Just over a year ago, President Donald Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which sets policies and manages programs that directly affect every American.
The Secretary wasted no time implementing his Make America Healthy Again agenda. One year in, it’s worth taking stock of what has worked — and what hasn’t.
There’s no question that Americans, especially children, are suffering from a chronic disease crisis. The U.S. has lower life expectancy than other developed nations, and poorer health outcomes stem at least in part from poor nutrition and environmental pollutants.
2025 delivered progress around food and nutrition. For example, food manufacturers agreed to phase out eight synthetic dyes by the end of 2026. That achievement was widely praised, as it followed years of bipartisan efforts to remove the harmful additives present in many foods Americans eat — from M&Ms and Froot Loops to even mashed potatoes.
But while the push to make our food supply healthier holds enormous promise, actions to dissuade parents from ensuring their kids get highly effective vaccines with decades-long safety records threaten to erase those gains — and more.
Nine in 10 voters want guidance from trained physicians, and 85% of Trump voters support continued vaccine innovation. Yet many of RFK Jr ‘s actions this year have directly contradicted that mandate.
In June, the Health Secretary’s “clean sweep” of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) — the independent panel responsible for delivering vaccine guidance — included firing the 17 vetted experts and replacing them with handpicked skeptics. Relying on cherry-picked numbers and anecdotes, the current members have since rescinded recommendations for some flu vaccines and changed long-standing hepatitis B vaccination guidance. And they may soon exact broader changes to the childhood schedule.
RFK Jr has also cancelled $500 million in mRNA contracts — which would have built on President Trump’s landmark achievement with Operation Warp Speed — further undermining efforts to drive breakthroughs in vaccines for cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other critical diseases.
And the Secretary has fueled the misinformation surrounding vaccine safety and guidance that has become all too common. One in three adults in 2025 reported hearing the false claim that measles vaccine is more dangerous than the virus itself. That’s up from less than 20% in 2024, and it’s sparking understandable confusion among Americans.
Of course, vaccine evaluation and monitoring should be constant, particularly for those administered to children, to ensure safety and efficacy. But the simple fact is that vaccines are among the greatest feats of modern medicine. Routine shots are expected to prevent about 508 million cases of illness and well over a million deaths among children born between 1994 and 2023.
The polio vaccine, for example, prevents paralysis in 99% of cases. It has virtually eliminated a disease that used to kill about 1,500 and paralyze 16,000 Americans every year. President Trump himself has praised it extensively.
The measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine has subdued the most contagious virus on earth. Measles is highly infectious: In an unvaccinated population, an infected person will infect more than nine out of 10 people nearby. It can remain in the air for up to two hours after that infected person leaves an area. Before the vaccine, the virus infected over 500,000 people each year, resulting in more than 430 deaths annually.
The vaccine has kept the number of cases low, mostly hovering around 100 each year for the past few decades.
Until now.
Anti-vaccine rhetoric and policies have caused childhood vaccination rates to decrease. Since 2019, almost 80% of counties and jurisdictions across the U.S. have reported “notable declines in childhood vaccination rates.”
The drop has been most pronounced for measles. Before the pandemic, the vaccination rate among kindergartners was 95%. It has now decreased to about 92.5%. While that may not seem like a large shift, it puts the vaccination rate below the threshold needed to stop the disease from spreading.
In 2025, the U.S. recorded over 1,900 measles cases, the most in over three decades. One outbreak that began in West Texas in January killed three people, including two young girls, and infected over 860.
This month, the U.S. will almost certainly lose its measles elimination status — which it gained in 2000 thanks to widespread vaccination — after reaching a full year of continuous disease spread.
The administration’s enthusiasm to improve America’s health has real, urgent promise. We all want to ensure kids are healthy. But this year, a course correction is essential. The country’s well-being is multi-faceted — in addition to better nutrition and exercise, it depends on access to, and evidence-based information about, the shots that have been protecting people for decades.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
