What if RFK, Jr Had Been HHS Secretary in Trump 1.0 During the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Millions of Americans Would Have Died

One of the great achievements during the first Trump Administration—one that Trump now apparently runs away from—was Operation Warp Speed’s success in bringing safe and effective vaccines to the American people. This success was due, in large part, to Cabinet level leadership—including the HHS Secretary—that was committed to this project.

This raises an interesting counter-factual: what would have happened if RFK, Jr. had been HHS Secretary given the same deference and authority that Trump has given him in this term? The answer from the data is clear: millions of Americans now living would have died.

Kennedy made no secret at the time to his opposition to the COVID-19 vaccines. He made this clear in both public statements and private emails. In 2020, Kennedy wrote of Facebook that "We clearly have a systematic problem when government health regulators have utterly abdicated their responsibility to safeguard public health and refer safety concerns about shoddily tested, zero-liability vaccines to pharmaceutical companies." He told podcaster Theo Von in November 2020 (after the FDA had granted approval to two of the vaccines) that the vaccines did not reduce the transmission of COVID and accused the FDA of lowering its standards. In December 2021, he falsely told a Louisiana oversight hearing that the COVID-19 shots were the “deadliest vaccine ever made,” claiming that "more people who have died in eight months from this vaccine than from 72 vaccines over the last 30 years."

Does anyone think that had Kennedy been Secretary in 2020—with same degree of deference he is now receiving from Trump—that the FDA would have approved the vaccines? Indeed, would HHs even have made the huge financial commitment need to get these vaccines to the FDA in the first place?

It is important to remember how effective the vaccines were in saving lives. The evidence is overwhelming. The Commonwealth Fund did an analysis of the effect of vaccinations in the first year and estimated that “In the absence of a vaccination program, there would have been approximately 1.1 million additional COVID-19 deaths and more than 10.3 million additional COVID-19 hospitalizations in the U.S. by November 2021.”

This analysis is supported by several facts.

First, as shown by the chart above, the the differences in the rate of death in vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans is startling.

Second, a study of county-level data published in The Lancet (a leading medical journal) found that counties with higher proportions of persons fully vaccinated had substantially lower rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths—even after a new variant emerged.

Third, data about the effectiveness of vaccinations in nursing homes showed a massive decrease in COVID-19 deaths.

What about safety? While, as the case with all vaccines there have been adverse effects, these adverse events have been rare and relatively moderate. One study of adverse effects in 2021 looked at the data collected in the Vaccine Adverse Effect Reporting System:

A total of 141,208 individuals suffered at least one adverse events following immunization following 239.97 million doses of COVID-19 vaccination. The frequency of side effects was 0.04%, 0.06%, and 0.35% following administration of Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson's Janssen vaccines, respectively. Most of the patients had mild systemic side effects, the most common being headache (0.01%) and fever (0.01%). The frequency of serious side effects including anaphylaxis (0.0003%) and death (0.002%) was extremely low.

The three COVID 19 vaccines have a wide safety profile with only minor and self-limiting adverse effects.

Historical counter-factuals are always subject to doubt. For example, would Trump really have given Kennedy the same absolute authority to run HHS in the midst of a Pandemic during an election year. One would hope not. Nonetheless, Kennedy has been consistent in his opposition to vaccines despite the science, and his views at the time to the COVID-19 vaccines should be troubling—especially in light of the chaos he is causing at the CDC.