RFK Jr. and the U.S. vaccine record: a running file for Canadians

For the first time, the anti-vaccine movement holds a national health ministry. This page keeps the dated record of what has actually been done in Washington since February 2025, what the courts have since undone, and what each item does — and does not — mean north of the border.

A QuackeryWatch running file · Started 16 September 2026 · Updated as the record changes

The record, in order

17 September 2026: the return to the CHD stage

Children's Health Defense is holding a one-day conference — billed as CHD in DC — at the Grand Hyatt Washington on Thursday 17 September 2026, with a reception the evening before. Kennedy is the keynote speaker. In-person tickets at $250 sold out; a livestream ticket is $100 and a standing-room pass $125.

He founded the organisation, joined it in 2015 and chaired it until December 2024, drawing a six-figure salary while the group filed dozens of lawsuits against state-level vaccine policies, according to his own financial disclosures. At his confirmation hearings in January 2025 he distanced himself from CHD and from his prior activism, and told senators he would not do anything to discourage Americans from getting vaccinated. This is the first time since taking office that he has appeared with the group publicly.

The published speaker list is the part worth reading closely. Alongside Kennedy: Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul; Representatives Paul Gosar and Thomas Massie; Andrew Wakefield; Tony Lyons of MAHA and Skyhorse Publishing; Mark Gorton of the MAHA Institute; Sayer Ji of GreenMedInfo; and CHD's own officers — chief executive Mary Holland, chief scientific officer Brian Hooker, CHD.TV director Polly Tommey, general counsel Kim Mack Rosenberg, advocacy director Michael Kane, publishing director Katherine Paul and programme director Miriam Eckenfels. Johnson receives the organisation's 2026 Defender Award at a dinner that evening — an award first given to Kennedy himself in 2023.

Is there a Canadian on the programme?

One, and the connection is real but partial.

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor at The Epoch Times and host of its American Thought Leaders programme. He was born in Canada to Polish immigrant parents and studied evolutionary biology at the University of Alberta. From 2016 to December 2020 he was an executive producer at NTD Television in the Toronto area. His own professional journalist profile lists both Canadian and American flags. He now works from the United States.

The relevant credit is not the Canadian one. Jekielek produced The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told, a documentary on claimed vaccine injury, alongside DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns. He has also co-hosted programmes with Robert Malone. He is at this conference as a journalist and filmmaker within the movement, not as a representative of anything Canadian.

No Canadian organisation appears on the published speaker list, and no Canadian physician, naturopath or advocacy group is billed. As of 16 September the organisers were still saying more speakers would be confirmed, so this may change; QuackeryWatch will update the page if it does.

The Canadian chapter: what the two websites show

Children's Health Defense has a Canadian arm. It is a separate federal not-for-profit — corporation number 1295112-6, incorporated 22 April 2021 — and its directors on the public Corporations Canada record include the Toronto lawyer Rocco Galati, who brought several of the Canadian anti-mandate actions documented in the Mandate Cases section of this site.

Because both organisations publish websites, the relationship between them can be examined directly rather than inferred. The table below sets out what the two domains looked like on 16 September 2026.

Two items that appear in an archived capture of the Canadian site's header — a "Legal Case" page and a recurring-donation campaign billed as "$22 in '22" — are no longer in the navigation. What they contained has not been established here, and QuackeryWatch makes no claim about it.

Waterloo, 2021: the lawsuit that was announced, funded and never found

The clearest illustration of what the Canadian chapter actually did happened at a university in this region.

On 16 and 24 August 2021 the University of Waterloo told staff and students that proof of COVID-19 vaccination would be required for campus access from 7 September. Within days an open letter began circulating, addressed to the university's administrators and demanding the policy be repealed. CBC Kitchener-Waterloo reported 32 signatures; the top three were University of Waterloo faculty — Michael Palmer, Edward Vrscay and Richard Mann. The university's response, through spokesperson Chris Wilson-Smith, was that its policy followed the advice of the Council of Ontario Medical Officers of Health and that the evidence on vaccine safety was overwhelming.

The letter did more than object. Hosted on university servers, it told readers that Children's Health Defense Canada, working with lawyers Rocco Galati and Amina Sherazee of the Constitutional Rights Centre, were preparing a lawsuit against every university and college that had issued such mandates, Waterloo included. This was not a claim made only by the letter's authors: the Constitutional Rights Centre had announced the same thing on its own website on 26 July 2021, under the heading that CRC and Children's Health Defence Canada were challenging COVID-19 vaccination mandates at several Ontario colleges and universities. Speaking to CTV Kitchener at the time, Palmer said a lawsuit was underway that would challenge the mandates in court.

A companion page maintained by the same professor, also on a university server, set out how to take part. Readers were invited to join the action as plaintiffs. It stated plainly that everyone joining would be expected to contribute financially to the cost, and it attached conditions. To qualify, a person had to remain unvaccinated, decline to disclose their vaccination status, refuse testing — and not apply for a medical or religious exemption.

The connection runs both ways. The professor who wrote the letter and hosted the instructions appears on Children's Health Defense Canada's own website as one of its featured experts, described there as a chemistry professor and physician at the University of Waterloo.

What happened to the lawsuit

QuackeryWatch can find no public record that it was ever filed.

There is no reported decision on CanLII — though that proves less than it appears, since CanLII indexes judgments rather than filings, and a claim that never reached a ruling would leave no trace there.

The more telling check is the Constitutional Rights Centre's own published case list, last updated 7 April 2025. It runs to twenty-nine numbered entries and it is not shy about the COVID litigation: it names the Action4Canada action in British Columbia (VLC-S-S-217586), both Vaccine Choice Canada actions in Ontario (CV-20-00643451-0000 and CV-00629810-0000), the Police on Guard application (CV-21-00661200), and — under a heading for cases where pro bono counsel was arranged at no cost to the client — Dr. Byram Bridle v. University of Guelph (CV-22-00691880-0000), with links to the filed pleadings. Bridle, like Palmer, is a featured expert on the Children's Health Defense Canada site.

No action against the universities and colleges appears anywhere on that list.

In fairness, the list carries its own qualification: it states that it excludes matters in which the Centre gave advice, consultation or co-counsel where the case settled or no reported decision followed. So the record is not closed, and this page asserts only what it can show — that an action was publicly announced in July 2021, that Canadians were asked in August 2021 to join it and to pay toward it, and that no public record of its filing has been located five years later.

Why the autism page matters here more than the rest

Most of the items above are administrative: who sits on a committee, what an insurer covers, which schedule a state references. Those are American problems with no direct Canadian effect. One item is different in kind.

For twenty-five years, the Canadian answer to a parent citing the vaccine-autism claim was straightforward — every serious body that has examined it, including the CDC, says no. That answer relied on the claim having no institutional home. Since November 2025 it has one. A Canadian parent can now be handed a cdc.gov link that says, in the federal government's own voice, that the consensus is not evidence-based and that contrary studies have been suppressed.

The formulation is carefully built. It does not assert that vaccines cause autism — a claim that would be immediately falsifiable. It asserts that the negative has not been proven, which is unfalsifiable by design. As the Autism Science Foundation put it, you cannot run a study showing that something does not cause something else; all science can do is point to the weight of the evidence, which here is large and consistent. The reframing converts a settled question into an open one without producing any new data, and it puts the burden on whoever is arguing for vaccination.

That is the artifact now in Canadian circulation. It will be cited by Canadian advocacy groups, by Canadian practitioners, and in Canadian school-board submissions, and the "but the CDC itself says" construction is the form it will take.

What to watch in Canada

The useful question is not what Washington does next but where the American material surfaces here. Four places, in rough order of likelihood:

• Canadian advocacy groups swapping their sourcing. Action4Canada and Vaccine Choice Canada have relied on a study that was never peer-reviewed, which is the weakness this site has documented. If they replace it with a direct CDC citation, the argument against them has to change, because the flaw moves from the source to the reasoning.
• School immunization reporting requirements. The existing pressure campaigns target provincial reporting rules. A federal American document is a powerful prop in a school-board deputation.
• Practitioners citing it to patients. This is the only point where a Canadian regulator has any purchase at all — a college can act on a registrant who tells a patient the CDC now says vaccines may cause autism. On the record documented elsewhere on this site, expect it to take years.
• Provincial divergence from NACI. Provinces already differ from NACI on eligibility and funding; Alberta's COVID-19 program has drawn criticism from infectious disease specialists for narrower eligibility than NACI recommends. Divergence for fiscal reasons and divergence on ideological grounds look similar from outside, which is precisely why the distinction is worth tracking carefully rather than assuming.

A note on how this page is written

Kennedy is a serving official, litigious, and the subject of enormous volumes of partisan commentary in both directions. This page is therefore restricted to actions with a date and a documentary record: a vote, a memo, a published webpage, a court order. It contains no characterisation of his motives and no claim about what he privately believes, because neither is documentable and neither is necessary. The record is sufficient on its own.

Where an American body has contradicted him, that is noted — the American Academy of Pediatrics on hepatitis B, Senator Cassidy on the same, FactCheck.org on mRNA. This is not a story of one country against another. The dissent from Kennedy's positions is overwhelmingly American, and saying so is both accurate and the strongest available answer to anyone framing criticism as anti-American.

Further reading: the American record, documented as it happened

This page is deliberately a bare chronology. Readers who want the analysis behind each step should go to Science-Based Medicine, where David Gorski and colleagues have tracked Kennedy's tenure in close to real time since the nomination. The running series is titled RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines and had reached eleven parts by July 2026.

• "I'm not anti-vaccine": a primer (April 2024) — written before the nomination, on the rhetorical move Kennedy uses whenever he is confronted with his own past statements. The most useful single item for anyone who has to argue with this material.
• RFK Jr. sacks the entire CDC vaccine committee and the ACIP bloodbath (June 2025) — on the dismissal of all seventeen members, and on the fact that the move had been predicted there in February.
• Part 5: VAERS (December 2025) and Part 10: the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (April 2026) — on the surveillance and compensation systems, and the petition to add some three hundred "injuries" to the Vaccine Injury Table.
• Part 11: eliminate the CDC vaccine schedule (July 2026) — the most recent instalment, and the most interesting for the argument on this page.
• The site's vaccines category, for anything published since.

Part 11 is worth singling out because it does something this material usually does not: it marks down its own prediction. Gorski's conclusion is that Kennedy has found the task harder than expected and has so far disappointed his own followers — while arguing that the effort has not been abandoned. That is consistent with the record set out above, where a court stayed the new schedule in March 2026 and the appointments behind it, and it is a reminder that the useful commentators are the ones who say when things did not go the way they expected.