‘Long-overdue Crack in the Dam’: RFK Jr. to Create CDC Sub-agency Focused on Vaccine Injuries
Source: Children’s Health Defense
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is creating a new sub-agency under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that will focus on vaccine injuries.
During an interview Thursday night with Chris Cuomo on “NewsNation,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said:
“We’re incorporating an agency within CDC that is going to specialize in vaccine injuries.
“These are priorities for the American people. More and more people are suffering from these injuries, and we are committed to having gold-standard science to make sure that we can figure out what the treatments are and that we can deliver the best treatments possible to the American people.”
Kennedy said the sub-agency is part of a broader focus on conditions that include long COVID and Lyme disease.
He said the pathway to creating the sub-agency wasn’t easy, elaborating on what he said Thursday, when he announced a major restructuring of HHS and the agencies it oversees, that when he requested data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), an HHS agency, he was told HHS would have to purchase it.
We are streamlining HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective. We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America or AHA. This… pic.twitter.com/BlQWUpK3u7
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) March 27, 2025
Kennedy told Cuomo:
“I tried to get the CMS patient information, which belongs to the American people and belongs to HHS, and the sub-agencies said we have to buy it from them, and it doesn’t make any sense. This is depersonalized data, and we need it to Make America Healthy Again.”
In February, shortly after being confirmed to run HHS, Kennedy promised that under his watch, HHS and CDC would establish a better system for tracking vaccine injuries.
On March 10, Reuters reported that unnamed sources within the CDC leaked that the agency was planning to do a study on the possible link between vaccines and autism. The story triggered an avalanche of negative mainstream news reports claiming the study isn’t needed.
On March 13, President Donald Trump pulled the nomination of Dr. David Weldon, an outspoken advocate for studying the link between autism and vaccines, after it became clear Weldon couldn’t snag the necessary number of votes.
Just this week, The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, reported that HHS had tapped researcher David Geier — a researcher and expert on the connections between toxic exposures and autism — to lead a study of possible links between vaccines and autism. The Post, followed by other media outlets, used the opportunity to attack Geier and the need for such a study.
‘Critical safety signals may have been buried’
Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, welcomed Kennedy’s announcement, describing it as an “excellent” development.
“It is also very sad that agencies within the HHS are ‘selling’ data to other agencies rather than having broad data-sharing both within the HHS, as well as with independent scientists,” Hooker said. “If we are ever going to get to the bottom of the causes of the chronic disease epidemic, independent researchers will need all of the relevant information that our tax dollars have paid for over so many years.”
Research scientist and author James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., called the announcement “a historic and long-overdue shift in public health accountability.”
He added:
“For decades, families of the vaccine-injured have been subjected to silence, stonewalling and denial by the very institutions tasked with ensuring safety. This new development is without question a step in the right direction.”
Biologist Christina Parks, Ph.D., who has studied vaccine injuries, said the new sub-agency “will legitimize the suffering of millions of Americans and people around the world who have suffered the agonizing effects of vaccine injury on their health or the health of a child or loved one.”
“Once the reality of vaccine injury is accepted, it will open the door to working with doctors to set a standard of care for acute vaccine injuries that has the potential to mitigate the damage caused by these events and speed recovery,” Parks said.
Nebraska chiropractor Ben Tapper, whose public questioning of the COVID-19 vaccines led the Center for Countering Digital Hate to add him — as well as figures like Kennedy — to its “Disinformation Dozen” list of the 12 “leading online anti-vaxxers” in 2021, also welcomed the announcement.
“This news feels like a long-overdue crack in the dam,” Tapper said. “For decades, we’ve been shouting on the rooftops — parents, researchers and victims alike — about the real harm these shots can cause, only to be dismissed as conspiracy nuts or told the science is ‘settled.’”
Tapper said that data on vaccine injuries has long been available — but ignored.
“If you know where to look, the data’s been there: VAERS reports, court payouts from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and countless studies buried or ignored by the mainstream. Now, they can’t pretend it’s not happening anymore.”
VAERS — the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System — is a government-run database of vaccine injury reports. Since the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccines, reports of vaccine-related injuries and deaths submitted to VAERS have significantly increased, while some have accused the government of undercounting reports.
“Vaccine injuries are real,” said Dr. Joel Wallskog, co-chair of React19, an advocacy group for vaccine injury victims. “COVID-19 vaccine injuries are real. There have been more adverse events in VAERS with the COVID-19 vaccines than all other vaccines combined.”
Wallskog added:
“The time has come for our country to stop the polarizing rhetoric about vaccine injuries. Creating a sub-agency to evaluate these injuries in a scientific manner — and not political — has the potential to help thousands, perhaps millions of people.”
Health freedom advocate Sayer Ji, co-founder of Stand for Health Freedom, called Kennedy’s announcement “an admission that the system has failed — and gravely.”
“That HHS departments were selling patient data and operating in silos reveals a cartel, not a public health institution. This is not reform — it’s rupture. And it opens the door to a new era of truth, accountability, and bodily sovereignty,” Ji said.
Lyons-Weiler suggested that critical data about vaccine injuries may have been overlooked as a result of the lack of communication within HHS.
“Critical safety signals may have been buried — not necessarily through conspiracy, but through a disjointed, profit-driven and overly bureaucratic system that prioritized internal control and proprietary access over transparency, accountability, and science,” Lyons-Weiler said.
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Kennedy inherited an ‘incomprehensible’ organizational structure at HHS
During Thursday’s interview with Cuomo, Kennedy also addressed criticism over staff reductions at HHS. Kennedy said HHS “is the biggest agency in government, twice the size of the Pentagon” and that the cuts will not affect the agency’s focus on public health.
“We’re not going to cut services. We’re not going to cut Medicaid, we’re not going to cut Medicare. We’re going to continue. We’re going to provide services, but more efficiently,” Kennedy said.
When he took over as HHS secretary, Kennedy said he inherited a department with an “incomprehensible” organizational structure and with “no chain of command, where people [were] operating in all these different silos and fiefdoms.”
“What we’re trying to do now is to streamline the agency, to eliminate the redundancies and to focus the mission so that everybody who is at HHS is going to wake up every morning and say, ‘What am I going to do today to Make America Healthy Again?”
Kennedy also discussed the recently launched “Operation Stork Speed,” which will “improve our capacity to have good, nutritious baby formula for the American public that doesn’t have heavy metals or other poisons in it,” and HHS efforts to eliminate toxic dyes from the food supply.
“We’ve met with the major food processors and told them we want chemical dyes out of all of our foods,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy added that HHS is reforming the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to stop subsidizing the purchase of unhealthy products.
“We’re reforming every part of the agency to make sure that our food supply is good and that we have the healthiest kids in the world, which we had when I was a kid,” Kennedy said.
Watch the interview here:
Related articles in The Defender
- RFK Jr. Overhauls HHS, Launches Administration for a Healthy America
- ‘We Will Do That Right Away’: RFK Jr. Promises Better Vaccine Injury Tracking, as White House Launches MAHA Commission
- Government Pays $2.5 Million to Person Injured by COVID Vaccine — But 98% of Claims Are Denied
- Their Vaccine Injury Reports Disappeared From VAERS — So They Developed a Tool Anyone Can Use to Track Their Own Reports
- Number of Children Who Died After COVID Shots Much Higher Than VAERS Reports Indicate, Analyst Says
- New York Times Investigation Finds People Injured by COVID Vaccines Are Being ‘Ignored’
