnormal behavior” as ‘early infantile autism” (National Autistic Society, n.d.), our government’s top healthcare agency is now peddling a fantastical story that taking Tylenol during pregnancy is what “can be associated with a very increased risk…” of new autism diagnoses in the United States (Christensen, Dillinger, & Tirrell, 2025). Not surprisingly, this claim is devoid of any facts.

If this pronouncement sounds far-fetched, that’s because the use of acetaminophen—one of the key ingredients in Tylenol—has been repeatedly studied since the release of the drug in 1955, particularly in pregnant women. In fact, there’s nary a substance, appliance, or even fabric that hasn’t been studied over the past century in an effort to identify the root causes of virtually every birth defect, genetic condition, chronic ailment, and neonatal ailment. Tylenol itself—arguably the most common pain reliever in the United States—has repeatedly faced scrutiny due to its ubiquity.

Monday’s disorganized pronouncement was made with either complete unawareness or discounting of findings from a study published just last year in JAMA Network that found no link between the use of acetaminophen and children’s risk of autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or any intellectual disabilities (Ahlqvist et al., 2024).

What made the Ahlqvist study so important is not just that they repeated similar studies conducted since 1955, but did so on a national scale, including a population sample of 2,480,797 children born between 1995-2019 in Sweden, and was done using a full-match sibling control analysis (analyzing results of full siblings with the same parents) to determine if there were differences in outcomes between siblings.

There were not (Figure 1).

Figure 1 - Risk of Diagnosis by Age 10 by Exposure to Acetaminophen

Note: Ahlqvist et al., 2025

Looking at the crude rate across all subjects, Ahlqvist found that virtually no increased risk of children developing autism, ADHD, or an intellectual disability as a result of prenatal exposure to acetaminophen. The study’s authors go so far as to suggest that studies whose design did not utilize sibling controls likely found associations as a result of familial confounding—failing to take into account shared familial risk factors, including genetic factors, which are either difficult or impossible to account for using statistical adjustments (D’Onofrio et al., 2013).

In our current reality, however, none of these studies conducted by many of the world’s best medical scientists mean anything because it’s apparently more important to indulge the conspiracy theories of the least scientifically literate amongst us. Just last week, at a Senate oversight hearing on the mess at HHS, RFK Jr. essentially accused every physician, healthcare professional, and supporter of science of being bought and paid for by Big Pharma (Griffing, 2025).

The current HHS Secretary needs to deflect criticism away from himself because, increasingly, the American public doesn’t trust him (Austin Jr., 2025). According to an analysis by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, “only 39% of Americans have confidence that Kennedy is providing the public with trustworthy information regarding public health, while 60% lack confidence in him (Wappes, 2025).

Kennedy, long a vaccine skeptic, has a history of making both purposely misleading and scientifically false accusations against medical institutions, many of which were through the organization he ran from 2015 to 2023, Children’s Health Defense, which regularly targeted minority communities in attempts to stoke fears of vaccination (Berman, 2024).

Beyond his anti-vaccination screeds, Kennedy has also:

• Posited that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people (Koenig & Shelton, 2023)

• Claimed that HIV didn’t cause AIDS, but party drugs do (Firth, 2024)

• Claimed that Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer (Glover, 2024)

• Claimed that 5G damages human DNA, causes cancer, and is being installed in order to carry out mass surveillance (Mostrous, 2020).

More damning, however, is that Kennedy has been given carte blanche to do whatever he wishes with little to no real pushback from Congress, where 52 Senators—all Republican—voted to confirm him.

Since then, Kennedy has embarked on a typically Trumpian campaign of instituting drastic changes to programming, staffing, offices, and services without considering the real-world implications of his actions. Since his inception, he has:

• Laid off thousands of employees across the various HHS agencies (Branswell et al., 2025)

• All but eliminated the communications department at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including those that deal with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests Chen et al., 2025)

• Gutted at least seven minority health offices, eliminating all or almost all of their workers, including directors (Constantino, 2025)

• Attempted to revoke $11 billion in funding for addiction and mental health care (Mann, 2025)

• Demanded that all vaccine studies include placebo controls despite vaccine studies already including placebo controls (Stein, 2025)

• Fired the entirety Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice (ACIP) and replaced them with hand-selected stooges (Schnirring & Van Beusekom, 2025)

• Demanded the retraction of a Danish vaccine study that demonstrated no link between aluminum in vaccines and autism (Fieldhouse, 2025)

• Fired the recently confirmed CDC director after she refused to fire career scientists or approve any recommendations made by an outside advisory panel with no scientific evidence or adequate science (King, 2025).

Every example of Kennedy’s virtually unrestrained power-wielding has resulted in not just the immediate outcomes—firings, funding cuts, and department shuffling—but in vast immediate and long-term consequences designed not to improve trust in the CDC and HHS (despite claims to the contrary), but to destabilize trust in our public health system to such a degree that it is functionally worthless. Our concern is how these actions will undoubtedly fuel health disparities.

RFK Jr’s repeated statements, actions, and decisions bring us around, again, to the reality that literally no reports, studies, or data released yesterday linking autism to Tylenol can be trusted to be scientifically rigorous, accurate, or reliable.

What we are seeing now is the result of decades of efforts on the part of Kennedy and others in the anti-vax space to rewrite history and dismiss scientific evidence fundamentally. His actions depend on the scientific illiteracy of two generations of adults who have rarely, if ever, experienced the true horrors of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks. We have grown too comfortable believing that measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, smallpox, and other diseases, including polio, just “weren’t really all that bad.”

They were that bad, and anyone who thinks that they weren’t needs to visit one of the handful of countries where lack of access to vaccines has allowed them to remain active and devastate the lives of children and families.

And now, after demanding that scientists prove the link between vaccines and autism and coming up blank, our government has decreed that Tylenol is to blame.

What happened yesterday at The White House could be characterized as health misinformation, at best, and health disinformation, at worst, but either way, the true losers were the American public. To put it bluntly, “Are you gaslighting us?”

Disclaimer: PlusInc has received funding from the following industry partners: Genentech, Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Gilead Sciences. None of the funding received has come with any stipulations that PlusInc mention, market, or aid with the distribution of any specific products, nor have these funders either asked for or received editorial input or control over any publication issued by PlusInc.