RFK’s New Infatuation With a Danish Model

ONE OF THE MORE FASCINATING and revealing twists of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crusade against vaccines is the way it holds up the policies of Denmark—tiny, socialist Denmark—as a model for America.

Denmark’s official vaccine guidelines for children are narrower than ours. They include the older, more familiar vaccines for diseases like measles, mumps, and pertussis. But they don’t include more recently developed shots for diseases like RSV, rotavirus, and meningococcal disease. Roughly speaking, Denmark now recommends childhood vaccination against ten conditions while the United States calls for shots against sixteen.¹

But that disparity won’t be there much longer if Kennedy gets his way. Late last week, he was all geared up to announce that, going forward, the United States would be slimming down its vaccine schedule to match Denmark’s. CNN reported (and other outlets later confirmed) that the announcement was imminent. The Department of Health and Human Services even distributed a planning email with logistics for an unspecified big policy reveal that was going to take place on Friday.

The reveal never came. A few hours after sending the logistics email, HHS sent out another scrubbing the plans. And it’s still not totally clear why. A senior HHS official told Politico that the general counsel’s office had raised legal objections to the proposed vaccine policy change; a second senior official said White House officials had ordered a postponement because they were planning a separate health care announcement (on drug prices) for the same day.²

Either explanation would be consistent with how HHS under Kennedy has operated, which is very much not in the careful, methodical way you would expect of a well-functioning bureaucracy. The department and its officials have already been forced to backtrack on public positions because of legal, medical, or political complications.³

But there’s plenty of reason to think Kennedy remains determined to scale back America’s vaccine schedule so that it aligns with Denmark’s—and that such a change is coming soon, probably in the new year. President Donald Trump has on multiple occasions said that American kids get too many shots—“it’s like you’re shooting up a horse,” he said in September.⁴ Earlier this month, he cited Denmark prominently in an executive order calling on HHS to revise U.S. guidelines.

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And one of the HHS officials now steering vaccine policy for Kennedy is Tracy Beth Høeg, a sports-medicine physician and epidemiologist who during the pandemic was a prominent critic of mask mandates, school closures, and booster-shot recommendations. At this month’s meeting of the official CDC advisory committee on vaccines, she gave a lengthy presentation extolling the virtues of Denmark’s recommendations, citing in part her perspectives as a physician—and parent—who spent part of her life there.

That presentation raised concerns that the American vaccine schedule is exposing children to potentially dangerous levels of aluminum, a substance many shots use to boost immune system responses. This is a popular objection of vaccine skeptics and opponents, but also one that researchers have investigated repeatedly and found to be without evidence—most recently, in a thorough, comprehensive study based on data from more than a million children that showed no increase in incidence for fifty different conditions.

As it happens, the study was from Denmark—a fact that highlights the curiously selective way Kennedy and his allies are ...