At RFK’s January 2025 Senate confirmation hearing, RFK was questioned about when, in 2021, he stated, “We should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites, because their immune system is better than ours.”
Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), who is Black, countered, “So what different vaccine schedule would you say I should have received?” NPR reported. “With all due respect, that is so dangerous.”
When asked to clarify his previous statement, RFK said, “There’s a series of studies, I think most of them by, uh, Poland, that show that, to particular antigens, that, um, blacks have a much stronger reaction. There’s differences in reaction to different products by different races. … The Poland article suggests that blacks need few antigens…”
The author of the studies refuted RFK’s claims. Dr. Richard Kennedy (no relation to RFK), a vaccine researcher at the Mayo Clinic, whose studies Kennedy seemingly referenced, told NPR, “the data doesn’t support a change in vaccine schedule based on race.” While the study of “immune response” to vaccinations by race did show there was a “higher antibody response after MMR (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) vaccination compared to white people,” Dr. Kennedy reiterated that the suggestion of different vaccination schedules would be “twisting the data far beyond what they actually demonstrate.”
“The comment that [Kennedy] made about the vaccine schedule, it’s basically scientific racism, which has been debunked,” said Dr. Oni Blackstock, a primary care and HIV physician and founder and executive director of Health Justice, a racial and health equity consulting company, told HuffPost. “He’s really perpetuating this false belief that Black people are somehow biologically different from white people and, in that way, justifying differential and ultimately unequal treatment for Black people versus white people.”
