When Joseph Ladapo was appointed the surgeon general in Florida in September 2021, the vaccination rate for routine injections for kindergartners was 93.3 percent. Now, it’s at 90.6 percent — the lowest it's been in over a decade. Some point to Lapado’s actions as a contributor to the decline.

For example, amid a measles outbreak in Florida, Lapado contradicted widespread medical guidance, failing to direct parents of unvaccinated children to get them their shots or keep them home. He advised not to vaccinate children against COVID-19 in 2022 and called for a halt to using mRNA vaccines for both adults and children.

Pediatricians now fear that national vaccination rates, which are already on the decline, will follow a similar trend as Florida if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is confirmed as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. But it’s not just how a reduction in vaccination rates could affect kids, but an overall decline in trust in science and medicine that could be devastating to children’s health.

“Positions on vaccines represent a discounting of medicine and science, and that discounting of medicine and science goes beyond vaccines, to include, as an example, his support for hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID,” Jeffrey Goldhagen, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Jacksonville, Florida, told Salon in a phone interview. “The issue with RFK goes far beyond vaccines, vaccines are the tip of the iceberg — an iceberg that represents a nihilism or denial of medicine and public health.”

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In other words, Kennedy represents a “dismantling” of the public health system. In a way, this is what Trump has instructed Kennedy to do. As Trump recently said, Kennedy will “restore” public health “agencies” to the “traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research” to “Make America Great and Healthy Again.” But such a restoration could lead to the loss of key programs that are vital to children’s........

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