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 · Last updated 20 September 2026 — build 20-09-E

The record, in order

17 September 2026: the return to the CHD stage

Children's Health Defense held a one-day conference — billed as CHD in DC — at the Grand Hyatt Washington on Thursday 17 September 2026. Kennedy gave the keynote, his first appearance at a CHD conference since becoming secretary. Reports of the size of the audience vary, from dozens to several hundred. All three ticket tiers sold out — the $250 in-person ticket, the $125 standing-room pass and even the $100 livestream. His own department promoted the speech on its social media channels.

He told the audience they have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House, citing presidential directives on research, transparency and parental choice around childhood vaccines. He also said he had wanted to move more sweepingly on his first day but was held up by process, since in government one step has to precede another or litigation follows. The Associated Press read the appearance, together with the August executive order, as a pivot back toward vaccines by an administration that had earlier in the year seemed to be steering toward food policy ahead of the November midterms. STAT described it as a victory lap, and noted that Kennedy, who once downplayed his anti-vaccine activism, has now made it central to his record as secretary.

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.

What he actually said, from the transcript

The full text of the keynote is on the public record. Four things in it are worth a Canadian reader's attention, and one of them is an admission. The speech also contained a series of specific factual claims about vaccine licensing, safety surveillance and autism prevalence, which we have checked separately in a line-by-line audit of the claims in the speech.

1. He said he supplied the Fauci documents himself

Kennedy told the audience that on taking office he was able to get into Anthony Fauci's laptops, hard drives and computers, that he turned thousands of pages over to Rand Paul and Ron Johnson, and that those documents were then published. He thanked Johnson for his leadership on it.

That is a direct first-person account of the chain: the Secretary of Health and Human Services retrieves the material, hands it to two senators, the senators release it, and five weeks later all three are at the same conference, where one of the senators accepts the organisation's award. The documents circulating on social media in this country — including the texts discussed on our page on the 82% miscarriage claim — did not emerge from an adversarial process between a department and an oversight committee. By his own description, the department supplied them.

2. He confirmed the schedule figures, and declined to discuss the court case

He described reducing the diseases universally recommended for routine vaccination from 17 to 11, and set out the sequence of presidential directives behind it: a December 2025 instruction to compare the American schedule with those of peer developed countries, the January overhaul, a May 2026 directive on flexibility in timing and sequencing, and a further directive last month on individualised vaccine options — beginning, he said, with the MMR. On the court order staying the schedule, he said only that the case remains in litigation and he would not discuss it.

3. The hepatitis B slide — and why it is the 82% trick again

He put a slide on the screen showing the package insert for a hepatitis B vaccine and told the audience its pre-licensure trial enrolled only 147 infants, monitored them for five days, and used no placebo — inadequate, he said, for a product given to millions of children.

The 147 figure is real. What it describes is not.

That trial was a bridging study for a newer recombinant formulation, designed to show equivalence to hepatitis B vaccines already licensed and already tested. The foundation underneath it is substantial: the National Academies have documented more than fifty placebo-controlled trials of the plasma-derived hepatitis B vaccine involving over a hundred thousand participants, and the first recombinant vaccine was studied at approval in at least 717 children and adults across at least six trials, each running at least six months.

4. The board he thanked

Closing, Kennedy thanked the CHD board by name: Tony Lyons, Mark Gorton, Michael Baum, Lee Marinoff and Brian Hooker. Baum is a principal of the law firm whose referral arrangement with Kennedy is the subject of our separate page on RFK Jr., Wisner Baum and the war on antidepressants — the arrangement that paid him more than $850,000 in disclosed fees in a single year. The advocacy organisation, the litigation, and the department now sit closer together than any of them is usually described as sitting.

He also announced, on the day, a Federal Register request for information on electromagnetic fields, a new autism research programme at ARPA-H, and a proposed near-doubling of federal autism research funding to $747 million. He told the audience he intends to die with his boots on.

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.

What others said about CHD in DC

This section collects assessments of the 17 September conference made by people other than QuackeryWatch. It will grow as more appear. Views expressed here are those of the writers named, not of this site.

Edzard Ernst

Professor Ernst, the first academic chair in complementary medicine and the author of more than a thousand papers in the field, published his assessment on 19 September. He called the appearance an alarming case of political authority being used to legitimise medical misinformation, and described participating in it amid widespread measles outbreaks as criminally irresponsible. His central argument concerns the position Kennedy has long claimed for himself:

Ernst's view is that the pro-safety-not-anti-vaccine distinction becomes impossible to defend the moment Kennedy shares a platform with Andrew Wakefield, and that the continued elevation of Wakefield shows how the movement treats discredited claims not as errors needing correction but as proof of persecution. On the rhetoric of truth-seeking against a corrupt establishment, he argues it shifts attention away from the quality of evidence and toward the emotional drama of alleged censorship — adding that repetition does not convert a falsehood into a truth.

His strongest point is structural, and it is worth Canadian readers sitting with. The real danger, he argues, is not that the movement contains false claims. It is that it builds an alternative system of credibility, in which personal testimony outranks reliable research, suspicion outranks verification, and the absence of absolute certainty is presented as proof of fraud. A person inside that system is not missing facts. They are using a different test for what counts as one.

Ernst concludes that a national health official who amplifies this weakens confidence in public-health institutions, encourages preventable disease and turns scientific uncertainty into a political weapon, and he calls for Kennedy's removal.

He also picked up the chemtrails remark, noting it drew applause from the room, and made the point that matters most about it: announcing that a government is "looking into" a conspiracy theory implies that a serious evidentiary question remains open. The investigation is the endorsement.

Jonathan Cohn, The Bulwark

Writing on 20 September under the heading that Kennedy's medical freedom comes with a body count, Cohn set the conference against something that had happened in a hospital nine days earlier, and it is the most concrete thing published about the week.

On 11 September a person presumed to have measles spent close to seven hours inside the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Part of that time was in the cafeteria and an atrium, through which hundreds of people passed and where the virus can remain infectious in the air for over two hours. The person is also believed to have spent time in the neonatal intensive care unit and its family lounge. Philadelphia's health department and hospital staff reconstructed the timeline; the city's deputy health commissioner confirmed details to Cohn. The person who brought it in was probably unvaccinated.

Cohn's argument is that a surge of this kind is precisely the moment a health secretary's attention is measured, and that Kennedy spent it at an anti-vaccine conference. Readers should note the article is behind a paywall and that the text seen here was partial.

Paul Offit

Dr Paul Offit directs the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, co-invented a rotavirus vaccine, and was one of the members of the federal immunization advisory committee before its reconstitution. He is therefore both a displaced participant in the record above and a physician at the hospital in the measles exposure below.

On the proposal to divide childhood immunizations into five fractional doses, he told CNN it would not work, and used a blunter word for the idea than this page will repeat. His objection is technical and worth understanding, because it is the argument a Canadian clinician will need.

Offit also documents this material in an ongoing series of his own, Beyond the Noise, which is the most useful single running source for anyone following the American record week by week. See the further reading below.

FactCheck.org

The Annenberg Public Policy Center's fact-checking project published a review of the speech on 18 September, by Jessica McDonald, Kate Yandell and Paul Cuno-Booth. It reaches the same conclusions as our own audit on the package insert, the placebo claim, the VAERS under-reporting figure and the autism prevalence comparison, and adds several items we had not examined. Their review is the most complete published check of the address and we have updated our page against it.

Two of their findings are worth flagging on their own. The placebo claim survives, they note, by moving the goalposts on what counts as a placebo — usually by insisting only saline qualifies. And they record an internal contradiction: while Kennedy told the room that nobody knows the risk profile because the studies were never done, his own department's website states that every authorized or approved vaccine undergoes safety testing and continued post-market monitoring.

They also note what the speech did not contain. In the middle of the worst American measles outbreak in decades, measles was mentioned once.

The press

• STAT (Isabella Cueto) described a return to his roots, and made the observation this page has adopted: having previously downplayed his anti-vaccine activism, Kennedy has now made it central to his legacy as secretary and to the midterm campaign.
• The Washington Sun reported that he addressed the room as though coming home, and noted the oddity plainly — his closeness to the movement on display while he runs the department that regulates drugs, oversees public health and administers the major federal insurance programs.
• The Guardian reported that he described children as vaccine-injured and damaged, and suggested links to allergies, asthma, ADHD, autism, diabetes, sudden infant death syndrome and anorexia — without presenting new evidence for any of it.
• The Hill placed the speech against the scrutiny Kennedy faces over the schedule changes and the August executive order on splitting the MMR shot.
• The Washington Post reported the remarks came during the worst American measles outbreak in 35 years, and included claims medical experts describe as misleading.
• ABC News quoted Dr Fiona Havers, an infectious diseases physician and former CDC vaccine expert, who said CHD has spread false and misleading information that has contributed directly to falling vaccination rates, and that a serving health secretary speaking at its conference legitimises that message while undercutting the agencies trying to control the outbreaks. ABC also noted that physicians put the real figure at roughly 30 doses before age 18, excluding annual influenza and COVID-19 shots, against the 94 doses Kennedy cited.

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 Canadian medicine has said

No Canadian organisation or clinician appears to have commented publicly on the September 2026 conference. That silence is itself worth noting. But Canadian medicine has spoken clearly on the substance, twice, and those statements are the ones a Canadian reader should have.

On the January schedule change. The Canadian Press reported on 6 January 2026 that doctors here feared the American changes would fuel hesitancy that crosses the border. Dr Joan Robinson, a paediatric infectious diseases physician in Edmonton speaking for the Canadian Paediatric Society, said Canada's schedule rests on the highest quality evidence available and that none of its decisions are tied to political ideas or anecdotal reports. Maxwell Smith, a bioethicist at Western University, addressed the specific move to recommend some vaccines only for high-risk groups: it looks reasonable at first glance, but if the wider population is unimmunised, pathogens circulate and reach exactly the vulnerable people the narrower policy claims to protect.

On the August executive order. The Canadian Paediatric Society said it stands behind Canada's routine childhood immunization schedule, developed by health experts on scientific evidence. Medical coverage in Canada at the time concluded that no change to the Canadian schedule was expected, and framed the task for Canadian clinicians as addressing the hesitancy the American changes would produce here.

The pattern across both statements is consistent and worth stating plainly: Canadian bodies have not engaged with the American claims, and have not needed to. They have restated that Canadian recommendations come from Canadian expert review of evidence. That is the correct institutional answer, and it is not an answer that reaches anybody scrolling past a screenshot.

Which leaves the gap this site exists to fill. The Canadian Paediatric Society speaks to clinicians and to policy. Nobody in Canada is answering the specific claims — the package insert, the 147 infants, the 1970 prevalence figure — in a form a worried parent will actually read. That is what our audit page attempts.

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.

The other essential source is Dr Paul Offit, writing at Beyond the Noise. Offit directs the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, co-invented a rotavirus vaccine in use worldwide, and served on the federal immunization advisory committee — so he is writing about a process he was part of and has since been removed from. Among the entries:

• A Great Day for Children (March 2026) — on the federal court ruling staying the January schedule and the committee appointments, with his own chronology of the preceding year.
• RFK Jr.: Secretary of Measlesland (August 2026) — on the Pennsylvania outbreak, its two deaths among unvaccinated people, and the claim that those deaths were fabricated.
• His interviews and presentations, collected by the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

And the Canadian analysis, written before any of it happened

Both sources above are American. The one Canadian body that saw this coming and said so in print is McGill University's Office for Science and Society, where Jonathan Jarry has been writing about Kennedy since 2023 — before the nomination, before the confirmation, before the schedule.

• Kennedy's Coalition of Quacks Wants to Feed America a Diet of Lies (15 November 2024) — written days after the nomination was announced. Its argument is the one this page has been making from the other end: that when America sneezes the world catches a cold, and that vaccine-preventable illness does not stop at the border. It also maps the coalition around him, which is the cast now appearing on conference stages.
• I Watched a Week's Worth of RFK Jr.'s Fear-Inducing "TV Channel" (2023) — a week spent watching CHD's video output, back when almost nobody was looking at it. It sets out his earnings for the year before his presidential run, and argues that treating this as narrowly about vaccines misses what it is: a broader worldview built on distrust of institutions and trust in one man.

That second point has held up better than most predictions on this subject. The 2026 keynote moved from vaccines to food additives to electromagnetic fields to chemtrails in a single hour. Reading it as vaccine policy alone would miss most of it.

For Canadian readers there is a practical reason to prefer these three sources over the aggregators recycling them. Second-hand accounts of this material drift: one widely circulated summary has the January schedule cut from 17 diseases to 10, where Kennedy's own words put it at 11. Small errors of that kind are what a reader will be confronted with if they cite them.

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.