Many in the anti-vax community turned on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Monday after President Donald Trump’s health secretary penned a column endorsing the vaccination of children against measles.
At least one conservative influencer, Linda Catalina, asserted Kennedy was “no different” than former Joe Biden health adviser Anthony Fauci or “anyone else from the old regime.”
“RFK jr. Is already proving to be a fraud,” Catalina wrote to her 35,000 X followers, including a screenshot of Kennedy’s column that was published by Fox News Digital with the headline: “Measles outbreak is call to action for all of us.”
It comes as Tom Corry, who served as assistant secretary of public affairs at Health and Human Services, announced on Friday that he was resigning.
“I want to announce to my friends and colleagues that last Friday I announced my resignation effective immediately. To my colleagues at HHS, I wish you the best and great success,” he wrote.
No reason was given for Corry’s abrupt departure, but sources told Politico that the aide had become frustrated by Kennedy’s muted response to the measles outbreak in Texas.
Kennedy, 71, has been a longtime figure in anti-vax communities. He went as far as writing in a book’s forward in 2021 that measles was not deadly and outbreaks had been “fabricated” to push people toward “unnecessary and risky” vaccines.
A growing measles outbreak in Texas—which killed the first U.S. child in decades, and the first U.S. citizen of any age in 10 years—appears to have Kennedy turning on his old beliefs. It also appears to be a change in tone from just last week where he, at Trump’s cabinet meeting, downplayed the Texas outbreak as a typical occurrence that was not cause for significant concern.
“Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons,” he wrote Sunday.
That sentence is not sitting well with many who have cheered on Kennedy’s so-called MAHA—Make America Healthy Again—movement. That includes the account “The Patriot Voice,” which raged in a pair of posts to his nearly 150,000 followers on X that Kennedy had betrayed a key MAHA stance.
“So, RFK Jr. thinks that it’s ok to continue POISONING people with heavy metals and aluminum directly penetrating the blood-brain barrier?” he wrote. “That is definitely NOT ‘MAHA.’”
He was not alone in his rage.
Ann Vandersteel, who celebrated Kennedy’s Senate confirmation just three weeks ago, wrote on Monday: “What is going on here? Who has MK Ultra’d @RobertKennedyJr?”
The account known simply as “Health Ranger” added to his 282,000 followers: “RFK Jr. is making it impossible for his own supporters to defend him, given that he’s now practically a spokesperson for the vaccine industry.”
Even the far-right figure Candace Owens chimed in to note Kennedy’s hypocrisy.
“This is absolutely wild,” she said of his column. “I’m thinking I might need to release the MMR episode of my Shot in Dark series for free so parents understand this is not a safe vaccine at all. The combination vaccines are the worse. Ironically, I learned this from RFK Jr.”
Owens’ post received over 9,500 likes in less than three hours.
