To understand why Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is attacking the hepatitis B vaccine, look to the rhetoric coming from his loudest fans in the anti-vaccine movement. According to the misnamed Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, the only women who get hepatitis B are filthy degenerates. Jillian Michaels, the former reality TV star-turned right-wing demagogue, declared last year that the hepatitis B vaccine is only useful for “drug addicts and people who have risky sex.”

“Are we protecting them for a lifetime of unprotected sex and drugs?” a popular MAHA advocate complained on X, apparently thinking it’s self-evident that that such protection is unnecessary for good people. A favorite anti-vaccine podcaster tweeted that hepatitis B is a disease of people who have “anal sex” and who get “stuck with a needle full of blood of an infected person.”

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On Sunday, Kennedy and the MAHA movement’s obsession with shaming women was on full display with the Washington Post’s report that HHS is set to tie autism risk to women who use Tylenol during pregnancy. As with most claims coming from Kennedy’s disinformation-happy machine, this finding is false. But it’s easy to see how the idea fits neatly into the right’s sexist vision of motherhood as a state of endless self-sacrifice. Tylenol is already discouraged for treating minor aches and pains during pregnancy. The medical consensus is that it should only be used to battle high fevers that can be dangerous for both the mother and the developing fetus. But the vision of a woman enduring misery to “protect” her baby is romanticized by the right — even if the suffering would, in this case, only risk the health of the baby.

The newly released report from the so-called MAHA Commission also underscores how Kennedy and his allies are hyper-focused on shaming women, even if it comes at the expense of harming children. Even though it was advertised as the “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy,” the report includes almost no substantive proposals for government action to improve child health. Instead, it shifts even more responsibility for child health outcomes onto the parents. Most of the strategy is about “educating” parents about what Kennedy believes is proper child-rearing, including his esoteric and false ideas about nutrition. (The secretary, for instance, thinks eating a diet high in animal fat is good, contrary to the wide consensus of medical experts.)