RFK Jr. on CNN: fact-checking the measles and autism claims
Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. asked Dana Bash to cite a study six times on Sunday. The source he finally named traces to a CDC page HHS rewrote twice.
This morning, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sat down with Dana Bash on CNN’s State of the Union, and for twenty minutes it went about the way you’d expect. Both of them raised their voices. Each accused the other of attacking them. He told her she’d committed “press malpractice” and that scaring people was “the job of CNN.” She told him he was causing inaccurate information to circulate. By 9:20 a.m. they were calling each other parrots.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services repeatedly demanded proof. Cite me the study. Show me one study. You cannot show me a single study that says that.
First, what he got right.
That’s the right demand. It’s the one I’d make. Most of what goes wrong in TV health coverage goes wrong when somebody says “studies show” and nobody asks which ones or assesses their quality.
Secretary Kennedy said Mexico has about 15 times the US measles rate per capita, Canada about four times, England about two. I checked all three against PAHO’s July situation report and UKHSA’s figures. For 2026 they come out at roughly 14, roughly 4.05, and roughly 2.35.
He said the measles vaccine stops about 97% of cases. That’s CDC’s figure for two doses, exactly.
Sen. Rand Paul released 1,141 pages of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary on July 25th. A March 15, 2020 entry reads: “I spoke with Bill de Blasio and convinced him... to close the NYC schools,” and “I went on to tell him he should close the bars and restaurants in NYC.”
Then Secretary Kennedy named a source.
About fourteen minutes in, he stopped asking for citations and produced one. He invoked the Institute of Medicine, now known as the National Academy of Medicine, and called it the ultimate arbiter on vaccine safety. He said according to them, none of the eight vaccines “that are administered during the first six months of life have ever been studied for relationship to autism.”
What the 2013 IOM review concluded.
The 2013 IOM review of the childhood immunization schedule says, in Chapter 5: “The initial literature search identified 32 papers on the relationship between immunizations or vaccines and pervasive developmental disorder.” And: “The evidence of an association between autism and the overall immunization schedule is limited both in quantity and in quality and does not suggest a causal association.” The report brief states the committee’s conclusion in one line: “the IOM committee finds no evidence that the schedule is unsafe.”
The IOM committee wrote that “studies designed to examine the long-term effects of the cumulative number of vaccines or other aspects of the immunization schedule have not been conducted,” and recommended more work on cumulative exposure. That’s about studying the schedule as a single unit rather than one shot at a time.
But that isn’t what Secretary Kennedy said.
On November 21, 2025, the CDC’s page on vaccines and autism was rewritten. Where it had said no links were found between any vaccine ingredient and autism spectrum disorder, it now says: “’Vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim.” CBS News reported that political appointees at HHS directed the change without consulting the CDC scientists whose subject it is. Secretary Kennedy told The New York Times he ordered it himself.
That page was updated again on July 22nd. It now names seven infant vaccines and asserts there are “still no studies that support the claim that any of the 20 doses of the seven infant vaccines” don’t cause autism. Seven vaccines, 20 doses, the first months of life.
On November 23, 2025, two days after the CDC page changed, the presidents of both the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences issued a joint statement saying that vaccines do not cause autism and that the CDC had cited National Academies work “without sufficient context.”
Secretary Kennedy’s science.
May 2025. The MAHA report came out. NOTUS found that it cited studies that did not exist. Researchers listed as authors said they had not written the papers attributed to them. The report was updated, and then updated again with new errors.
August 2025. HHS cancelled roughly $500 million in BARDA mRNA vaccine contracts. Asked for the scientific basis, it sent STAT News a list of studies. The list had originally been assembled as research for a 2024 book called Toxic Shot: Facing the Dangers of the COVID “Vaccines.”
September and December 2025. CDC staff presented a 2010 paper on hepatitis B vaccination and developmental disability to the vaccine advisory committee, the second time days before that committee voted to change the infant hepatitis B recommendation. The paper rested on 31 autism cases. On May 21st, the paper was retracted, the journal citing “fundamental methodological flaws,” a sample it called “critically small,” and an “overstated conclusion that inappropriately suggests causality.” The vote stands.
January 2026. The childhood immunization schedule was revised. ACIP was not consulted. The revision rested on evidence assembled by two federal health officials and was signed by an acting CDC director. A federal court stayed it in March. The next hearing in AAP v. Kennedy is this month.
And one more example. When a study of 1.2 million Danish children found no association between aluminum-adjuvanted vaccines and autism or 49 other chronic conditions, Secretary Kennedy asked Annals of Internal Medicine to retract it, and the journal declined.
Secretary Kennedy’s history.
On CNN, he said the communities with measles are almost all religious communities that don’t vaccinate, and added: “Even the Mennonites have not vaccinated since 1796, since Edward Jenner invented the smallpox vaccine.”
Mennonites in the Chortitza colony began immunizing their children against smallpox in 1804, within about eight years of Jenner, and colony records show them petitioning Russian officials to obtain cowpox vaccine. The 1809 and 1814 vaccination lists for Chortitza survive and name the families and children, village by village. By 1817, the Molotschna colony had vaccinated 197 of its 311 children.
CDC’s own field investigation of the West Texas outbreak, in a Low German Mennonite community in Gaines County, records no religious prohibition on vaccination. It describes distrust of outside institutions. Mennonite Church USA said: “As a denomination, MC USA does not request vaccine exemptions for our members on behalf of our religious beliefs.”
Secretary Kennedy also said on Sunday that he has never questioned the efficacy of the MMR vaccine. But in an April 2025 CBS News interview, he said: "We're always going to have measles, no matter what happens, as the vaccine wanes very quickly." Two doses of MMR are 97% effective against measles, and the CDC says that protection usually lasts for life.
Two unvaccinated school-aged children died of measles in West Texas last year, along with one unvaccinated adult in New Mexico. There were 2,371 confirmed US cases as of July 30th, a 35-year high and the second record year running, and PAHO’s review of whether the United States still qualifies as having eliminated measles has been pushed to November.
The challenge of real-time fact-checking on TV.
Bash cited more than 40 studies covering 5.6 million people. Secretary Kennedy cited a webpage.
Telling them apart means reading the 2013 IOM report, checking who commissioned it, pulling the revision history on a CDC page, and locating a retraction notice from May, which is a day of work. It can’t happen inside a twenty-minute segment, and he knows that.
Viewers can’t adjudicate in real time, and “do your own research” is the instruction that helped create this problem.