Massachusetts Public Health Commissioner Dr. Robbie Goldstein is a Tufts University-trained physician who’s spent his entire career as an infectious disease specialist.
He’s on the infectious disease faculty at MGH and teaches at Harvard Medical School. He did a two-year tour at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And in 2023, he became the state’s point man on all things infectious disease.
These days, however, Goldstein spends less time fighting plagues and more time playing whack-a-mole as the Trump administration launches what Goldstein sees as dangerous attacks on the science and common-sense approaches that have been the bedrock of public health for decades.
How much time?
“Fighting this disinformation, unfortunately, is 90% of my job on any given day,” Goldstein said Wednesday during a news conference at his agency’s headquarters in Downtown Boston. “And that’s the reality of public health in this moment.”
Goldstein’s comments came ahead of Friday’s expected vote by a federal vaccine advisory committee on whether newborns should still get the hepatitis B vaccine on the day they’re born, The Washington Post reported.
The panel is a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an avowed vaccine skeptic.
The expected ruling by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which was meeting in Atlanta, also comes days after Goldstein went on the offensive against CDC guidance that he says revives the debunked link between childhood vaccines and autism.
It’s part of a broader HHS effort to reconsider decades-old vaccine policies.
At Wednesday’s news conference, Goldstein and Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey reinforced the state’s commitment to making those vaccinations safe and available despite the federal government’s actions.
“In Massachusetts, we follow the science, the data and we listen to our medical experts,” Healey said. “We will make the best health recommendations to our families so that they can protect themselves and their loved ones. We’re also committed to getting out to the public accurate information about the safety, the effectiveness and the availability of vaccines for yourself and for your kids.”
That’s no small task. The public health establishment’s reputation took a beating during the COVID-19 pandemic, facing attacks by Trump and other vaccine skeptics along with conflicting guidance from authorities.
The agency “failed to provide the public and public health authorities with clear and consistent messaging, and it failed to coordinate effectively with other public health agencies,” Robert Redfield and Robert E. Moffit, two public health scholars for the conservative Heritage Foundation, wrote earlier this year.
The CDC also “failed at collecting and disseminating relevant data in real time to state public health authorities and the public more broadly,” during the nation’s greatest public health crisis in a century, they asserted.
And that distrust has only grown since, with less than half of all Americans now saying they have confidence that such agencies as the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration can carry out their core responsibilities, according to a May tracking poll by KFF, a health news website.
That cuts across party lines, with 6 in 10 adults — including three in four Democrats and nearly half of Republicans — saying the agencies are not paying enough attention to science when making decisions and recommendations about vaccines, pollsters found.
At least 3 in 10 respondents also said the agencies are paying “too much attention” to the beliefs of officials running the agencies (34%) and the interests of pharmaceutical companies (30%) when making vaccine-related decisions.
You don’t have to look hard to find the real-world proof of that skepticism. Social media fairly seethes with it.
“They never were evidence-based. They were controlled and when you question things, it’s like cornering a caged animal. They will aggressively attack,” one Facebook commenter remarked of a MassLive story about flu vaccines. “It amazes me, and yet, based on world history, should not, that people are like sheep. I just can’t understand how people don’t want to question things as they are. What is the danger in more research to protect people?”
Another observed that “they have never believed in fact-based science. They have always done what [the] … money told them to do.”
Massachusetts Public Health Commissioner Dr. Robbie Goldstein, left, joins Gov. Maura Healey and other experts and advocates at a news conference on Dec. 3, 2025, to discuss the state’s vaccination efforts. (John L. Micek/MassLive)
On Wednesday, both Healey and Goldstein acknowledged that experts had to “rebuild the trust that’s been chipped away at, by misinformation and disinformation and the deliberate sowing of doubt,” he said.
It’s particularly frustrating, Goldstein noted, since the success of the Hepatitis B vaccine is so well-established.
“We have been safely and effectively giving the Hepatitis B vaccine to newborns since 1991, when the CDC recommended the vaccine for all babies within 24 hours of birth. The result of that decision has been game-changing,” Goldstein said. Pediatric infection rates have fallen by 99% nationwide. Let me say that again. They have fallen by 99% nationwide since 1991.”
“That is way more than a success story. That is a home run,” he continued. “It’s one of the greatest public health interventions of our time. And it’s a shining example of what happens when science guides policy and when prevention is embraced early, equitably and universally.”
Katie Blair, the director of the advocacy group Massachusetts Families for Vaccines, which supports such public health efforts, fights a similar fight all the time.
“We get nasty comments on our posts all the time,” she said. “As a new mom, I’ve noticed my social media feeds ― the algorithm shows me a lot of mom groups, and it’s just everywhere.”
Speaking to reporters after Wednesday’s news conference, Healey rejected the suggestion that state officials would not bring some skeptics on board, no matter how hard they tried.
“You never write off anybody,” she said. “And my job as governor is to make sure that everyone in Massachusetts has access to accurate information, whether it’s about their health and vaccines or anything else,” she said. “So, you know, D.C. and Secretary Kennedy and the Trump administration may be changing the way things have been done for decades when it comes to public health, but in Massachusetts, we’re staying the course, and we’re going to continue to go with what is proven and with what works.”
For Goldstein, “the best that we can do is go out and speak truth every single day and hope that people will listen to us.”
