Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who previously voted to confirm anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy as federal health secretary, publicly denounced President Trump’s recent statements characterizing the combined MMR vaccine as unsafe. Trump had ordered changes to the recommended childhood vaccination schedule, proposing that the two-dose combined Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine be replaced with two doses of three separate vaccines, describing the MMR shots as resembling “a nuclear weapon” that could be “quite lethal.” Cassidy, speaking to CNN, labeled these claims as potentially harmful, saying “If it wasn’t so potentially tragic, you would break out laughing at a comment like that.”
Cassidy outlined practical concerns about the proposed change, noting that parents would need to visit doctors six times instead of two, children would receive six injections instead of two, and insurance companies would face increased costs for multiple office visits. He argued these changes would ultimately drive up insurance premiums and stressed that “the president is wrong; there’s a lot of bad things that will come out of this.” When asked about Trump’s assertion that “nothing bad can happen” from the revised approach, Cassidy rejected this characterization.
Cassidy’s public criticism came despite his track record of supporting Trump’s nominees. The Louisiana senator cast the decisive vote on August 8 allowing Todd Blanche, a former criminal defense lawyer for Trump, to secure Senate confirmation as U.S. attorney general. When announcing his earlier support for Kennedy as health secretary, Cassidy noted that pediatricians had expressed concerns about Kennedy’s history of promoting vaccine skepticism. He stated he had secured a commitment from Kennedy that the CDC would maintain statements clarifying that vaccines do not cause autism.
However, after Kennedy assumed his role as health secretary, the CDC’s “Autism and Vaccines” webpage was modified. An asterisk was added to the headline “Vaccines do not cause Autism,” linking to a footnote stating that autism’s root causes remain unknown. Additional text was inserted suggesting that studies supporting a vaccine-autism link may have been overlooked by health authorities. Cassidy criticized these changes, stating that Trump’s MMR commentary would do nothing to address the discredited connection between vaccines and autism, which originated from a single retracted paper.
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