RFK Jr. and the Collapse of America’s Vaccine Defenses

by | Aug 27, 2026 | Politics, Corruption & Criminality

Image: The Hartmann Report

RFK Jr. and the Collapse of America’s Vaccine Defenses

by | Aug 27, 2026 | Politics, Corruption & Criminality

Image: The Hartmann Report

Covid is surging, measles is killing again, and the man running America’s health system spent years attacking the very vaccines that could save lives.

Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann

Louise went to the local pharmacy yesterday to get her Covid shot because Covid is climbing in all fifty states right now. She was turned away, because there’s apparently no current Covid vaccine available anywhere in America.

This isn’t a minor risk to us all, and should be a national scandal. It’s baffling that the media is ignoring it, particularly given the consequences.

A Nature study published this month from Boston Children’s Hospital found that severe Covid reactivates other dormant viruses already quietly living inside us, including Epstein-Barr, cytomegalovirus, and herpes simplex. They noted that up to 50,000 Americans died of Covid in the 2025-2026 respiratory season and over ten million Americans are living with debilitating long Covid.

An earlier Nature paper out of the University of Colorado found that Covid infections can wake up dormant cancer cells sleeping in the lungs, roughly doubling the probability that lung cancer survivors will die of that cancer. They also pointed out that because the vaccine reduces the severity of the Covid inflammatory response, it also reduces the chances of lung cancers popping up after people catch the disease.

So, the shot she was trying to get wasn’t just because she didn’t want to spend a week in bed with a sore throat and a fever (although that’s good enough): these are deadly real-life consequences of letting your vaccination (and the immunity it confers) slide.

The lack of a vaccine and the muttering of our pharmacist about “the feds” led us on a search for reasons why there’s no current vaccine anywhere in America right now, while other countries are happily vaccinating their people as you read these words. Turns out it appears to be mostly Bob Kennedy’s responsibility.

Manufacturers stopped making last year’s formula long ago, and the new formula for the 2026-2027 season that includes the new and truly awful XFG strain was initially approved by the FDA back in May. Last year we got the new fall vaccine on August 27th, but that agency still hasn’t granted final approval to the new vaccines, so nothing is shipping and won’t until late September or October.

And it’s not like this couldn’t have been predicted; every year since the pandemic we’ve seen a late summer wave as people travel and kids go back to school. The wave this year is particularly bad, most likely because so many people haven’t gotten their boosters and so our national immunity has waned.

Why the delay?

  • Bob fired all seventeen medical professionals who were members of the CDC’s Vaccine Advisory Committee and replaced them with anti-vax quacks. A federal judge, noting their lack of genuine qualifications, stayed Bob’s appointments in March (along with Bob’s rewriting the childhood vaccine schedule) so the committee that authorizes your insurance company to pay for your shots has been legally frozen for five months. If you want a shot, be prepared to fork over a hundred bucks or more. If you can find one.
  • Bob also cancelled 22 mRNA vaccine research projects worth close to half a billion dollars, this same year that a breakthrough was announced with the development of an mRNA vaccine that knocks out the deadly skin cancer melanoma.

These new mRNA vaccines are safe and effective, and offer dramatic promise for fighting everything from regular diseases to cancers of all types. Because they’re made in a lab instead of grown in eggs like the conventional flu (and many other) vaccines, they can be quickly and inexpensively mass produced, something that’s particularly useful for rapidly mutating viruses like Ebola, Covid, and the flu.

And just two weeks ago, with Bob standing next to him, Trump signed an executive order cutting recommended childhood immunizations from 17 down to 11, ordered the MMR shot split into three separate injections (there is no scientific basis for this whatsoever), and ordered Todd Blache’s Justice Department to start suing states that don’t hand out religious and other exemptions for childhood vaccinations to pretty much any parent who wants one.

The result of this and Kennedy’s trash-talking vaccines for years is quickly becoming evident: Americans are dying. Two unvaccinated people died of measles in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania this week; they’re the first measles deaths in the US this year, and the first in that state in 35 years.

Why Lancaster County and why now?

Five years ago, on July 31, 2021, when he held no federal office, Bob Kennedy showed up at the Lancaster County farming fair and spoke to a crowd of around 1,500 people. He told them a joke about measles, saying when he got it as a kid it let him stay home and watch TV all week with his brothers and sisters.

The crowd laughed.

He then told them the treatment for measles was chicken soup and vitamin A, and warned that the feds were coming to vaccinate the local Amish community because “they cannot stand the fact that you are healthy.”

They’re not laughing now. They’re dying.

Paul Offit has written about that speech at length, and he noted that Bob had been to Samoa where he apparently cautioned people about vaccines. As a result, Offit notes, 83 people died, most of them children.

Measles vaccine coverage among kids in Lancaster County has fallen, since 2017, from 95.5% down to 87.6%. Because measles is the single most contagious disease known to humanity—it can linger in the air for several hours and infects 9 out of 10 unvaccinated people who walk through that cloud and take a breath—a community really needs to maintain around a 95% vaccination rate to avoid big outbreaks.

After yesterday’s two measles deaths, Bob called Governor Josh Shapiro to offer federal help. Shapiro turned him down, telling reporters:

“I was very, very blunt with him, and I made very clear that his actions and the rhetoric that’s coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America, particularly right here in Pennsylvania.

“There’s real life consequences to spreading misinformation.”

Nationally, we’ve seen >2,700 cases this year so far, the worst year for measles since 1991, and we’re about to lose the “measles elimination” status we earned in 2000. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Bob if he accepts any responsibility for that awful record, he said, “Absolutely not.”

So now that we know the “How,” what’s the answer for the “Why?”

Mary Trump, a brilliant writer and commentator, licensed clinical psychologist, and Trump’s niece who’s known him and his family since childhood, was on my radio/TV program yesterday and we discussed one possible answer: Vladimir Putin wants Americans sick and broke and Donald—who’s talked with Putin for more than an hour about every 2 weeks since his inauguration and whose CIA director is in Moscow right now—could be happy to oblige.

Pretty much everything Putin has asked of Trump or would want from him he’s gotten:

  • Cut off weaponry to Ukraine,
  • Reduce American troop strength in Germany,
  • Block NATO membership for Ukraine,
  • Trying to recognize parts of Ukraine as Russian territory,
  • Ordering State and Treasury to give sanctions relief to Russian oligarchs,
  • Letting the nuclear START treaty expire,
  • Disbanding the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force,
  • Closing the State Department’s R/FIMI office that mapped Russian disinformation efforts targeting Americans,
  • Gutting CISA’s election security teams including the Election Security Resilience Team that could block Russian election-manipulation efforts and regional advisors, and more.

When Biden was president in 2021, our State Department nailed three English-language online outlets run by Russian intelligence that were trash-talking the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins published a study in the American Journal of Public Health showing how Russian troll accounts were “using vaccines as a wedge” to create the appearance of a debate among American scientists when none existed. They concluded the Russian goal was to “corrode trust in vaccines” among the American public.

Only two cabinet secretaries have ever been successfully impeached: Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876 and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024. Neither was convicted and removed from office by the Senate.

Nonetheless, Congresswoman Haley Stevens filed articles of impeachment against Kennedy last December, charging abuse of authority and citing his efforts to undermine American public health.

While there’s no chance Mike Johnson or Republicans in the House will allow articles of impeachment against Kennedy to even get out of committee this year, supporting such an effort could—if Democrats can take the House and Senate this fall—pave the way for a return to normalcy either through replacing him or simply chastising him.

When Republicans impeached Mayorkas, they established the modern precedent of impeachment as a remedy for a secretary who’s considered incompetent by the majority of Congress.

So, it may be a good time to call your member of the House and your two Senators and put this on their radar screens (202-224-3121). Stevens’ impeachment resolution, H.Res.944 is still alive and worthy of getting some more co-sponsors.

And if you learned anything valuable from this article, please consider upgrading your subscription to help us expand the reach of this newsletter. Democracy isn’t a spectator sport, and neither is public health or the very large job of keeping the public informed.

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann, one of America’s leading public intellectuals and the country’s #1 progressive talk show host, writes fresh content six days a week. The Monday-Friday “Daily Take” articles are free to all, while paid subscribers receive a Saturday summary of the week’s news and, on Sunday, a chapter excerpt from one of his books.

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