RFK Jr.’s Anti-Science Agenda
 
President Trump has long touted his record of fulfilling his sweeping vision for America using the mantra “promises made, promises kept.” Unfortunately, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., doesn’t view that phrase as something worth modeling. Before and during his confirmation hearings to be HHS secretary, Kennedy vowed to keep vaccines available to those who want them. Ten months into his tenure, it’s clear Secretary Kennedy never intended to keep that commitment to those who confirmed him or to the American public. Since assuming the role of HHS secretary, Kennedy has fired the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, and appointed members with a long history of vaccine skepticism. While downsizing or shaking up HHS needn’t be a bad thing, it is a problem when the new guard is intent on taking away patient choice.
 
As the Taxpayers Protection Alliance has previously documented, the new ACIP appointees have made COVID-19 booster shots harder to get among a wide swath of adults. Meanwhile, Secretary Kennedy has pushed the government to endorse tenuous links between the COVID vaccine and the deaths of young people as a likely pretext for more restrictions. These efforts to tighten access to popular and demonstrably safe vaccines restrict Americans’ freedoms and will expose millions of households to preventable illnesses. The continued push to undermine confidence in childhood vaccines should be particularly worrisome for future generations. Americans are already seeing the results of anti-vaccination efforts being pushed at the highest levels of state and federal government. Across the country, measles—which hospitalizes one in five infected children under age 5 after having been declared eradicated in the United States 25 years ago—has surged to levels not seen in many decades. Because of Secretary Kennedy, this resurgence of once-eradicated diseases could harm even more children. First, his reconfigured ACIP panel recommended delaying combined vaccinations against measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella (MMRV), for children under age 4, who previously were eligible for a combined vaccine beginning at 12 months of age. As the American Academy of Family Physicians rightly points out, bureaucrats are actively denying parents the option to vaccine their young children in one comprehensive inoculation. Then, on December 5, ACIP overturned decades of precedent and overruled the consensus of the medical community when it removed the universal recommendation on administering the hepatitis B vaccine to newborns. The key presenter at last week’s meeting in favor of changing the vaccination schedule was Aaron Siri, whose expertise on childhood vaccines, as noted by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), is limited to being a trial lawyer who has gotten rich suing pharmaceutical manufacturers. The CDC claimed that this new policy allows for “individual-based decision-making.” The reality is that, like how ACIP handled COVID-19 boosters, the hepatitis B vaccine will now be subject to an unclear and costly standard called “shared clinical decision-making" (SCDM). As University of California law professor Dr. Doris Reiss noted, SCDM “usually leads to less uptake, partly because nobody is sure what it requires.” The evidence even suggests that SCDM status frightens providers into prescribing affected vaccines less often than before.
 
Secretary Kennedy and HHS bureaucrats seem intent on sowing doubt about trusted vaccines, making patients and providers jump through countless hoops to get them, and undermining manufacturers’ ability to produce them, through efforts to upend the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) and bankrupt it by adding costly and unfounded autism-related claims to the system. Ultimately, these efforts will result in fewer children taking vaccines that have essentially eradicated once-highly lethal diseases in the United States. After all, as even some ACIP members have admitted, the longer people must wait to get vaccines, and the more shots they must take, the lower overall compliance will be. That’s bad for patients, their families, and healthcare freedom in general.
 
Meanwhile, HHS refuses to answer questions about the “how” and “why” of key initiatives such as ongoing autism research. On September 5, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance Foundation submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to HHS to get better insight on the agency’s autism research process and pushing of dubious links between Tylenol, vaccines, and autism. Unfortunately, the agency has yet to respond. This is not an isolated incident at HHS. An April report in Politico noted that agency officials were shutting down FOIA offices and scaling back information response efforts. This not only raises legal questions but also enables government officials to act recklessly and politicize science. It’s time for a new approach at HHS that prioritizes transparency, health, and patient choice. After overseeing Operation Warp Speed, one of the greatest health triumphs in American history, President Trump should consider if he wants Secretary Kennedy’s anti-freedom, anti-health agenda to be a core part of his own legacy.
 
The Destruction of Protectionism
 
It seems that tariffs are paid by Americans after all. Last month, President Trump exempted a list of grocery and food products from his so-called “reciprocal” tariffs, freeing these goods from the burdens of the so-called Liberation Day. Of course, the White House ought to have guessed in the first place that the reason many of these products are imported in large quantities is not a lack of protection. In fact, for myriad reasons, it is simply impractical for Americans to produce many goods and commodities domestically. The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates per-household relief Trump’s exemptions at $35 annually, although, according to the Yale Budget Lab, the remaining tariffs will impose “a loss of $1,700 for the average household and $900 for households at the bottom of the income distribution.” It is low-hanging fruit (so to speak) for free marketeers to glibly mock the White House’s reversals on the “protection” of produce not grown in the United States. However, the damage inflicted by President Trump’s tariffs on American industry and manufacturing should not be overlooked.
 
The gratification of the administration’s autarkic tendencies is funded by American consumers and businesses—to the detriment of capital investment, productivity, employment, and the savings accounts of American consumers. An analysis from Goldman Sachs estimated the share of tariff costs borne by American businesses at 51 percent and the share borne by American consumers at 37 percent. Sure enough, manufacturing employment is sinking, with 58,000 jobs gone since Liberation Day and 6,000 vanishing in September alone. This is no coincidence, nor does it bespeak a protectionist triumph. American manufacturers rely on imports. Indeed, “[a]round half of U.S. imports are used by American manufacturers,” the Cato Institute notes. “Trump’s tariffs are a roughly 15% tax on more than a TRILLION DOLLARS-worth of US manufacturing inputs,” Cato’s Scott Lincicome wrote on X.
 
Rising tariffs invariably beget requests for the relief of affected industries—relief that tends to be gifted to the friends of the powerful. This administration has proven itself no exception. But “[w]hat [President Trump] hasn’t excluded from his tariffs is the very machinery and other inputs needed if you want to build a factory,” according to Bloomberg. “In fact he’s threatened to impose more tariffs on industrial machines and robots. Which means that fitting out a new manufacturing plant in the US is significantly more expensive than it was when Trump took office and may become pricier still.”
 
The system is inputs all the way down. The man of system intent on protecting domestic shepherding raises the costs of the sorter of the wool; the protection of the sorter raises the costs of the carder; protection of the carder raises the costs of the dyer; and so forth, as each new layer of protection raises costs on each enterprise downstream in the supply chain, perhaps prohibitively. A Trumpian all-things-to-all-people protectionism raises the costs paid by manufacturers, rendering American industry poorer and less competitive. The protective tariff, wrote economist William Graham Sumner, “consists in delivering every man over to be plundered by his neighbor and in teaching him to believe that it is a good thing for him and his country because he may take his turn at plundering the rest.” As a matter of pure addition and subtraction, these successive rounds of plundering yield a negative number. Trump’s “steel and aluminum tariffs…created a few metals-producers’ jobs—1,000 in steel and 1,300 in aluminum,” Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux wrote of the first Trump administration’s tariffs. “Using Federal Reserve data, Kadee Russ of the University of California, Davis and Lydia Cox of Harvard estimated that these tariffs destroyed about 75,000 manufacturing jobs,” the duo adds. For the mathematically challenged, that comes at best to more than 55 jobs lost for each one created.
 
“[I]gnore a fact, and that fact will be your master,” Russell Kirk wrote. President Trump would do well to face facts.
 
 
Blogs:

Monday: TPA Pushes Lawmakers to Support SAMOSA Act

Tuesday: Five Ideas to Improve the House Healthcare Plan

Thursday: Tariffs, Bailouts, and the Politics of Special Interests and TPA Praises Executive Order Rescheduling Cannabis

Friday: Advancing THR in 2025 and TPA’s Priorities for 2026
 

Have a great weekend!



David Williams
President
Taxpayers Protection Alliance
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Suite 500
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www.protectingtaxpayers.org