Dr. Ashish Jha responds to RFK Jr. on vaccines, measles, and COVID-19
(CNN) — In attempting to rewrite the history of the US Covid-19 response, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday pinned the blame for pandemic lockdowns on Dr. Anthony Fauci, while simultaneously reviving a string of debunked assertions about vaccines, RSV and measles.
Kennedy’s appearance came in the wake of a congressional hearing with Fauci last week, when the infections disease expert invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination more than 100 times, as Republicans lambasted him for his role in handling the pandemic.
Kennedy joined the chorus of criticism on CNN’s “State of the Union with Dana Bash,” saying President Donald Trump, who was in office at the beginning of the pandemic and notably downplayed the virus, was not to blame for the government’s response.
“Trump, as you recall, wanted to end the lockdowns. I think the thing that did the most damage to our country was the lockdowns,” he said.
The lockdowns were overseen by state and local leaders who were responding to ICUs being overwhelmed and hospitals asking for help to get control of the situation in the early stages of the pandemic.
Dr. Ashish Jha, who served as the White House Covid-19 response coordinator under President Joe Biden from 2022 to 2023, pushed back on Kennedy’s claims, saying, “accountability has to be with our political leaders,” while condemning his false claims on the inefficacy of vaccines.
“The accountability has to be with our political leaders, not with scientists who are giving advice. Second issue that i just want to quickly reflect on. There was a lot of information that Secretary Kennedy said that just isn’t true. It’s just factually not true,” Jha told Bash in an interview following Kennedy’s appearance.
The clash underscores a deepening division over public health authority at a critical juncture. As HHS secretary, Kennedy’s skepticism of mainstream science is no longer just outsider rhetoric; it now shapes official federal policy. His efforts to reframe the pandemic’s legacy come as the US battles its worst measles resurgence in more than three decades — a crisis experts warn is fueled directly by the type of vaccine misinformation and institutional distrust Kennedy amplified during the broadcast.
Measles
Kennedy pushed back on his handling of measles outbreaks in the US.
“The communities that are suffering from measles are almost all religious communities that just don’t vaccinate,” Kennedy told Bash.
A Mennonite community was one focus of an outbreak that began in West Texas last year. But the virus quickly spread among unvaccinated people outside that group, eventually reaching almost 800 cases — including the deaths of two children — before the outbreak was declared over.
There have been dozens more outbreaks in 2026, leading to the highest case count in 35 years, and more than 90% of them have been in people who aren’t vaccinated or whose vaccination status is unknown.
South Carolina has reported more measles cases in 2026 than any other state. An outbreak started raging across Spartanburg County in October; it would become the largest the US has seen in decades, with nearly 1,000 cases, before ending in April.
Health officials recommend two doses of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine in childhood, and those two shots are 97% effective against measles infection.
But experts say the potential for measles outbreaks remains anywhere vaccination rates remain below 95%, a key immunity threshold for the highly contagious disease.
Pockets of low vaccination have been growing in recent years, which research attributes in no small part to misinformation.
Kennedy, who has frequently expressed skepticism about vaccines, told Bash that his agency’s websites recommend that “parents should get their children vaccinated for measles.”
“I’ve never questioned the efficacy of the MMR vaccine,” he said.
But in March 2025, as the outbreak in Texas spread to New Mexico and Oklahoma, he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that measles outbreaks could be driven in part by people who have waning immunity from the vaccine.
“When you and I were kids, everybody got measles, and measles gave you … lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn’t do that. The vaccine is effective for some people for life, but for many people, it wanes,” Kennedy told Hannity.
“Some years, we have hundreds of these outbreaks. … And, you know, part of that is that there are people who don’t vaccinate, but also the vaccine itself wanes,” he said.
RSV
Some of the criticism officials have leveled at Fauci concerns “gain-of-function research,” which involves the manipulation of a germ in a lab setting so researchers can study how it behaves as it evolves.
Kennedy claimed that gain-of-function research was responsible not just for the virus that causes Covid-19 but for other diseases, as well.
“The RSV epidemic that we have, that is the biggest killer of kids in this country today, came from these kind of experiments,” he said.
RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, was first identified in the late 1950s in lab chimpanzees as well as in human children. What became known as gain-of-function research began two decades later, when scientists first figured out how to piece together genes from different organisms.
After 2011, when two teams of scientists modified the bird flu virus so it could become more dangerous and be transmitted between mammals through the air – something the virus hadn’t been able to do before — the US Department of Health and Human Services stepped in to create guidelines and mandate oversight of such research.
Acetaminophen and autism
Kennedy told Bash that dozens of studies link exposure to Tylenol during late pregnancy and the perinatal period to autism.
A 2025 review by US researchers of 46 earlier studies did suggest a possible link between prenatal exposure to acetaminophen — the drug found in Tylenol — and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children, but the researchers said the study does not prove the drug caused those conditions. They advised that pregnant women should continue to use acetaminophen as needed, at the lowest possible dose and for the shortest possible period.
Other research has found no sign of a link, including studies of millions of children followed for decades. However, there’s little research looking at autism prevalence relative to acetaminophen use during infancy or early childhood.
Major medical organizations support the use of acetaminophen to treat pain and fever during pregnancy, with recommendations reflecting that the benefits outweigh any potential risks.
Covid vaccines
Kennedy and Bash butted heads on whether Covid-19 vaccines had protected children, with the secretary asking her to cite research showing that the vaccine “did more good than harm.”
More than 700 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been administered in the US since they became available in late 2020, according to the World Health Organization. Researchers have estimated that the vaccines helped save 2.5 million lives around the world between 2020 and 2024.
The shots have been extensively tested and continually monitored for safety, and serious side effects such as anaphylaxis or myocarditis have happened but have been generally rare.
Research has also found that the vaccines are associated with lower risks of infection, hospitalization and complications in kids. In December, a report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that children who were vaccinated against Covid-19 in the previous respiratory virus season had a “substantially lower risk” of emergency department and urgent care visits related to the virus.
The-CNN-Wire
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