OAN Staff Taylor Tinsley
10:30 AM – Thursday, October 2, 2025
Governor Josh Shapiro has signed an executive order protecting Pennsylvanians’ rights to access vaccines of their choice – a move he claims pushes back against efforts by the Trump Administration to limit that freedom.
During a press conference on Wednesday, Shapiro (D-Pa.) said people should be able to make health care decisions themselves, without advice from President Donald Trump or Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary RFK Jr.
“We don’t want politicians who don’t know best taking away our freedom to be able to be parents over our children and interrupt or interfere with the relationship with our doctors,” Shapiro said. “I believe the same thing is true about vaccines.”
His comments come after the HHS secretary in May, removed the Coronavirus vaccine from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recommended vaccine list for healthy children and pregnant women.
“We have seen sadly in recent months the president and RFK Jr. spreading blatantly false information about vaccines and their efficacy,” the governor said. “They’re taking real concrete steps to restrict your ability to get access to a vaccine, or your ability to decide what vaccines your child should get.”
Shapiro also pointed to how RFK Jr. fired all 17 members from the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee back in June, a move in which Kennedy said was a long time coming.
During a July interview with NewsNation, Kennedy said the panel had been under attack for two decades.
“In 2002 congress investigated the panel and found that 97% of the people sitting on it have conflicts with the pharmaceutical industry,” the HHS secretary said.
He added that in one case, four out of five members of the panel were working for Merck, a global pharmaceutical company, when they approved a vaccine for Merck.
“One of the people on that panel who voted had a patent on that vaccine which he then sold for $186 million. We wanted to make sure there’re people on that panel for the first time in history that don’t have conflicts of interest, that are not making money by voting themselves rich.”
Kennedy’s changes come as the administration is trying to restore public trust in America’s healthcare system.
Earlier this week, Kennedy released a video refuting a chart used against him during a recent congressional hearing arguing that vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives.
He detailed data regarding measles, whooping cough, influenza and tuberculosis, showing that the vaccines were invented after mortality rates had already dissipated.
“In 1900, some 13,00 Americans a year were dying of measles. By 1960, however, this number had dropped to a few hundred. But the measles vaccine was not introduced until three years later (1963). So, the measles vaccine can’t really claim the credit for saving all those lives,” the health secretary said.
RFK Jr. said that while people often say vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives, that idea is so widely accepted that it’s rarely questioned or carefully examined by public health agencies.
Kennedy has asserted vaccines are a critical part of public health and can prevent infection, but emphasizes blind faith in vaccination alone is the real problem.
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