An Old Friend Sent Me a Text About RFK and Vaccines. I Spent the Next Six Hours in PubMed.
The Health Secretary keeps saying no childhood vaccine has been tested against a placebo. The 1954 Salk trial alone proves him wrong, and that's just the start.
My old friend texts me on a Tuesday afternoon. Not a phone call. A text. Which already tells you something about how this is going to go.
“So I guess none of the vaccines kids get were ever tested against a placebo. RFK said it on the news. Pretty wild if true.”
I am sitting at my kitchen table in Sioux Falls, halfway through a cup of coffee that has gone cold, and I feel that thing happen in my chest. The thing that happens every time someone I love forwards me something a politician said. My jaw locks. My shoulders come up. I put the cup down.
Six hours later, I have eleven browser tabs open. PubMed, FactCheck.org, the New England Journal of Medicine, the University of Michigan School of Public Health archives, a Google Sheet maintained by a Stanford infectious-disease physician, and the original 1954 Francis Field Trial documentation. My coffee is now ice cold, and it has been joined by a glass of water and a half-eaten apple. My wife has come into the kitchen twice to ask if I am okay. I am okay. I am writing.
Here is what I found.
What He Actually Said
On May 14, 2025, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sat in front of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and said this: “The only vaccine that has been tested in a full-blown placebo trial against an inert placebo was the COVID vaccine. The other 76 shots that children in this country received between birth and 18 years old, none of them have been safety tested in prelicensing studies against the placebo, which means we don’t understand the risk profile for those products, and that’s something I intend to remedy” (Goodman, 2025).
The chair of that committee, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who happens to be a physician, paused the hearing to correct the Secretary on the record. He named rotavirus, measles, and HPV as counterexamples right there in the room (PBS News, 2025). The Secretary kept going.
This is not a slip. Kennedy has been making some version of this claim since at least 2017. It shows up on Joe Rogan, on Fox, in his book about Anthony Fauci, and now in federal policy documents. His department’s spokesperson has told reporters the same thing in writing. It is the foundation under a sweeping rewrite of the U.S. childhood immunization schedule that landed at the CDC on December 31, 2025.
So the question is not whether the Secretary believes what he is saying. The question is whether what he is saying is true.
It is not.
The 1954 Salk Trial Ends This Argument All By Itself
In April 1954, parents in 44 American states, as well as parts of Canada and Finland, agreed to enroll their children in what became the largest medical experiment to date. The Francis Field Trial of Jonas Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine eventually included 1.8 million kids. About 440,000 received the vaccine. About 210,000 received a saline placebo. The remaining 1.2 million served as observed controls (Wikipedia contributors, 2026; University of Michigan School of Public Health, n.d.).
It was randomized. It was double-blind. It was placebo-controlled. The placebo was, by Kennedy’s own narrow definition, inert. It was a saline solution. The researcher who designed it and ran the analysis was Thomas Francis Jr. at the University of Michigan. He announced the results to the world from Rackham Auditorium in Ann Arbor on April 12, 1955: 60-70 percent effective against type 1 polio, over 90 percent effective against types 2 and 3, and 94 percent effective against bulbar polio (University of Michigan School of Public Health, n.d.).
Polio is on the CDC childhood immunization schedule. It has been on every version of that schedule since 1955. The 1954 Francis Field Trial is in every epidemiology textbook ever written. It is taught to every public-health student in America. CBS News has a seventieth-anniversary write-up of it. The History Channel has a page on it. You can read the trial design in the New England Journal of Medicine. You can read the announcement press release in the University of Michigan archives.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services either does not know this or knows it and chooses not to mention it. Pick whichever one keeps you up at night.
A Stanford Doctor Got Annoyed and Built a Spreadsheet
In April 2025, an infectious-disease physician at Stanford University, Jake Scott, was watching the same press cycle I was. Scott has a private practice quirk that I share: when somebody in public life says something that contradicts the medical literature, he cannot let it go. So he started a Google Sheet (CIDRAP News, 2025).
By that night, the sheet had seven entries. By the next morning, it had twenty. By June, it held 274 randomized controlled vaccine trials, 164 of which were placebo-controlled, with 133 using inert placebos. By late October, Scott’s Stanford Health Care bio described the database as cataloging more than 1,700 randomized controlled trials of vaccines. The full thing is publicly viewable. Anyone can click any entry, follow it to the PubMed citation, and read the original paper.
CIDRAP News asked Scott directly whether the Secretary’s claim that COVID-19 was the only vaccine ever tested against a placebo was defensible. His answer: “It’s unequivocally, demonstrably, measurably false. … Essentially every childhood vaccine has been tested in placebo-controlled trials of some sort” (CIDRAP News, 2025). Scott testified to the same effect before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on September 9, 2025. His testimony, publicly posted, names at least 9 of the 16 vaccines on the routine childhood schedule that have been tested against inert placebos: COVID-19, rotavirus, polio, influenza, measles-mumps-rubella, human papillomavirus, varicella, pneumococcal disease, and Haemophilus influenzae type b.
That is more than half of the routine pediatric schedule. With saline. Or saline-equivalent inert placebo. In published, randomized, controlled, double-blind trials. Indexed in PubMed.
