RFK Jr.’s actions empower lawyers at the expense of Americans’ health

Matthew Kandrach

Submitted photo/InsideSources.com

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OPINION — For the last year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has worked to dismantle a decades-old, bipartisan consensus on the basics of public health. It’s long past time that the public asks why. 

Kennedy likes to position himself as a public-health crusader and champion of consumer rights, but his actions as HHS secretary paint a more complicated, conflicted picture. For decades, Kennedy was a trial lawyer, a member of an industry that profits from the public’s pain and fear. 

And under Kennedy’s leadership at HHS, America’s public-health system has gotten weaker while the public gets sicker. Vaccinations are down and highly contagious, once-eliminated diseases, such as measles, have resurged with terrifying speed. For several decades, measles was considered effectively eliminated in the United States. However, in 2025, the U.S. recorded 2,288 confirmed measles cases, the most since the early 1990s, and as of May 2026, we have surpassed 1,900 cases.

This collapse of herd immunity places the very young, the elderly and the immunocompromised at greatest risk. These are the vulnerable populations that HHS is sworn to protect, yet they are being betrayed by the department’s own leadership.  

Kennedy has fueled widespread misinformation and vaccine speculation through persistent misrepresentation of evidence-backed science. He showcased the depth of that misrepresentation at a Senate budget hearing last month when he claimed that almost none of the 20th-century’s decline in infectious disease mortality was attributable to increased vaccination, citing a 2000 Johns Hopkins study.  

Thankfully, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., interjected to provide the complete context, noting that the study found vaccines were instrumental in eliminating deaths once they became widely available in the mid-20th century. 

Kennedy has stacked key vaccine policy boards with paid expert witnesses in lawsuits that trial lawyers brought against vaccine manufacturers. The trial bar is an industry that relies on a sick, fearful and litigious population to drive profitable litigation. After all, a high-trust society is less conducive to generating the lucrative lawsuits upon which the trial bar relies. 

By deliberately subverting vaccine confidence and spreading scientific misinformation, which he’s done for years, Kennedy and his allies are cultivating a landscape of systemic vulnerability that can be relentlessly monetized in civil courts. 

The cornerstone of this grift is the coordinated attack on the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. It was established in 1986 during President Ronald Reagan’s second term to provide both stability to the vaccine-manufacturing market and give victims of vaccine injuries a streamlined, fair process for claims. It is structurally designed to protect consumers by covering a petitioner’s legal representation separately from the injury award, ensuring victims keep 100% of their award. 

However, the system offers little financial incentive for trial lawyers, as it does not allow contingency fees and instead pays legal representatives of VICP claimants at a reasonable hourly rate. That is why the trial bar is cheering on legislative schemes like the End the Vaccine Carveout Act, which would destroy VICP. 

If this legislation is enacted or Kennedy’s efforts to dismantle VICP succeed, vaccine-injury claims would be pushed out of this streamlined program and into an unpredictable civil court system. There, trial lawyers will be able to take their usual 30% to 40% contingency fee off the top of any financial award granted to vaccine claimants. 

President Trump was elected to bring costs down and to rein in excessive regulation. It is a shame that his HHS secretary seems to be taking the opposite approach, one that would put elite attorneys’ ability to generate new business ahead of the freedom and finances of Americans.

It is time for the president and his team to reject any efforts from within HHS, or from the Republican majority in Congress, that could allow trial lawyers to extract unearned wealth from the American public at the expense of everyone else’s quality of life. 

Matthew Kandrach is the president of Consumer Action for a Strong Economy. He wrote this for InsideSources.com. Please submit comments at yourvalley.net/letters or email them to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.