Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. called for cancellation of government ads for flu shots as the deadly virus raged last year — despite having assured skeptical lawmakers he believed vaccines played a “critical role in healthcare,” newly released emails show.
Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, made the move less than 24 hours after being sworn in as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, according to The New York Times.
Kennedy’s Feb. 14, 2025, request was relayed to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by his communications director, Andrew Nixon, and is mentioned in a message that referenced the call.
“Andrew Nixon/HHS gave me a call and asked that we pull out of circulation all campaign ad buys related to flu or anything encouraging shots or vaccinations,” CDC official Nicole Coffin wrote. “He said this request came directly from the Secretary.”
Nixon’s call came the same day the CDC announced that 16,000 Americans had been killed by influenza-related ailments, including 68 children, according to The Times.
An HHS spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a Friday inquiry from The Independent.
During Kennedy’s Senate confirmation hearings in January 2025, he said, “I believe vaccines have a critical role in healthcare; all of my kids are vaccinated.”
But he also stood by his lucrative anti-vaccine advocacy, saying, “I have often disturbed the status quo by asking uncomfortable questions, and I’m not going to apologize for that.”
The hearings came after Kennedy privately told Republican senators that he was “all for” polio vaccines after previously suggesting that they’d killed “many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.”
“He told me he is not anti-vaccine. He is pro-vaccine safety, which strikes me as a rational position to take,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told Politico at the time.
The Senate later confirmed President Donald Trump’s nomination of Kennedy, 52-48, with Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who survived childhood polio, joining all 47 Democrats in opposition.
The 253 pages of emails were posted online Thursday by the Democrats on the Senate health committee, who said they came from the CDC’s former chief medical officer, Dr. Debra Houry, CBS News reported.
The committee’s ranking member, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., posted a summary of the emails on his website, which said they showed Kennedy’s “politicization of HHS, willingness to ignore vaccine science and undermine the basic health and safety of Americans.”
The email included one from August 2025 in which a top Kennedy aide told then-CDC Director Susan Monarez about the “absolute need for political review of major policy decisions at CDC” and told her to “err on the side of caution” in determining which decisions were “major,” according to CBS News.
The White House fired Monarez eight days later, prompting a series of resignations by top CDC officials, including Houry and the head of its National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
Monarez later wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Kennedy had pressured her to “resign or face termination,” which Kennedy denied during testimony before the Senate health committee in September.
Other emails detail Kennedy’s overhaul of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, with a draft memo by a Kennedy aide saying its vacancy schedule gave “Biden appointees significant sway over ACIP and its recommendations until 2028,” according to CBS News.
“Secretary wants to replace 10 members on the ACIP committee. He has a bench of 10 ready to replace,” according to separate notes on a CDC meeting. “He doesn’t care which members.”
Kennedy later removed all 17 committee members but a federal judge in March stayed his appointment of 13 replacements in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups.
