Most Americans are probably familiar with homicides from TV shows such as the "Law & Order" franchises, which have run for decades. They know that murder can be accomplished with a variety of weapons, poisons and even with bare hands. Less obvious is that it can be the direct result of government officials inducing people to distrust proven means of protecting themselves.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s falsehoods, conspiratorial thinking, and institutional sabotage have lowered U.S. vaccination rates, which has caused untold numbers of preventable illnesses and the foreseeable loss of human life.
Former Office of Management and Budget official John D. Graham supplied a useful descriptor for this kind of harm: "statistical murder." He warned that flawed government policies and misplaced priorities could sacrifice lives by diverting resources from effective protection toward imaginary or exaggerated hazards. His phrase captured the human cost of squandered opportunities to prevent death.
The arithmetic is straightforward. If a policy could prevent 100 deaths through one intervention but officials choose another that prevents only one, the opportunity cost is 99 preventable deaths. We generally cannot identify by name which particular individuals would have survived under the better policy, but that uncertainty about identity does not erase the difference in expected mortality.
Kennedy extends Graham's problem: He attacks effective protections such as vaccines while redirecting official attention toward unsupported dangers.
Kennedy's record of lies and evil is unambiguous. In a 2023 interview, he declared, "There's no vaccine that is safe and effective." When challenged during his Senate confirmation hearing, he claimed he had intended to add a qualification but had been interrupted. FactCheck.org
Kennedy's fixation on the myth of vaccine-induced autism is similarly impervious to evidence. A 2019 Danish nationwide cohort study followed 657,461 children and found that MMR vaccination did not increase autism risk, including among children considered susceptible. Subsequent large studies have led to the same conclusion. However, Kennedy's continued insinuations and outright lies exploit some parents' uncertainty about vaccines.
Kennedy's campaign also relies on sentimental history. He told senators that childhood chronic disease had risen from 2 percent during his uncle's presidency in the 1960s to 66 percent today. That comparison lacks a sound evidentiary foundation: definitions, diagnostic practices, and surveillance have changed, and experts have disputed his contemporary estimate. Childhood obesity and other chronic conditions do deserve serious attention, but they do not justify invoking an imaginary golden age to discredit modern medicine.
Kennedy's deceptions are contaminating the agencies in his department. In June 2025, he removed all 17 sitting members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's highly respected Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replaced them largely with anti-vaccine shills. In August of that year, HHS announced the wind-down of grants in 22 mRNA vaccine-development projects — state-of-the-art medical science — worth nearly $500 million. Kennedy justified the latter by asserting inadequate protection against respiratory infection, a claim for which there is no evidence.
The stakes of lowering vaccination rates are huge. A modeling simulation published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last year illustrated the danger of falling vaccination rates. It concluded:
"At current state-level vaccination rates, measles may become endemic again; increasing vaccine coverage would prevent this. Under a 50 percent decline in childhood vaccination in the US, the simulation model predicted 51.2 million measles cases over a 25-year period, 9.9 million rubella cases, 4.3 million poliomyelitis cases, 197 diphtheria cases, 10.3 million hospitalizations, and 159,200 deaths."
Such studies illustrate how changes in vaccine uptake can radically alter the burden of lethal, preventable diseases.
The warnings are already accompanied by actual outbreaks. The CDC reported 4,410 confirmed measles cases in the United States in 2026.
We cannot precisely quantify a mortality total attributable to Kennedy's tenure. However, vaccines prevent potentially fatal diseases, inadequate coverage enables outbreaks, and Kennedy and his allies' longstanding campaign discourages confidence in vaccination and lowers vaccine uptake. Deliberately weakening protection creates a foreseeable burden of death even when responsibility for individual fatalities cannot be assigned.
Kennedy is therefore guilty, in John Graham's moral and policy sense, of statistical murder, by recklessly and relentlessly discouraging life-saving vaccination.
Congress should investigate Kennedy's destructive, indefensible decisions and hold him accountable. Impeachment would relegate him to well-deserved ignominy. Remember that when you vote on November 3.
Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Glenn Swogger Distinguished Scholar at the Science Literacy Project. He was the founding director of the FDA's Office of Biotechnology.