RFK Jr's war on vaccines is about shaming women, not helping kids

RFK Jr’s war on vaccines is about shaming women, not helping kids
The MAHA movement regards all childhood ailments as a sign that moms are failing

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published September 22, 2025 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) 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.”

Across X, so-called “MAHA moms” have made it clear that they feel insulted by the pre-Kennedy recommendation that newborns get vaccinated for hepatitis B, as if the doctor is implying that, as mothers, they are among the “bad” women who do drugs or have what they consider the wrong kind of sex. This is why Susan Monarez, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned during her Senate testimony last week that Kennedy was ignoring scientific evidence to attack vaccine access, including a hepatitis B vaccine administered to newborns. On Friday, under fire from medical experts and several Republicans, Kennedy’s hand-picked CDC vaccine panel postponed a vote on whether to delay the newborn immunizations. But with the secretary’s army of MAHA moms insisting the vaccine is an attack on their purity, the threat of a policy change is not over.

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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.) ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/09/22/rfk-jrs-war-on-vaccines-is-about-shaming-women-not-helping-kids/