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In an extraordinary public display of administration infighting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate foreign relations committee on June 2 that he was wresting back control of U.S. contributions to an international vaccine consortium — Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and his anti-vaxxer entourage. It was time, Rubio announced brusquely, to “re-engage” with Gavi, which was established in 2000 and takes the lead in vaccinating roughly 60 percent of the world’s children.

Across the public health world, there was a collective sigh of relief. “I hope it is a reset,” Professor Gavin Yamey, director of the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health at Duke University, told Truthout. “I hope it is a sign of support. Traditionally global health has been a remarkably bipartisan concern.” Yamey hopes that Rubio’s announcement will turn the page on the “aberration” of the U.S.’s recent “unprecedented” disengagement with international public health needs.

Gavi is a private organization that is funded by a combination of contributions from governments around the world and from private philanthropy. While the U.S. contributions, which make up about one-seventh of the organization’s total funding, are authorized by Congress and have traditionally been administered by the State Department, RFK Jr. essentially demanded control over the process when he came into office. And, in 2025, the State Department, preoccupied as it was with the administration’s stampede away from multilateralism and overseas aid, acquiesced.

Kennedy has long been a vaccine skeptic, and he has been particularly outspoken in his opposition to the use of a mercury-containing compound named thimerosal as a preservative in multi-dose vaccines. Wealthy countries, which generally use single-dose vaccines, have generally phased out the compound’s usage in vaccines; but in poorer countries, where aid agencies and medical systems have long relied on multi-dose vaccines — which are easier to transport, to store, and to distribute to large numbers of patients at speed — it is still vital to use the preservative in some vaccines so as to prevent contamination of batches.

RFK Jr. has long argued that thimerosal is a neurotoxin that can cause autism. Numerous scientific studies disagree with this — and the scientific consensus is that this type of mercury compound is harmless when used in vaccines. But Kennedy has rarely let science stand in the way of his anti-vaccine ideology, and by........

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