RFK Jr.’s pick to reshape the childhood vaccine schedule embraces Covid conspiracy theories

A doctor who falsely claimed that Covid was a U.S.-made bioweapon and that Covid vaccines cause cancer, miscarriage and widespread heart disease is leading a federal panel likely to implement sweeping changes to the childhood vaccine schedule this week. 

Kirk Milhoan — a pediatric cardiologist and church pastor tapped by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP — will preside over the committee later this week as it considers key changes to the national childhood vaccine schedule. He replaces Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician who stepped down this week to take on the role of chief science officer at HHS.

At meetings on Thursday and Friday, the committee will consider a slate of changes to the CDC’s current vaccine schedule, including whether to continue its recommendation that infants receive a hepatitis B shot at birth — a vaccine that has prevented hundreds of thousands of childhood infections. Experts warn that without the birth dose, hepatitis B will infect thousands of babies again each year. Most infected infants will develop chronic infection and 1 in 4 of those are at risk to die from chronic liver disease as adults.

It wasn’t immediately clear what other changes the panel would be considering this week, or how Milhoan might affect those decisions. Milhoan told The Washington Post the committee planned to examine whether the childhood immunization schedule — and specifically aluminum salts in vaccines (a safe adjuvant that triggers an immune response) — could be causing increases in allergies and autoimmune disorders, a claim with little support that anti-vaccine activists have long touted.

Milhoan’s previous statements on Covid and vaccines raise questions about how much the panel’s recommendations might be supported by scientific fact.

“We have to say it out loud, this was a bioterror weapon,” Milhoan said of Covid in remarks before a Texas church congregation in October. “I believe what it was, it was actually a test release in Wuhan. And then there were people in Italy and there’s an exchange between Wuhan and Italy. And then it got transferred there and then it went, slowly, as respiratory viruses do, across the way. So from a medical standpoint, it was and the U.S. has to own this, because they funded it all.”

In the same remarks — first reported by Endpoints News — Milhoan compared vaccination efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic to the Holocaust and called mRNA technology “the biggest threat to humanity.” He also cautioned audience members against trusting public health experts, suggested vaccines cause miscarriages, and characterized the CDC as having blood on its hands.

“The medical establishment, the public health establishment … it has to be almost dismantled and started fresh because the corruption is so deep I can’t even tell you how deep this corruption is,” he said. 

“If you get a vaccine and you’re in your first trimester, you have an 80% chance of miscarriage,” Milhoan said, and suggested that the Food and Drug Administration “hid that data.”

While Milhoan’s conspiratorial worldview surrounding Covid and its vaccines is well-established — evidenced by statements he’s delivered in dozens of podcasts, sermons and public speeches since 2020 — his views on non-mRNA vaccines for children are less clear. He declined a request for comment from MS NOW. An HHS spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Milhoan, who joined the panel in September, is the latest conspiracy theorist elevated to a role in reshaping public health policy under Kennedy, who has installed loyalists committed to his anti-vaccine agenda while pushing out career scientists and physicians who refuse to go along. Anti-vaccine activists and their allies have been installed at public health agencies as senior advisers, researchers, experts, chiefs of staff and acting directors. 

The ACIP panel is similarly stacked with members who favor Kennedy and his extreme ambitions. In June, Kennedy fired the 17 experts who previously made up the panel and announced they would be replaced with eight new — and mostly inexperienced — members, many of whom had publicly criticized vaccines and two who served as paid expert witnesses in legal cases against vaccine makers.