Last week, the Food and Drug Administration, under the direction of the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., revoked the emergency use authorization for the COVID-19 vaccine. Overnight, the vaccines went from being widely available at pharmacies and clinics to effectively inaccessible for millions of Americans.
For those who no longer need or want another dose, this decision may seem like bureaucratic housecleaning four years after the pandemic began. But for vulnerable people who still depend on the protection these shots offer, the revocation was devastating. Conservative commentator Erick Erickson put the human cost in stark terms: “My wife has Stage 4 lung cancer. She is one of the people the COVID vaccine actually helps. Thanks to the current mess at HHS, CVS is unable to get her the vaccine.”
On Thursday, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) grilled Kennedy during a hearing on the shake-ups seen under Kennedy’s watch. Republicans at the hearing noted that their constituents were concerned about the chaos stemming from Kennedy’s decision. Despite Democratic theatrics more concerned with internet virality than getting real information, the hearing raised fair and legitimate questions.
Erickson’s words serve as a reminder that, even as the world has largely moved on from COVID-19, some people still face significant risks. For the immunocompromised, a well-timed booster can be the difference between a manageable infection and a life-threatening one. Stripping access without a safety net is not a win for freedom or public health — it’s bureaucratic negligence.
There are valid arguments against how COVID-19 vaccines were tested and rolled out. I made them repeatedly. Parents were right to question why children, who were at very low risk of severe illness, were rushed under emergency authorization. I wrote in 2021 about the advisory panel that approved the vaccine for children, noting that while experts were comfortable making it available, they explicitly rejected the idea of mandates. They wanted parents to have a choice.
Yet within months, COVID-19 absolutists in city governments, schools, and cultural institutions made vaccination a requirement for basic participation in society. Parents who declined the shot for their children suddenly found themselves locked out of restaurants and theaters. That overreach poisoned trust.
Those concerns were real then, and they remain real now. Emergency use authorization was stretched beyond what it was designed for, and public health officials damaged their credibility by using it to strong-arm compliance instead of respecting the principle of choice. The backlash was predictable, and Kennedy is one of its loudest inheritors. But in his zeal to undo the mistakes of his predecessors, he has made some big ones of his own.
The argument for revoking emergency use authorization is understandable. COVID-19 is no longer an emergency. Four years out, the data about side effects, effectiveness, and durability should be used to craft permanent approvals, not temporary ones. But timing and implementation matter. What happened this week was not a careful transition. It was a rug pull.
Pharmacies like CVS were caught flat-footed and forced to turn away patients seeking doses because the federal government left them no legal avenue to dispense the shots. States scrambled. Vulnerable Americans found themselves in limbo. If Kennedy wanted to take a victory lap over reining in what he calls “Big Pharma,” he could have done so without causing chaos in September, just as respiratory viruses are about to surge.
What makes this even more ironic is that one of the chief complaints of anti-vaccine activists is that parents and patients were denied a choice. Mandates and social coercion during the pandemic took options away from families. Now Kennedy has done the same thing, only in reverse. What was once an overreach of coercion has now been replaced with an overreach of restriction. The common thread is the arrogance of bureaucrats deciding for everyone rather than allowing individuals to make decisions with their doctors.
Kennedy insists he wants to empower patients to make informed decisions about vaccines and other medical treatments, but he has also pushed to ban direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, arguing that drug ads distort medical decision-making. That position is hard to reconcile with his rhetoric. If patients are to be trusted with nuanced choices about vaccines, why shouldn’t they also be trusted with access to information, even through advertising, about other drugs? Empowerment means access, whether to vaccines at the pharmacy or information in the marketplace.
Even more contradictory is his demand that patients now seek out doctors to get approval for COVID-19 vaccines while telling parents to distrust their doctors’ expertise when it comes to childhood vaccines like MMR. You can’t insist that physicians are untrustworthy voices captured by pharmaceutical companies but still require Americans to rely on those same doctors as gatekeepers for the COVID-19 shot and information about pharmaceuticals. That inconsistency reveals the ideological, not medical, roots of his approach.
It didn’t have to be this way. Thoughtful policy would have revoked emergency use while providing a bridge of access until permanent approvals were in place.
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Families facing cancer or immune disorders do not experience the world in slogans about “ending the emergency.” When the government takes away their ability to act, they don’t see it as accountability for pharmaceutical companies. They see it as abandonment.
Kennedy promised a new direction on public health that would give power back to the people. But the chaos we’re witnessing tells a different story. Bureaucrats, whether pushing vaccines and pharmaceuticals or pulling them, can still forget the lives caught in the middle.
