New CDC Director Has Questioned Vaccine Safety
Jay Bhattacharya’s recent new appointment may suggest more changes to the vaccine schedule.
This week, NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was named acting director of the CDC. The appointment is the latest signal that more changes may be in store for the childhood and adolescent immunization schedule, which has long been a target of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and the anti-vaccine movement he is a part of.
Bhattacharya’s ascendance comes as the CDC has moved to limit access to vaccines. Last June, Kennedy replaced the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices with skeptics and anti-vaccine voices. In August, the Trump administration fired CDC Director Susan Monarez after mere weeks on the job after she refused to commit to green-lighting the new body’s vaccine recommendations.
Since then, the CDC has updated its vaccine safety page to link vaccines to autism—a narrative that research and major medical associations have repeatedly refuted—and adopted new guidance, reducing the number of recommended immunizations for children. Experts have warned that such changes threaten vaccine access as they inform what insurance companies will cover.
Bhattacharya, the fourth person to head the CDC under the new Trump administration, following Kennedy’s dismissal last week of the agency’s previous director, Jim O’Neill, as part of a larger reorganization. He has previously cast doubt on vaccine safety.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Bhattacharya questioned the need for COVID-19 boosters and claimed they were insufficiently tested prior to approval. In a 2024 documentary, he suggested that the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, which research has shown is not effective against COVID, had been suppressed to secure vaccine approval.
Even before his NIH appointment, the new acting CDC director was an ally of Kennedy. When the secretary ran for president in 2024 as an independent, Bhattacharya spoke at the campaign event announcing his running mate. That summer, Bhattacharya also organized a public health conference at Stanford University featuring individuals like writer and COVID vaccine critic Alex Berenson.
There are already indications that Bhattacharya will support Kennedy’s anti-vaccine push. In January, he co-authored a memo with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary and CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz endorsing the vaccine schedule changes the CDC adopted.
“Not only does Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a health economist, have zero expertise in controlling infectious diseases, he has used his voice to help spread them,” warned Dr. Jonathan Howard, author of the book We Want them Infected, who has followed Bhattacharya’s career closely for years. Howard, an AJI scientific advisor, noted Bhattacharya’s involvement in the vaccine schedule memo.
Bhattacharya’s interim appointment comes just two weeks after he would not fully rule out vaccines as a cause of autism while testifying before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Instead, he would only say he was not aware of any study linking a single vaccine to the neurodevelopmental disorder, leaving open the possibility that multiple shots may be a trigger. Later, he said some vaccines were not as well studied as the measles shot in relation to autism.
In a podcast appearance from September 2024, Bhattacharya was even more explicit, expressing openness to alternative immunization schedules and suggesting more research into the debunked autism-vaccine connection was warranted.
”I think there is a legitimate increase in autism in the population at large and the question of why—we should be moving heaven and earth to answer it,” he said at the time. “And I don’t think it’ll likely end up being the vaccines, but I don’t know that for a fact. So it should be part of the scientific conversation as a hypothesis that looks at—because we’re asking parents to vaccinate their children with…several vaccines; many vaccines…Each of them could have a different combination of effects.”
He also said he thought that it was “also reasonable to ask questions about the particulars of the vaccines that are on the schedule one at a time,” he added. “I don’t see how, in this post-COVID era, you can just simply say ‘trust the experts.’”
Since Bhattacharya has been NIH director, HHS has slashed mRNA vaccine technology research. In August 2025, the day after a gunman who believed he was injured by the COVID vaccines fired multiple rounds into buildings on the CDC’s campus, he appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, which has trafficked in conspiracy theories and misinformation, to declare that the lifesaving mRNA vaccine platform was “no longer viable.”
“It’s not a surprise that measles is spreading uncontrollably today, and not only can we expect this to continue in 2026, it will take decades to begin to repair the damage he has done,” Howard said. “If we have another pandemic, heaven forbid, we’ll be on our own.”