Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a conference of the anti-vaccine group Children's Health Defense on Sept. 17 that vaccine injuries are likely rare but that "there's no way for us to know this," because the system for reporting injuries is broken, according to CIDRAP's account of the Washington speech. "We have no idea what the risk profile is for these products," he said.
That claim does not match how vaccines are tracked in the United States. The CDC and the FDA monitor vaccines after approval or authorization through four complementary systems, including one that studies medical records from large health care organizations. Fact-checkers at FactCheck.org found that Kennedy repeated a series of false and misleading claims about vaccine testing and injury reporting.
