Trump Is at Odds With RFK Jr. Over Vaccines—But Not Why You’d Think

Despite the White House’s myriad attempts to rein in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s conspiratorial rhetoric, Donald Trump himself is still expecting anti-vaxx results.

The president is reportedly losing faith in his health secretary’s abilities to slash childhood vaccines. The issue came to a head during a May lunch at Trump’s National Golf Club in northern Virginia, when Trump pressed Kennedy as to why he wasn’t doing more to probe into the (widely debunked) tie between vaccines and autism. At the time, Trump told Kennedy point blank that he believed the secretary “had the yips,” The Wall Street Journal wrote Monday night, citing sources familiar with the conversation.

The topic reared its head again at a mid-June meeting between the two men in the Oval Office, during which Trump lamented that Kennedy simply wasn’t doing enough.

Trump reportedly believes he has given Kennedy ample time to prove himself, and is disappointed that Kennedy hasn’t made more progress.

Practically every conversation between Trump and his health secretary circles back to the vaccine conspiracy, reported the Journal. The president has shared with his aides that he believes Kennedy will be a failure if he fails to produce results.

In fact, lobbyists and Department of Health and Human Services staffers suspect that Trump will replace Kennedy with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Dr. Mehmet Oz, likely after the midterms, the Journal reported.

Trump regularly turns to Oz for health policy advice, even on issues that have nothing to do with Oz’s agency. Oz, in turn, makes sure Trump gets his way every time.

The president’s priorities on the matter have since been made clear: HHS must do more to peel back the federal guidelines for the childhood vaccine schedule, reducing the number of shots given to children.

Sources who spoke with the Journal suggested that the president is all-in on the anti-vaxx conspiracy, sharing that Trump expects to see autism rates drop as a result of the decreased inoculations.

Limiting vaccine access was a core tenant of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda—until White House advisers pressured him to lay low, fearing that his rabble-rousing, anti-science ideology could further harm Republican odds come November.

Already at issue at the ballot box: the price of food, the price of oil, the price of water, the price of energy. Yet Republicans have failed to offer a resonant message to keep their party in power. Instead, Trump started an inexplicable war with Iran that has exacerbated the already astronomical cost of living. He has also slashed taxes for the wealthy and stalled the mechanics of Congress by strong-arming his allies into supporting his wildly unpopular voter suppression bill, the SAVE Act.

Meanwhile, Kennedy is running HHS with practically zero relevant experience. He has not worked in medicine, public health, or the government—rather, he is guided only by a pocketful of conspiracies that America’s foremost health experts have already thoroughly debunked, and his off-the-wall notions about health have thus far proved disastrous for the agency.

Kennedy has transformed HHS, replacing independent medical experts on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He also overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, a decision that could potentially affect vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual. ...