donald trump prompted Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to intensify his search for conspiracy theories linking autism to vaccinesaccording to a new report of The Wall Street Journal.
Kennedy, who has long promoted false conspiracy theories linking vaccines to autism and questioning their safety, had reportedly been instructed by White House officials to prove it before the 2026 midterm elections. But according to sources who spoke to him Diary, Trump directly asked Kennedy why he wasn’t doing more research on vaccines during a lunch in May at one of his golf courses.
The president stated that he wants Kenendy to reduce the number of vaccines recommended for children by the Department of Health and Human Services and its downstream agencies, and hopes that autism rates will decrease as a result. Sources also told Diary that in a tense June meeting at the White House, Trump chastised Kennedy for not having made enough progress on the matter.
Trump himself has a long history of peddling vaccine conspiracies, which intensified during the 2024 campaign cycle as the “Make America Healthy Again” or “MAHA” movement began to gain a foothold within right-wing politics. In 2014 huh infamously tweeted that a “healthy little boy goes to the doctor, gets pumped [a] mass injection of many vaccines, does not feel well and changes – AUTISM. Many cases like this! He continued to push vaccine skepticism while in office, where he is in a real position to shape policy.
Even as Trump complains that his HHS secretary has not met his standards when it comes to MAGA and MAHA vaccine conspiracy theories, there is no telling how much damage Kennedy’s tenure in the federal government has had on the nation’s health, especially when it comes to vaccine-preventable diseases.
According to tracking by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Medicine, confirmed cases of the measles (a deadly, vaccine-preventable disease that had been effectively eradicated in the United States) has reached a maximum of three decades. The rise in cases has been directly linked to a rise in vaccine hesitancy across the United States, particularly among religious fundamentalist groups. Kennedy mixed messages surrounding the outbreak, prevention and treatment options have not helped to improve the situation.
During his term, Kennedy has also moved to gut critical vaccine advisory panels (replacing them with other vaccine skeptics), canceled advertising campaigns promoting seasonal vaccines like the flu, inserted skeptical language about vaccines in public CDC resources, underfunded programs developing mRNA vaccines and changed significantly the childhood vaccination schedule and skip the standard expert reviews and evaluations that normally underpin such changes.
In May, around the same time he was reportedly criticizing Kennedy for failing to find the desired link between vaccines and autism, Trump issued an executive order calling for American children to receive fewer vaccines and ordering federal health agencies to review their policies. At the end of the day, if Kennedy doesn’t live up to his expectations, Trump has repeatedly shown himself willing to bypass his own advisers and do it himself.
