Trump’s White House would mainstream vaccine skepticism as confidence drops among Republicans

Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN

(CNN) — Anyone who doubts that a second Trump term would take vaccine skepticism into the mainstream of American government and life should watch Kaitlan Collins’ interview on CNN Wednesday with the co-chair of Donald Trump’s presidential transition team, Howard Lutnick.

On the one hand, Lutnick disputed the vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent assertion to supporters that he would be in charge of the US Department of Health and Human Services if Trump is elected.

On the other hand, Lutnick sounded convinced, after spending a few hours with Kennedy this week, that the government is hiding something about vaccines.

When Collins noted that neither of them are doctors but that vaccines have been shown to be safe and effective, Lutnick asked, “Why do you think vaccines are safe?”

Collins told him that kids get them and they’re fine.

“Why do you think they’re fine?” Lutnick asked. He pointed to the disproven theory that vaccines cause autism and said, quoting Kennedy, that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is blocking data about vaccines.

“(Kennedy) wants the data, so he can say these things are unsafe,” Lutnick told Collins. “He says, ‘If you give me the data, all I want is the data, and I’ll take on the data and show that it’s not safe.’ And then if you pull the product liability, the companies will yank these vaccines right off, off of the market. So, that’s his point. He’s not trying to do anything, but things that made sense.”

Regarding Kennedy’s goal. If it is as Lutnick says, it seems that Kennedy is interested in opening up a wave of vaccine lawsuits to get manufacturers to yank vaccines.

Regarding liability. Congress responded to a wave of lawsuits related to vaccines in 1986 to create the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which is intended to compensate the extremely small portion of the population that develops adverse reactions to vaccines. The program, which is funded by an excise tax on recommended vaccines, has paid more than $4.5 billion to around 9,500 people since 1988, according to the Department of Justice. Vaccine manufacturers can be sued for injury in state court.

Regarding the allegation of “blocked” data. What are Kennedy and Lutnick talking about? It’s not at all clear.

Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again PAC directed me to a spokesman for his shuttered presidential campaign, which has not returned a request for comment.

Lutnick tried to moderate his position in a post to X after the CNN interview, saying he does support vaccines, but he also wants to respect people who don’t – and he repeated that there is data the government is blocking.

“We would be doing everyone a service if the government respected Bobby Kennedy’s request to make the full data available,” Lutnick wrote on X.

When I asked the CDC for quick comment on this story about whether there is “blocked” data, they noted it’s a difficult subject to address and wanted a specific example to respond to. Lutnick clearly didn’t have specifics. But he’s an investment banker, not a medical researcher.

Jerome Adams, who was US surgeon general under Trump, said Kennedy should not get a senior role in a Trump administration.

“Bottom line: It’s hard to implement your other political priorities if you’re busy dealing with a measles or polio outbreak,” he told The Washington Post.

Ultimately, the CDC offered this statement from a spokesman:

What does the government do to review vaccine safety?

The system by which the ongoing safety of vaccines is monitored is multilayered and complicated.

It involves a government-run reporting system, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which is essentially a tip line where anyone can make a claim, for any reason. Those complaints are searchable, including by the public, but they aren’t vetted, and reports may have nothing at all to do with a vaccine dose. The searchable data is also nonspecific.

The CDC also maintains the Vaccine Safety Data Link, a collaborative effort between the CDC and health care organizations like Kaiser Permanente, and the data has been used in many studies. Sharing specific information about some of these cases publicly could violate privacy laws.

The CDC is also involved with the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Project, which coordinates a nationwide network of experts and also conducts vaccine safety research.

The point is not that any of these things is perfect, but rather that there is a lot of work that goes into assessing the safety of vaccines with help from government agencies on an ongoing basis.

There are also independent organizations like the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins University.

Drop in faith in vaccines

But while the system satisfies the medical community, it is increasingly not satisfying the public, a phenomenon that was turbocharged by the Covid-19 pandemic and related vaccines, as well as recent politics.

Whereas in 2001, 94% of Americans said that parents getting their children vaccinated was extremely or very important, that figure has dropped to 69%. It’s still a strong majority, but it hides a remarkable partisan shift, according to long-term polling by Gallup.

In the years since the pandemic, the portion of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who say it is extremely important for parents to get their children vaccinated has fallen from 52% in 2019 to 26% in 2024. A strong majority of Democrats and Democratic leaners, 63%, still say childhood vaccination is extremely important.

Dr. Daniel Salmon, director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety, wrote with colleagues for the New England Journal of Medicine this year that more needs to be done to maintain public faith in vaccines. They noted that extremely rare adverse reactions “no longer seem rare when vaccines are given to millions or billions of people.”

They recommended taking excess money from the VICP, the fund for people who have adverse reactions, to more robustly fund safety research and help build up public trust in vaccines. They also recommended a holistic, independent review of the vaccine safety system.

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