Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is starting to echo President Donald Trump’s aggressive anti-immigration rhetoric in response to criticism of his vaccine policy.
Throughout his marathon of seven Congressional hearings last month, the Health and Human Services secretary justified his changes to key vaccine panels and blamed immigrants for the threat of infectious diseases—echoing Trump, who has used the threat of disease as a reason to stem immigration at the southern border and justify domestic crackdowns.
As midterms approach, Kennedy is tempering his anti-vaccine rhetoric, which the White House asked him to downplay.
When lawmakers pressured Kennedy on vaccination rates and tried to pin him down onrising US measles cases, Kennedy defended his policies by blaming Mennonites, saying the government lied to Americans during Covid-19, and detoured to point at polio and tuberculosis.
“If you’re worried about polio and tuberculosis,” he said during a House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee hearing April 21, “you should look at the immigration policies in this country because the places where it’s occurring are the places where the immigrants are going because they’re not vaccinated.”
Evidence that immigrants are spreading these diseases within the US is thin. A 2025 policy analysis from the libertarian CATO Institute found no statistically significant relationship between the immigrant population and notifiable disease incidence rates. The number of annual tuberculosis cases among immigrants has remained about the same per year since 1993. Doctors and infectious disease specialists say the key to preventing the spread of these diseases is vaccines and access to treatment for everyone.
“Don’t think of these people as disease vectors,” said Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Rather, think about how can we help them to make sure that they reduce their risk by giving them prevention, by giving them proper screening.”
Immigration Crackdown
Trump signed a proclamation on his first day back in office declaring an “invasion” at the southern border and moved to suspend certain entries while establishing new removal procedures. The proclamation said border officials lack the capabilities to adequately check criminal records and screen for diseases. A federal appeals court last week found this proclamation unlawful because it violated individuals’ right to seek asylum.
Kennedy was raising a real public health policy concern, said Michael Capuano, director of research for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for lower levels of immigration.
“It’s a huge public health policy issue that was created during the Biden administration when you let in millions of people with no tuberculosis screening because it’s a latent disease and there’s no vaccine for it,” he said.
A majority of tuberculosis cases do occur among individuals not born in the country. Provisional data from the CDC shows that of the 10,260 cases in the US in 2025, more than 7,858 were among foreign-born individuals. The rates of tuberculosis in the US remain among the lowest in the world, according to the CDC.
Capuano said the Trump administration could put more requirements on travelers from specific countries, such as Haiti, which has a higher rate of tuberculosis. “There are clear and present dangers from a lot of places,” he said.
But others did not view the issue as one of immigration policies.
José Romero, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who also once served as Arkansas’ secretary of health during the pandemic, noted immigrants entering legally are already screened for tuberculosis. CDC instructions require chest X-rays for individuals 15 years and older applying for immigrant or refugee status.
Romero said the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement efforts at medical facilities could backfire to threaten public health.
“When we have programs that turn them over, and the individuals are afraid to leave their homes because they could be deported, we’re not going to be able to find these cases,” he added.
Low Polio Numbers
The last known case of polio to occur in the US was in 2022 in New York, where it was later linked to the live-virus oral polio vaccine, according to a report in the Annals of Medicine and Surgery.
The key to preventing polio in this country is continued immunization, even though the US doesn’t get many cases, said Arthur Caplan, professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
“In fact, it is so contagious and hides that you don’t want to stop doing it, even though we really don’t have it,” he said.
Although neither the polio nor the measles vaccines were impacted by recent changes in the vaccine recommendation schedule, vaccination rates in both have seen a decline.
Kennedy’s move to drastically reduce the number of recommended vaccines for children has been held up in court, a decision the administration appealed Thursday. Trump’s nomination of Casey Means—a Kennedy ally who shares some of his views on vaccines—for surgeon general was also pulled Thursday after she failed to garner enough support in the Senate.
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is supported by Michael Bloomberg, who is the majority owner of Bloomberg Government.
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