RFK Jr. Challenges Assertion Vaccines Have Saved Hundreds of Millions of Lives

The health secretary noted that deaths from contagious disease dropped before the introduction of vaccines.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Washington on Sept. 30, 2025. Win McNamee/Getty Images

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sept. 29 challenged the common assertion that vaccines against diseases such as measles and polio have prevented hundreds of millions of deaths.

When Kennedy appeared before the Senate Finance Committee earlier in September, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) displayed a chart titled “How Vaccines Helped All But Eradicate Diseases” and credited vaccines with lowering morbidity for measles and six other diseases by 99 percent or 100 percent.

The chart showed “the need for vaccines is very clear,” Cantwell told Kennedy.

Kennedy said on Monday that “the vaccine industry has long used this kind of chart as proof of the common claim that vaccines had saved hundreds of millions of American lives” but that vaccines have prevented fewer deaths than thought.

The health secretary pointed to a 2000 paper funded by the government that found significant drops in deaths from infectious diseases prior to the introduction of vaccines.

Measles deaths, for example, numbered about 13,000 a year in 1900, but had declined to a few hundred by 1960, Kennedy said. The first measles vaccine was not released until 1963.

Kennedy also cited Dr. Edward Kast, a Harvard Medical School professor who, in a 1970 speech, said that “the principal half truths were that medical research had stamped out the great killers in the past—tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, puerperal sepsis, etc.—and that medical research and our superior system of medical care were major factors in extending life expectancy.” In the case of tuberculosis, he said, there was a sharp decline in deaths before the vaccine was introduced.

Kast also said health professionals “must convince the public not by slick advertising tricks,” in a speech Kennedy summarized as “warning that actors within the medical industry would try to take credit for the momentous reduction in disease fatalities in order to advance their profits, their prestige, and their influence.”

“The deceptive graph that Senator Cantwell showed the nation is precisely the kind of scientifically baseless propaganda device against which Professor Kast warned us. And yet it is a common trope promoted by the pharmaceutical industry and allied medical associations and their highly paid politicians to evangelize us into believing that vaccines alone saved all those lives,” Kennedy said, noting how Cantwell has accepted contributions from pharmaceutical companies.

Kennedy said that vaccines “are a critical part of public health” that “can prevent infections like measles altogether” but that “blind faith in vaccination alone as our only recourse against death by infection has inclined our medical system to discount the role of therapeutic drugs and vitamins and diet exercise and other lifestyle changes that might fortify human immune systems against all kinds of sickness.”

The video came after President Donald Trump, during a recent news conference on autism, said that he was “a big believer in vaccines,” and described Kennedy as a believer as well.

Kennedy’s video drew criticism from some, including Dr. Demetre Daskalakis. The doctor recently resigned from his position as a top official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which states on its website that routine vaccinations for children born during 1994 and 2023 saved more than 1.1 million lives.

“Improvements in healthcare resulted in drastic decreases in measles DEATHS before vaccine that’s true, but cases continued at a record high until vaccine was introduced,” Daskalakis wrote on X. “That’s how we eliminated vaccine transmission in the United States.”