Rfk Jr. Is Holding Up $600 Million In Vaccines For Poor Countries

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push to remake the U.S. vaccination schedule is on hold following a federal judge’s decision last month, but the health secretary is still using his power to affect which shots children in poor countries receive.

Kennedy says the children are getting obsolete shots with dangerous ingredients that the U.S. has long since phased out. He is holding up $600 million Congress appropriated for the vaccines to pressure the international humanitarian group, Gavi, that distributes them.

“Gavi has refused to provide the United States with the specific data, studies, or detailed accounting of how U.S. funds are used,” Emily Hilliard, senior press secretary at the Health and Human Services Department, said in a statement to POLITICO.

The U.S. co-founded Gavi a quarter-century ago to get vaccines to the world’s poorest nations and Congress has long provided a big chunk of its budget. But Gavi says it hasn’t received the money it’s due for the current and last fiscal years, which makes up about 15 percent of its budget. The funds are set to expire on Sept. 30 if the Trump administration doesn’t release them. The group provides vaccines for 20 diseases, including measles, malaria and polio, to more than 50 low-income countries across the globe.

Gavi’s funding is officially controlled by the State Department, but Kennedy’s influence shows how his skeptical views about vaccines are still affecting government policy. That’s despite a Boston federal judge’s decision last month that said most of the vaccine policy changes Kennedy had ordered in the U.S., including a significant reduction in the number of shots recommended routinely for children, were invalid because he hadn’t followed his department’s own procedures. Kennedy has long believed, in defiance of research showing otherwise, that some vaccines have dangerous side effects.

Susan Collins (R-Maine), the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, told POLITICO in an emailed statement her staff has been in touch with Gavi about the U.S. funding and that she plans to send a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio urging him "to quickly move to provide the U.S. contribution to Gavi, consistent with congressional intent."

Collins said Gavi has helped vaccinate more than one billion children in the world's poorest countries and purchased more than $12.5 billion of U.S.-made goods and vaccines to achieve that goal.

Advocates for Gavi say the withholding of funds will cost children’s lives. They also say the vaccines the group uses are safe and are better-suited to the challenges of immunizing people in the developing world, where refrigeration is spotty and it’s harder to get people boosters, than the vaccines used in the U.S. and other wealthy countries.

Hilliard said Gavi has thus far declined to develop a plan for phasing out a mercury-based vaccine preservative called thimerosal that Kennedy believes is likely to cause autism. The Trump administration has asked Gavi to stop using vaccines that contain the preservative.

Kennedy wrote a 2014 book arguing the preservative is dangerous, Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak, and moved to phase it out in the U.S. — where it is still used in some flu shots — last year.

The Boston judge’s decision reversed that decision, finding the Kennedy-appointed panel that had advised the change was not properly appointed.

Given concerns about the safety of thimerosal, the CDC worked with vaccine makers in the 1990s to phase it out in the U.S. and it was largely removed from pediatric vaccines offered to Americans by 2001. But the agency at the same time has said the preservative is safe.

Thimerosal is used in several vaccines Gavi provides, including in a shot against five diseases, according to the group’s former chief executive, Seth Berkley. He said many developing countries lack adequate refrigeration to store vaccine vials containing a single dose, which are often used in the U.S. and don’t contain thimerosal. But developing countries often use vials of multiple doses, which take less refrigeration space but in some cases contain thimerosal to prevent bacterial contamination.

Without the shots with thimerosal, “kids would go without vaccines — which maybe is the desire — but that would lead directly to deaths from those diseases,” Berkley added, referencing the commonly held view that Kennedy’s goal is to broadly reduce vaccination.

During testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee last week, Kennedy cited a different concern about a vaccine Gavi distributes to combat three serious bacterial infections — diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (better known as whooping cough). Kennedy said it had been discontinued in the U.S. because it was causing brain injury.

“They're still giving it to 161 million African and Asian children a year,” Kennedy said in response to a question from New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen. Kennedy added that Gavi had told him it didn’t want to use a newer vaccine that Kennedy called safer.

While a study conducted in the late 1970s in the United Kingdom linked the shot in rare cases to permanent brain injury, more recent studies haven’t found evidence of it, according to the World Health Organization. But the U.S. discontinued it in 1997 amid those concerns.

Gavi said in a statement that it continues to use the shot because it offers longer lasting protection than the one given in the U.S. and other higher income countries. The shot Gavi uses also requires fewer doses than the one used in the U.S. for protection against whooping cough.

Gavi in its statement said the vaccine “is safe and effective and estimated to have saved 40 million lives in the past 50 years.”

Berkley, an American infectious disease doctor who led Gavi for more than a decade and spoke to POLITICO in his personal capacity, said the WHO recommends the shot Gavi is using because it helps avoid outbreaks of whooping cough in places where access to health care services is limited and where giving booster shots is more logistically challenging.

But President Donald Trump withdrew from the WHO, an arm of the United Nations, in January. Trump cited his view that the WHO mismanaged the response to Covid-19 as one of the reasons.

Kennedy told Shaheen that his health department and the State Department are also concerned Gavi would funnel U.S. funding to the WHO. Kennedy said Gavi has refused to say whether it would do that. Both Gavi and the WHO are based in Geneva, Switzerland.

Gavi declined to comment on the issue. “We are continuing to engage with the U.S. government and cannot comment further at this stage,” Gavi said in its statement.

Sania Nishtar, its CEO, told the newswire AFP in an interview Friday that the lack of U.S. funding combined with cuts from other donors has hit Gavi’s malaria program the most. Gavi has helped deliver 39 million doses of a new malaria vaccine to 25 African countries where the disease is endemic and has been killing mostly children under 5 years old.

Nishtar estimated that tens of thousands of children would die due to the cuts.

Last year, she traveled to Washington to try to convince the Trump administration to maintain funding.

Last week, Shaheen pleaded with Kennedy to appoint someone from his office to work with her office to resolve the dispute.

Kennedy said he would.

In its 2027 budget request, the State Department said any future funding for Gavi for 2027 “is contingent on the organization making necessary reforms and meeting certain benchmarks on vaccine safety.”