US health officials appear to shy away from anti-vaccine talk ahead of midterms [View all]

Source: The Guardian

Sun 5 Apr 2026 09.00 EDT
Last modified on Sun 5 Apr 2026 15.41 EDT


US health officials appear to be shying away from voicing negative views of vaccines in public as November’s midterm elections loom and key polling indicates anti-vaccine views are a liability.

Health officials have made unprecedented changes to routine vaccine recommendations in the past year – slashing one-third of the US childhood schedule, including the recommendation for hepatitis B immunization at birth. But even before a federal judge essentially invalidated these moves, officials haven’t championed their dramatic changes after Donald Trump’s pollsters recommended veering away from anti-vaccine ideology ahead of the midterms.

The elections seem top-of-mind for US health officials. At a conference on women’s health in March sponsored by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Marty Makary, commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), referenced support from the “Make America healthy again” (Maha) movement in the 2024 election. “Moms showed up to vote for the Maha agenda,” he said.

At the conservative CPAC conference at the end of March, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the HHS secretary and longtime vaccine opponent, didn’t explicitly mention immunizations once in his 30-minute “fireside chat” with Mercedes Schlapp, one of the organizers of the conference. When Schlapp asked Kennedy what advice he would give to “Maha moms” or “Maha parents,” Kennedy didn’t default to his two decades of rhetoric about toxic exposures and vaccines. Instead, he said: “The biggest threats that we’re facing now are cell phones and social media.”

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/05/health-officials-anti-vaccine-views-midterms