On September 29, 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted a seven-minute video on X. He was upset about a recent Finance Committee hearing during which Senator Maria Cantwell (D, WA) showed a chart depicting the number of lives saved by vaccines. “The vaccine industry has used this kind of chart as proof of the claim that vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of American lives,” said RFK Jr., who wasn’t buying it.
Listen to the audio edition here:
In response, he showed graphs noting that deaths from measles and pertussis were reduced by advances in agriculture, engineering, refrigeration, sanitation, nutrition, and water chlorination, all of which occurred early in the 20th century, well before the introduction of vaccines. Unfortunately, RFK Jr. failed to note that the pertussis vaccine, which was introduced in the 1940s, reduced the number of pertussis deaths from 9,000 per year to fewer than 10, and that the measles vaccine, which was introduced in the early 1960s, reduced the number of measles deaths from 500 to 0.
RFK Jr. didn’t show a graph about the incidence of Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) infections before and after vaccines. Before the Hib vaccine was introduced in the late 1980s, Hib caused 20,000 cases of meningitis, pneumonia, and sepsis every year, resulting in blindness, deafness, developmental delays, and seizure disorders as well as 1,000 deaths, mostly in children less than 2. The Hib vaccine caused a 99 percent decline in the incidence of disease and death. The virtual elimination of Hib had nothing to do with better sanitation and everything to do with the vaccine.
Indeed, by focusing solely on deaths, RFK Jr. also failed to recognize the impact of permanent disabilities caused by other diseases such as blindness and deafness from measles, deafness from mumps, liver cancer from hepatitis B virus, cervical cancer from human papillomavirus (HPV), and congenital birth defects caused by rubella virus.
Perhaps the most interesting graph that RFK Jr. didn’t show related to the impact of sanitation on polio. Ironically, improved sanitation in the 20th century led to a dramatic increase, not decrease, in the incidence of the disease. In the early 1900s, polio was a common infection. Most mothers had antibodies against polio that they passively transferred to their unborn child through the placenta. Because polio was widespread, babies were often exposed to the virus early in life, at the same time they were protected by their mother’s antibodies. With improved sanitation, polio became less common. Now children were exposed to the virus later in childhood, after their mothers’ antibodies had worn off.
In 1955, when Jonas Salk made his polio vaccine, as many as 58,000 young children would be paralyzed by polio and 3,000 would die every year. Because of the vaccine, polio was eliminated from the United States by 1979.
This year alone, the United States has suffered the largest measles outbreak in more than 30 years, an influenza death rate for children bigger than anything we’ve seen since the 2009 swine flu pandemic, and far more whooping cough cases and deaths in babies than in previous years. Nonetheless, RFK Jr. saw this as exactly the right time to tell us that vaccines don’t save lives.
Frankly, the most frightening moment on his video occurred at the beginning when he said, “Hi, I’m Robert F. Kennedy Jr., your Secretary of Health and Human Services.”
Paul A. Offit, MD, is director of the Vaccine Education Center and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. This piece originally ran on his Substack, Beyond the Noise!
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