RFK Jr. Killed the Vaccine Campaign, Kept the Kid Rock Jacuzzi

April 21, 2026

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. walked into a third round of House hearings today. Measles cases are up. An unvaccinated child in Texas is dead from the outbreak. The CDC's pro-vaccine messaging campaign, the one the Biden administration ran for years, has been quietly shut down since February. Seventeen members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the panel that decides which vaccines go on the childhood schedule, were purged by Kennedy and replaced with his own handpicked group. And the HHS budget Kennedy is defending on Capitol Hill would cut discretionary funding by roughly 25 percent, about $32 billion.

What survived the cuts? A taxpayer funded promotional video in which Kennedy drinks milk in a jacuzzi with Kid Rock, both of them shirtless. Representative Linda Sánchez of California held up a giant blown-up photo of it on the House floor last week.

"You suspended this pro-vaccine messaging campaign," Sánchez said, "but somehow you're spending taxpayer dollars to drink milk shirtless in a hot tub with Kid Rock, and somehow you think that's a better public health message than informing the public of the importance of vaccines?"

Kennedy tried to pivot. "You got a lot of misinformation," he said. Sánchez cut him off. "That is not answering my question. I think you don't want to answer my question."

Asked directly whether the measles vaccine could have saved the life of the unvaccinated child who died in Texas, Kennedy conceded: "It's possible, certainly."

The Bootlicker bargain

Kennedy came to the Trump cabinet on a specific deal. Trump got a famous name, a spoiler candidate taken off the general election ballot, and a Health Secretary who would deliver on the anti-vaccine movement that had been circling the administration for a decade. In exchange, Kennedy got a cabinet seat, a $111 billion agency to reorganize, and the platform he had been building since the pandemic.

The return on that bargain is now on the public record. Seventeen vaccine advisors fired in one sitting. A pro-vaccine messaging budget zeroed out. A 25 percent HHS cut that falls hardest on CDC, NIH, food safety modernization, and the rural health infrastructure that red states actually use. A childhood vaccine schedule under review by a panel Kennedy selected himself. And a branded promotional push around the MAHA agenda, Make America Healthy Again, that centers raw milk, psychedelics, and celebrity cosplay more than any measurable public health outcome.

On Saturday the President signed an executive order accelerating research into psilocybin, MDMA, and ibogaine. That is the MAHA program. It is not pro-vaccine. It is not pro-CDC. It is not even pro-science in any traditional sense. It is pro-Kennedy and pro-Trump, which is the only test that matters inside this cabinet.

What Congress heard today

Representative Kim Schrier, a pediatrician and a Democrat from Washington, confronted Kennedy in this morning's House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee over the ACIP purge. She asked him to name a single qualification of the new panel members that compensated for the decades of clinical experience he had just fired. He did not.

Kennedy's opening statement leaned on the line he has used in every hearing: "We have done better." The 25 percent budget cut is framed as efficiency. The purged advisors are framed as industry captured. The shut down vaccine messaging campaign is framed as overreach. Every line in the playbook is the same line: trust the Secretary, not the data.

He testifies again tomorrow, April 22, in front of two Senate committees back to back. Finance, then HELP. Then the Senate votes on his budget request.

What we are watching

Three things. First, whether any Republican on the Senate HELP committee breaks from the administration on the pro-vaccine messaging question. Measles is no longer an abstract debate. Second, whether Speaker Johnson allows a floor vote on the ACIP purge, which a bipartisan group of pediatric physicians has asked Congress to reverse by statute. Third, whether the HHS Inspector General opens an investigation into the Kid Rock promotional video procurement. The video did not come from nowhere. Somebody wrote the contract. Somebody approved the payment. Those names are on an invoice in the HHS procurement office.

Kennedy was hired to do exactly what he is doing. Trump got his Health Secretary. The cabinet got its loyalist. The measles outbreak in Texas got its body count. The Secretary got his jacuzzi commercial. Everyone at the top of this transaction is getting what they bargained for. The only people paying the bill are the kids who were not on the new ACIP's list.