Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary RFK Jr. spent his Sunday morning shouting over CNN’s Dana Bash after she pressed him over his failed management of the measles outbreak and continued anti-vaccine messages, which are leading to fewer Americans getting vaccinated to avoid easily preventable deaths.
Bash questioned RFK Jr.’s crusade to study the already debunked idea that vaccines play a role in developing autism, and cited the American Academy of Pediatrics’ finding that more than 40 studies covering 5.6 million people found no connection between vaccines and autism.
The conversation shifted to RFK Jr.’s disinformation about the COVID vaccine, in which he snapped at Bash, demanding to see a study that the COVID vaccine helped prevent children from contracting the disease. According to a study released last year by the CDC, the COVID vaccine reduced the risk of COVID-related emergency room and urgent care visits by 76% among children ages 9 months to 4 years and by 56% among children ages 5-17.
RFK Jr.’s on-air meltdown follows a NOTUS report revealing that the CDC’s website still cites a 2010 hepatitis B vaccine study that its publisher retracted in May.
American Bridge’s research now shows that same discredited study was also featured on Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign website, with matching language, citations, and conclusions. The findings reveal just how much RFK Jr. is using HHS to push his own anti-vaccine ideology.
Both the CDC’s vaccine safety page and the archived Kennedy24 campaign FAQ point to the same retracted 2010 study to claim a threefold autism risk from the hepatitis B vaccine in newborns.
The overlap does not stop there. Both sites point to 1986 as the year autism prevalence began climbing, tying the rise to the growing number of childhood vaccines. And both sites dismiss the scientific consensus in nearly identical terms:
- RFK Jr.’s campaign claimed, “all scientific studies claiming to disprove the link between vaccination and autism are deeply flawed.”
- The CDC claims studies finding no vaccine-autism association “have all been criticized for serious methodological flaws.”
“RFK Jr. isn’t running the CDC on science. He’s running it on his own anti-vaccine ideology, and he’s using the full weight of the federal government to install it,” said American Bridge 21st Century spokesperson Brandon Weathersby. “Every day he pushes talking points that were debunked years before he took this job, he makes more parents afraid to vaccinate their kids and themselves. That fear has real-world impacts. Measles is spreading through this country at a scale we haven’t seen in decades, on his watch, while he treats it like a distraction from his personal theories instead of the public health emergency it is. RFK Jr. was put in charge of keeping Americans safe and healthy. Instead, he is spending his time picking fights on cable news while preventable diseases spread unchecked under his leadership.”
Published: Aug 3, 2026