By now, most of us have probably seen the clips. On the morning of August 2, 2026, Secretary Kennedy appeared on CNN’s State of the Union and spent twenty minutes locked in a tense back-and-forth with Dana Bash. When I started talking to friends about it, the word we kept coming back to was vitriol. The mask had fallen. There was a kind of raw hostility in the way he dismissed her questions, and it felt familiar in an unsettling way. When Bash pressed him on how his language feeds vaccine hesitancy, he told her she was “repeating it like a parrot,” that all she knew how to do was repeat what she had been told and say to trust the experts. I’ve seen that exact accusation screamed verbatim in our comment sections for years: that we’re all just parrots, that none of us has an independent thought, that we’re merely echoing a script handed down by some faceless authority. To make matters worse, every time he said the word “experts,” he made air quotes with his fingers, as if the entire concept of expertise was a joke. People with far more political savvy than I have argued that this was a deliberate performance, a calculated play to rally his base. I don’t know whether that’s true. What I do know is how it feels to hear that message repeated again and again while we are getting hit with outbreak after outbreak—measles, foodborne parasites, you name it. It reminds me of an old seawall taking a repetitive battering during a hurricane. At some point, you start wondering how much more it can absorb before something breaks.
Those air quotes were not just a rhetorical flourish. They were about who gets to count as an expert in the first place. Immunology, vaccinology, clinical medicine, epidemiology—decades of training in any one of those fields apparently no longer clears the bar on its own. I know the counterargument because I see it in my inbox all the time: sure, that’s expertise, but the entire field has been “captured,” so we need people from outside the bubble who will push back. The problem is that consensus among experts is not a club agreeing with itself. It exists because the highest-quality evidence keeps pointing in the same direction, study after study, country after country, for decades. These are the same researchers who are constantly reviewing the scientific literature and updating their views when new, high-quality evidence emerges. That is what expertise actually looks like. Last June, we already saw what “outside the bubble” means in practice, when Secretary Kennedy removed all seventeen members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee. A federal judge later found that many of the replacements were unlawfully appointed, and HHS then issued a new charter with fewer requirements for members’ expertise. The meetings themselves have been painful to sit through, because what gets platformed there is a kind of skepticism built on misreadings of weak data, presented with all the authority of a federal advisory committee. It is one thing to hear that kind of rhetoric in a podcast or a comment section. It is another to watch it play out inside the institutions that are supposed to protect public health.
Let’s set the record straight, briefly, because there are only so many times you can say the same thing. Measles is not confined to religious communities that don’t vaccinate. The CDC has confirmed 2,371 cases this year, 93 percent of them in people who were unvaccinated or whose status was unknown, and that is the most annual cases in the United States since 1991. While the West Texas outbreak did begin in a Mennonite community, it spread well beyond it, growing to more than 750 cases. This year, South Carolina has been hit hardest, and outbreaks are running right now in Ohio, Utah, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, where more cases were reported in a single week than at any point in the past decade. On other claims: RSV did not come out of gain-of-function research. Gain-of-function research means deliberately changing a pathogen in the lab so that it gains some new ability, like spreading more easily or infecting a species it couldn’t infect before. RSV was identified in the late 1950s, decades before the molecular techniques associated with modern gain-of-function research even existed. It is also not the biggest killer of kids in this country, though it is the leading cause of infant hospitalization. And the United States never had the world’s highest mortality rate from COVID-19. Johns Hopkins’ final tracking data put the U.S. case fatality rate at about 1.1 percent, while Peru’s was 4.9 percent. If we look at deaths per 100,000 people instead, the U.S. still wasn’t close to the top, trailing Peru and a dozen or so other countries. COVID-19 vaccines did protect children, too. One study in CDC’s own Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report found that vaccination cut emergency and urgent care visits by 76 percent in kids ages nine months through four years, and by 56 percent in kids ages five through seventeen. These are not obscure findings. They are straightforward, replicable facts.
Another thing that deserves real attention is the claim about infant vaccines and autism. The argument often points to the Institute of Medicine’s 2012 vaccine safety review, which examined 158 possible vaccine-and-adverse-event combinations across eight routinely used vaccines, drawing on more than 12,000 peer-reviewed studies. For many of those combinations, the committee concluded that the evidence was inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship. I understand why that wording sounds alarming. But it describes the strength of the available evidence, not a signal that someone found and couldn’t explain. The committee anticipated exactly this misreading, saying “inadequate to accept or reject means just that.” On autism specifically, it evaluated the MMR vaccine and concluded that the evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship. It also looked at DTaP and autism and found the evidence inadequate, because the one study available came from the Geiers, the same father-and-son pair that has been repeatedly criticized for flawed methodology, and it relied on passive surveillance reports with no unvaccinated comparison group. The following year, the IOM reviewed the childhood immunization schedule as a whole and found no evidence that it was associated with major safety concerns. Pandemic disruptions are part of the story of falling vaccination rates, but not the main part. Kindergarten MMR coverage fell meaningfully between the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years, driven both by changes in health-seeking behavior and by school closures, since kids who don’t come back to school don’t have the usual cues to get their school-required vaccines. The seed is real, but it doesn’t explain why we have this many measles cases now. To his credit, Kennedy did tell Bash that the measles vaccine works, that it stops measles in about 97 percent of cases, and that parents should vaccinate their children. I’m glad he said it. But it was a little too little, too late. He didn’t say it, and he certainly didn’t shout it, when three people died of measles last year, the first U.S. measles deaths since 2015, two of them young girls in West Texas. What he offered then was vitamin A, which is neither a preventive nor a cure. It is a supportive treatment in specific circumstances. And death is nowhere near the only bad measles outcome. Roughly one in every thousand children who get measles develops encephalitis, brain swelling, and about one in five of those dies. A smaller number develop SSPE, a fatal brain disease that can surface seven to ten years after everyone thought the infection was over. Measles also causes immune amnesia: it destroys the memory cells your immune system spent years building against everything else it had encountered, leaving children vulnerable to infections they were already protected from, sometimes for years. We will be paying for these outbreaks long after the case counts stabilize.
Perhaps the most striking new detail from the CNN interview was Kennedy telling Bash that the President asked him to study whether vaccines cause autism. A year ago this month, I published a piece in the New York Times walking through some seventy studies on vaccines and autism and showing how the handful claiming a link were built. Now here we are, relitigating the same question yet again. Last week, a study published in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal followed more than 2.5 million U.S. children through age eight and found no association between a first MMR dose received before twenty-four months and a subsequent autism diagnosis. It looked at childhood autism specifically rather than the full spectrum. The findings sit alongside more than forty high-quality studies across seven countries and 5.6 million children. This is what the evidence looks like when it converges from many directions: consistent, robust, and reassuring. Meanwhile, both my kids go back to school in a few weeks, not that I’m counting down or anything, and measles is exactly the disease that finds an under-vaccinated classroom. The virus can linger in the air for up to two hours after an infected person has left the room. By November, we’ll know whether the U.S. has crossed the twelve-month threshold of continuous transmission that would cost it the measles elimination status it has held since 2000. That is a strange prospect to be facing while Secretary Kennedy tells CNN that we are handling measles better than any country in the world. Every dollar spent relitigating whether vaccines cause autism is a dollar taken from research that could actually help autistic people and their families thrive. There are better questions to ask, better places to invest our attention, and better ways to protect the children in our lives.
At the end of the day, all of this lands somewhere deeply personal. This is not political theater to those of us who work in public health; it is the work of trying to keep people alive and healthy. It is watching children die from a disease we know how to prevent. It is seeing a parent in a clinic, anxious and confused, trying to make sense of conflicting messages from people in power. It is feeling exhausted by the same false claims resurfacing every few months, dressed up as new revelations when they are just the same old misreadings and misunderstandings. The human response to uncertainty is to look for someone to trust, and it is devastating when the people in positions of authority exploit that trust to push ideology over evidence. But there is also hope in this story. There are still researchers, clinicians, educators, and community leaders who refuse to give in to the noise. There are still parents asking questions, reading carefully, and choosing to vaccinate their children because they understand that a needle is nothing compared to the horror of watching a child struggle to breathe. There are still journalists pressing for answers and scientists speaking up, even when it is exhausting. We can be honest about the damage that this moment is doing, and we can also commit to doing something about it. We can refuse to let the air quotes define what expertise means. We can hold our leaders accountable when they platform dangerous misinformation. And we can keep talking to one another, not as parrots, but as people who genuinely care about the world we are leaving to the next generation. The seawall may be battered, but it is not gone yet. We still have a choice about whether we let the water in.