Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said that the main thing getting in the way of changing vaccine discussions in the U.S. is “the Secretary of Health,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla had some strong words for U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., calling the official’s rhetoric and policies on vaccines “anti-science,” according to a Wednesday report from The Wall Street Journal, which spoke to Bourla during the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland.
Kennedy, along with the greater Department of Health and Human Services, are able to have “very productive discussions” on a variety of health subjects, including cancer and drug pricing, Bourla told the publication. But “it’s a different world when you start discussing vaccines,” he added. “There’s almost like a religion there.”
Asked by the WSJ about what gets in the way of changing the conversations around vaccines in the U.S., Bourla answered bluntly: “The Secretary of Health.”
Indeed, since Kennedy took the reins of the country’s top health authority in February 2025, the vaccine space has been battered not just by confusing and controversial policy changes, but also by critical rhetoric from the Secretary and other top officials.
In April 2025, for instance, just more than one month after his confirmation, Kennedy publicly questioned the safety of measles vaccines—while Texas was in the middle of a measles outbreak that claimed the lives of two children. A month later, the Secretary removed COVID-19 vaccines from the routine immunization guidelines for healthy children and healthy pregnant women.
More recently, Vinay Prasad, who heads the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, last month circulated an internal memo—that has since been leaked—claiming that at least 10 children had died because of COVID-19 vaccines. Prasad has yet to present data to back this claim up, but at the time nevertheless said that “for the first time, the U.S. FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children.”
Bourla has good reason to take aim at Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism. Vaccine sales across the board were down in the third-quarter of 2025, a trend that executives across the four major vaccine developers—Pfizer, GSK, Sanofi and Merck—attributed to macro factors and declining vaccination rates, though the companies generally did not outright place the blame on domestic policy changes from Kennedy.
Even outside of COVID-19, Pfizer’s vaccine products suffered sales declines in Q3 2025. The Prevnar family of pneumococcal vaccines dropped 4% operationally year-on-year, while the respiratory syncytial virus shot Abrysvo plunged 22%.
