Who is Dr. Kirk Milhoan?
He is head of the RFK Jnr hand-crafted ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) refresh.
As a quick reminder, it used to have wholly appropriate subject matter experts until RFK Jnr stepped in last June 2025, fired them all, and then replaced them with individuals who were a mixture of anti-vaccine cranks, or others who had no expertise with vaccines.
Via here you will find a quick rundown of that initial batch.
Later in September, RFK Jnr appointed five more cranks, and so Dr. Kirk Milhoan was part of that second wave.
So who exactly is Dr. Kirk Milhoan who is now the chair of this panel of quacks and cranks?
He is is a credentialed pediatric cardiologist.
Unfortunately he is also an anti-vaccine crank and so he has also been publicly associated with groups and platforms that challenge mainstream vaccine consensus, especially around COVID-19 vaccines and myocarditis.
Being a credentialed pediatric cardiologist does not make you an expert in vaccines and boy does he have a long track record demonstrating this. Here are a few of his notable hits …
- During the pandemic he promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin – both unproven treatments for COVID-19
- He also falsely claimed the COVID vaccine caused cancer and miscarriages.
- He said having to carry around records of when you got your COVID shots was akin to “what happened when the Jews had to wear the yellow Star of David” during the Holocaust.
- During the worst months of the pandemic, Milhoan said that members of his Calvary Church of South Maui didn’t need to wear masks or practice social distancing.
- In 2024, he participated in a sham hearing on COVID vaccine “injuries” hosted by conspiracy theorist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green.
Wait, back up a moment to that second last item … his church?
Well yes, not only is he a doctor, but he is also a pastor.
To be wholly clear about all of this, the credible scientific evidence for his anti-vaccine stance is … oh come now, you already know, it is nothing at all except his own personal belief.
What has Milhoan been saying now, why am I writing this?
On Jan 22, 2026 Milhoan gave an interview to a podcast called (in this case very ironically) “Why should I trust you?“. I write “Ironically” because he more or less spent the entire interview demonstrating why he cannot be trusted. If you have seen some of the recent headlines then it will have been fallout from this train-wreck of an interview.
- If you really do have a pain fetish, then the interview can be found here. (It is 1 hour and 16 minutes)
As the chair of APIC his “thinking” merits some attention because what he advocates for has the potential to have some truly dire consequences.
Via The Philadelphia Citizen, there is a Jan 30, 2026 article titled “Meet Kirk Milhoan and be afraid“. This is by Paul Offit.
Side note: Before we get into the details, Paul is not a journalist, but instead is a vaccines expert, and yes, I’ve met Paul, he is very impressive. Via his Wikipedia page …
Paul Allan Offit (born March 27, 1951) is an American pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases, vaccines, immunology, and virology. He is the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine. Offit is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology, professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, former chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases (1992–2014), and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
What Paul does is to pull apart the interview given by Milhoan.
What now follows are 8 claims made by Milhoan. For these I lean upon Paul’s rebuttals, but for some I also add my own thoughts as well.
Claim 1: Milhoan raises an old anti-vaccine trope: “vaccines are not appropriately studied for safety, only efficacy“
That is a total lie.
Paul debunks this myth …
Prior to licensure, vaccines are tested in prospective placebo-controlled trials involving tens of thousands of subjects to determine safety and efficacy. These studies are designed to find relatively uncommon, but not rare, safety problems. The Covid-19 vaccines are a perfect example of how this works.
In February 2021, Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine was submitted to the FDA for authorization. At that point, the vaccine had been tested in a prospective, placebo-controlled trial of 40,000 adults. It appeared to be free of serious safety problems. Once authorized, however, and given to about 19 million people, the vaccine was found to cause clotting, including clotting in the brain. The problem was extremely rare, affecting about 1 in 250,00 people, but it was real and quickly picked up in post-authorization surveillance programs like the Vaccine Safety DataLink, which are designed to find safety problems as rare as one in 1 million.
For Milhoan facts might not matter, but they really do.
Let’s move on to the next one.
Claim 2: Milhoan: We don’t need the Polio vaccine anymore because sanitation is far better now
My immediate thought was basically FFS.
Paul is far more polite, he debunks this BS with facts, evidence, and real data …
The incidence of polio in the United States skyrocketed in the U.S. in the 1950s when as many as 20,000 children were paralyzed by the virus. Why then? Why in the 1950s? In the 1920s and 1930s, when sanitation in the U.S. was poor, polio was a common disease, typically infecting babies in the first year of life at the same time they were receiving passively transferred antibodies from their mother through the placenta. Those passively transferred antibodies were often, but not always, protective against paralytic polio. (Hence the term “infantile paralysis”.) When sanitation improved, children were exposed to polio when they were older, after maternal antibodies had worn off. Polio became a more common disease of the 5- to 9-year-old, not a rarer disease in infancy. In other words, better sanitation increased the incidence of polio, the opposite of what Milhoan had claimed.
Also, if polio immunization rates decline, as happened in 2022 when a 27-year-old man in Rockland County, NY, was paralyzed by polio, the disease will come back. The incidence of paralysis caused by the strain that infected the Rockland County man is one in 2000. In other words, he was the tip of a much bigger iceberg of people who were infected, but not paralyzed, by the virus. Indeed, the poliovirus strain that caused this man’s infection was found in the wastewater of Rockland County as well as surrounding counties. And it might also be found in the wastewater in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. This virus, which is a derivative of the oral polio vaccine, is the most common cause of polio worldwide. Why would you ever take the risk of not vaccinating against a virus that is still around? Polio is not a disease you want to see come back.
Claim 3 – Many of [the] risks of measles without having a vaccine, was in the 1960s. We take care of children much differently now. Our ability to have pediatric hospitals, children’s hospitals, pediatric ICU’s. What we’re going to have [now] is a real-world experience of when unvaccinated people get measles. What is the new incidence of hospitalization? What’s the incidence of death?”
Milhoan is arguing that we don’t need to prevent Measles anymore because when it emerges we are far better at handling it.
Again, this really is just more of his BS. With the rise of measles, which was once totally eradicated but is back because of people like him casting doubt about vaccines we now have a body count. That’s totally on him and his community of anti-vaxers.
Back to Paul …
The first measles vaccine was available in 1963. Before that, every year about 48,000 children would be hospitalized with measles and 500 would die. Hospitalization was caused by severe measles pneumonia or severe dehydration. Our ability to take care of pneumonia with oxygen or ventilation, or dehydration with intravenous fluids, has not changed substantially since that time. The death rate from measles in 1963 was one to three per 1,000 cases. This past year in the U.S., three people have died among the roughly 2,000 reported cases — no different than mortality rates 60 years ago.
I will also add the following. For the other 999 out of the 1,000 who get measles and do not die there is still a huge impact. For those who do not go deaf or blind and appear to just have a mild case there is more. The measles virus will deplete previously acquired immune memory by killing cells that make antibodies, and thus weakens the immune system. This can then in turn cause deaths from other diseases. While measles does not get you, what it does do is to open the door for something else to do so.
Suppression of the immune system by measles lasts about two years and has been epidemiologically implicated in up to 90% of childhood deaths in third world countries. Historically this may have caused rather more deaths than were directly caused by measles.
Claim 4 – Milhoan proceeds to argue that the risks of the measles vaccine outweigh the benefits
Fact Check: The Measles virus causes pneumonia, dehydration, and encephalitis that can result in blindness and deafness. The Measles vaccine doesn’t cause any of those problems.
So, why would any parent reasonably choose not to get the vaccine?
The answer is because they were conned by liars like Milhoan.
Claim 5 – Milhoan doubles down: “It’s been very important to us, the members of the committee, that what we were doing is returning individual autonomy to the first order, not public health, but individual autonomy to the first order.”
Paul…
And there it is. Individual freedom trumps public health. That’s why, according to Milhoan, the individual has a right to make poorly informed decisions that put not only their child, but other children, at risk. Public health means caring about your neighbor, individual freedom means not caring. “The likely increases in childhood illness and death appear to be worth the price of freedom to choose whether to vaccinate,” writes bioethicist Art Caplan. It’s not just bad policy, it’s “bad ethics.”
Milhoan’s “freedom” argument comes across like this: “It is my individual right to drive at night with the lights off at high speed on the left hand side of the highway“.
Ethically, autonomy matters but it is not absolute, especially when decisions expose others to harm or deny a child a basic protection.
Many ethicists argue that failing to vaccinate without strong medical justification violates a parent’s duty of care, much like refusing antibiotics for a life-threatening infection would. This is why most societies allow medical exemptions, but treat non-medical exemptions far more cautiously.
The key to it is this, the issue isn’t “parents vs. the state.”, instead it is this question: whose interests deserve priority when individual choice conflicts with preventable harm, especially harm to those who have no choice at all.
Some might indeed (in a vaccine context) argue for the personal freedom to choose to drive on the side of the road they prefer. When an individual does this and ends up killing somebody, then that is always classified as reckless or criminally negligent conduct, not a mere traffic mistake. Arguing for personal freedom is not a valid defence.
Where we are now is clear. Ethically, state intervention for medical care becomes justifiable when the risk to a child is significant and preventable, the risk to others is substantial, and the intervention is proportionate and evidence-based.
In the context of vaccines the balance we have reached is that we generally require vaccination for school attendance, and we will of course allow exemptions only for genuine medical reasons, but we will also stop short of forced vaccination except in extreme outbreaks.
The ethical goal is risk reduction with minimal coercion, not punishment.
Autonomy has never meant “the right to do whatever you want regardless of consequences.” In ethics and in law, autonomy ends where preventable harm to others begins.
Claim 6 – Milhoan is asked about all the reports and data that have established the facts with empirical evidence. His rebuttal is insane, he says “That’s not science. That’s not necessarily science. Science is what I observe.”
Is the man really this deeply stupid?
Yes, he really is.
Milhoan’s claim, “Science is what I observe”, describes personal empiricism, not science. Modern science is explicitly designed to limit the authority of individual observation, because individual observation is biased, incomplete, and often misleading. That’s why science relies on aggregated data, reproducibility, statistical analysis, peer review, and independent verification. A single person’s observations, no matter how sincere or experienced, are the raw material of science, not its final authority.
Dismissing “reports, files, and data” as “not science” flips the scientific method on its head. Those things exist precisely because truth is best approximated when no single observer gets to decide what counts.
There’s also a power issue embedded here. Saying “science is what I observe” implicitly centers authority in the individual: my eyes, my judgment, my interpretation. This is not a transparent contestable process others can check. It is not how science works.
Milhoan’s posture resembles the very thing scientific institutions were created to replace: pre-modern knowledge systems where truth flowed from trusted figures rather than from shared methods. Science never ever means “I saw it”; it means “anyone can test this and see if it holds up.”
Science is a collective, corrective enterprise. Milhoan is redefining science as personal experience with credentials attached. That’s not just a semantic disagreement, it’s a fault line between evidence-based governance and intuition-based authority, and in the context of a vaccine panel, that distinction carries dire consequences for all of us.
Claim 7 – Milhoan: “If you allow flexibility on certain vaccines, you actually then enhance uptake in other ones that are really crucial like MMR and polio and things like that.”
Nope, that’s a lie.
Back to Paul who spells out just how truly batshit crazy this is …
Vaccine rates in the U.S. are eroding. During the past year, we’ve seen an outbreak of measles greater than anything we have seen in more than three decades, child deaths from influenza greater than anything seen since the last influenza pandemic, cases of tetanus greater than anything we have seen in the past 10 years, and children dying from whooping cough in states that hadn’t experienced deaths from whooping cough in years.
Milhoan is arguing that if we loosen vaccine recommendations, making vaccines more optional, then vaccine rates will increase. On what planet does he imagine this happening? Loosening vaccine recommendations — by making vaccines appear to be less necessary — will only decrease vaccine rates.
Claim 8 – Milhoan: “I’ve never seen a case of congenital rubella affecting a child in my career.”
I’ve never personally seen a house burn down, hence fire codes are unnecessary.
Right?
This is a a category error, he is confusing personal experience with population risk. Prevention works by making tragedies rare, not by disproving their existence.
Paul lays it out like this …
Milhoan is implying that congenital rubella syndrome is rare in the U.S. Which is true. If rubella infections are rare in the U.S., then, at least according to Milhoan, it is reasonable not to get a rubella vaccine. But the disease is rare in the U.S. because of the rubella vaccine. Before the rubella vaccine, about 20,000 children in the United States whose mothers were infected with rubella virus in the first trimester delivered children who were blind or deaf or had heart defects. The vaccine virtually eliminated rubella virus from the United States by 2005.
But rubella is common in the world. Every year, about 32,000 babies suffer congenital rubella syndrome. And international travel is common. So, it is likely that people who are infected with rubella enter this country all the time. This is also true for measles virus. The measles vaccine eliminated measles from this country in 2000. But people infected with measles still entered the country every year. Fortunately, in 2000, enough people were vaccinated against measles so that the virus didn’t spread. The same is now true for rubella. But lower immunization rates and rubella will be back.
The core concern
Dr. Kirk Milhoan is not some random crank, he is in a key position of national responsibility. As chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices he gets to dictate US vaccine policy for the nation.
The fact that his stance is basically raw unadulterated stupidity that will inflict a considerable degree of real harm should positively terrify us. In normal times his views would have seen him booted very promptly from the committee, but these are not normal times.
Somehow, the word ‘unbelievable‘ doesn’t even come close to describing the level of stupidity that enables him to have been initially appointed and to then remain after airing such crazy views.