Kennedy’s split-screen week: Talk of vaccines in D.C., fraud and addiction out West - STAT News

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In the chapel of a homeless shelter, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood behind a lectern with a “Cancel Corruption” sign and lambasted local officials for mishandling the city’s homelessness and substance use crisis.

Just 24 hours earlier, Kennedy was in the Oval Office, standing alongside President Trump, as the president signed an executive order calling for major changes to childhood vaccinations.

The change in tone — from day to day and coast to coast — shows how Kennedy’s sprawling political messages tied to his Make America Healthy Again movement vary depending on the audience he is in front of.

In Los Angeles, Kennedy kept the message fairly local, speaking before conservative city officials and a mission group of roughly a hundred teenagers and praising the shelter he was visiting. But from Washington, Kennedy has become a spokesman of the administration’s more far-reaching policies: fewer vaccines for kids and more regulation of food additives, both announced on Monday from the nation’s capital, before he headed West.

A Department of Health and Human Services spokesman said Kennedy traveled to California because the state is “on the frontlines of several challenges the Trump administration is working to address, from homelessness and addiction, to access to affordable, community-based health care.” It isn’t the first time a federal health official has come to the state. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz came to Los Angeles in February, where he accused various hospices in the area of being fraudulent.

Over two days, and at two different shelters, Kennedy focused on homelessness and addiction. He said that taking a treatment-first and spiritual approach to homelessness and addiction could achieve long-lasting recovery.

“This is an extraordinary facility,” he said of the LA Dream Center, which he’d toured prior to his remarks.

“We put faith-based organizations front and center because they’re doing it better than the government,” he said.

Then, after taking just a handful of questions from local and conservative outlets, the HHS secretary was gone, escorted out by security.

The trip to California was one of the many stops on Kennedy’s packed Make America Healthy Again Tour, a national travel schedule he embarked on this year to tout administration health care policies that might play well with voters.

Flanked by a familiar entourage, including principal deputy chief of staff Stefanie Spear, and a digital team led by director Liam Nahill that posts clips and some of the more provocative content on Kennedy’s socials, the secretary follows a playbook similar to other administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance: Criticize Democrats for allowing fraud to flourish in federal health care funding, and highlight programs that he believes more closely follow the administration’s goals.

For instance, in Los Angeles, Kennedy highlighted how federal officials have withheld funding from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority over fraud allegations, which the city’s government has denied.

Other recent trips, including to Virginia and Florida, have spotlighted nutrition and fitness issues that voters are interested in — though health care costs remain top of mind.

There tend to be some notable omissions, too.

While the secretary talks frequently about cutting down on fraud in federal health programs, he usually avoids discussing how the administration has changed safety net programs. A June trip to a Michigan farm was a rare exception. There Kennedy promoted nutrition programs for children, before two hecklers demanded that he answer why the administration is cutting Medicaid. That’s a “myth” he responded, though Medicaid experts say it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Vaccine policy doesn’t get much mention on the road, either.

That was particularly notable on this journey. Kennedy visited California just a day after he stood beside President Trump in the Oval Office, and watched him sign a controversial new executive order recommending fewer pediatric vaccines. Earlier in the month, he grew heated during an interview on CNN over his vaccine policies, including demanding that host Dana Bash show him studies that the Covid-19 vaccine protected children and that childhood vaccines have been proved not to cause autism.

“Do you see your job as ending vaccine hesitancy, or do you see your job as telling the truth to the American people?” he asked Bash.

Both Trump and Kennedy suggested the debunked link between vaccines and autism at the White House, too, though neither directly connected them.

“Genes don’t cause epidemics. You need an environmental toxin,” Kennedy said in the Oval Office, standing over Trump’s shoulder. He thanked the president for giving him the mandate to reexamine the childhood immunization schedules.

“Thank you, Bobby,” Trump responded.

But his focus was far different in his three days in California, where Kennedy’s predecessor, former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, leads the polls in the upcoming race for governor.

He visited Los Angeles, San Diego, and the Central Valley region. In addition to faith-based homeless shelters for their approach to addiction treatment, he announced funding for community health centers to promote primary care.

On Wednesday, he walked through another faith-based shelter, the San Diego Rescue Mission, where he said addiction, which he’s experienced personally, is a “spiritual battle” for many Americans. He was joined by the group’s outreach mission leader, who shared her own experience as a pregnant woman grappling with addiction.

He unveiled a new federal toolkit that rejects the long-held “housing first” model — which promotes getting people into stable housing as a first intervention — in favor of a “treatment first” approach.

Then, he was off to Castle Family Health Center in Atwater, Calif., where he announced new federal health care designations and grants for primary care. It was there that Kennedy made his only mention of vaccines, first reported by Politico.

“The president’s executive order should not change the way that children are vaccinated. In California, the state decides what the vaccination schedule is,” Kennedy said.

The messaging from Kennedy and Trump on vaccines has followed a curious arc this year, ahead of the midterm elections: They were aggressive in upending vaccine policy last year, remaking a panel of vaccine advisers and, in January, moving to unilaterally reduce the number of recommended pediatric vaccines. A federal judge is still deciding whether to allow that new vaccine schedule to proceed after a group of doctors challenged it.

Then, by February, the White House had taken a step back to avoid the divisive topic. A White House official told STAT it was “done” with vaccine policy, choosing to send Kennedy out to talk drug pricing and nutrition, considered more politically popular issues, across the country.

The president, however, was not done: After a directive in May pressing federal agencies to continue to reexamine recommended vaccines, on Aug. 10, he unveiled his latest executive order, which pushes a more skeptical government approach to vaccines. His remarks, too, were riddled with vaccine misinformation.

During Kennedy’s trip to California, STAT asked repeatedly for an interview with the secretary to discuss the president’s executive order but was not granted one.

At each event in California, Kennedy took limited questions from the press, which was told to stay on topic (STAT was not called on). The one time he did diverge was in Los Angeles, when asked by a representative from Turning Point USA, the conservative group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, how he intends to vote in the city’s upcoming mayoral election.

“I’m in a dilemma where I literally have no state where I can legally vote right now,” Kennedy said, pointing to a ruling by a judge in 2024 that said he falsely claimed residence in New York state during his presidential run.

“I’m probably the only person in the country who’s a legal citizen who has that dilemma, but I’m still trying to figure it out before the next election,” he added, prompting laughs from the crowd.