When a Republican presidential candidate pushed the falsehood that childhood vaccines cause autism at a 2015 debate, Fox News host Greg Gutfeld denounced that candidate for adopting a “hysterical antiscience point of view.” He warned that the false narrative was “stupid,” “destructive,” “deadly,” and “dangerous,” and described its proponents as “bozos” who risked the lives of children.

That candidate was Donald J. Trump.

A decade later, President Trump has installed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — the anti-vax crusader who has long blamed increasing cases of autism on childhood vaccinations — at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services, which Kennedy is using to undermine public confidence in and access to vaccines.

And Gutfeld, rather than vigorously standing up for the importance of vaccination against the “antiscience point of view,” has embraced Kennedy as “open-minded” and honest, and is running cover for the secretary against his purportedly “unglued” critics.

The collapse of Gutfeld’s moral clarity demonstrates how the right stopped worrying about the potential deaths of children and brought vaccine deniers into the fold during the COVID-19 pandemic — and how fealty to Trump has become the MAGA movement’s sole defining principle.

Gutfeld in 2015: Trump linking childhood vaccines to autism “is destructive and it's ignorant because it’s not science”

Republican presidential candidates argued over the fabricated link between vaccines and autism after CNN moderator Jake Tapper raised Trump’s past comments about it during the party’s September 16, 2015, presidential primary debate. 

Trump defended his prior remarks, calling for “smaller doses” of vaccines “over a longer period of time,” citing the case of “a beautiful child [who] went to have the vaccine” and then, “a week later, got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.” Fellow candidates Rand Paul and Ben Carson, both medical doctors, responded by defending vaccines, with Carson noting, “We have extremely well-documented proof that there’s no autism associated with vaccination.”

Gutfeld picked this portion of the debate to discuss the following day on Fox’s panel show The Five, calling it “a moment that I didn’t like.” After airing portions of comments from Trump, Paul, and Carson, the Fox host warned about potential disaster if the GOP adopted such lies.

“This is a really bad thing to happen to the Republican Party, an anti — hysterical anti-science point of view about vaccines,” Gutfeld said. “And using the anecdote with a child is destructive and it’s ignorant because it’s not science.”

“It’s a false causal argument to say because vaccines and autism symptoms appear at the same time, ergo, the vaccines cause autism,” he continued. “That’s the same as saying, you know when you have ice cream and you get sunburns in the summertime, therefore ice cream causes sunburns. It’s stupid and it’s bad for Republicans.”

“And not only that, it’s deadly and it’s dangerous,” Gutfeld added. “We’re seeing outbreaks of measles all around the world. We’re seeing it in Australia, we’re seeing it in Africa where people are actually dying. Meanwhile, we’re having outbreaks in Disneyland.”

“Why is this happening? Because people are listening to bozos who are questioning the validity of what is really a wall,” he concluded, referencing Trump’s call to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. “Science built a wall against disease and it’s called vaccines.”

Gutfeld didn’t stop there — he went on to criticize Paul and Carson for not being explicit enough in their criticism of Trump and defence of vaccines.

“It was terrible,” Gutfeld said of their remarks. “They’re doctors. And I’m glad Ben Carson, feebly, came up and said something, but they are doctors and they have a responsibility to defend the profession because there are doctors like them everyday who have to confront this argument.”

“Whenever they go in there and have worried mothers or elderly people who don’t want vaccines, they are the ones in the frontlines,” he added. “And those doctors are on TV and they should have come out, they should have been forthright about it.” 

“You know, hats off, that’s just so strong and so right, I’m so glad you said that,” liberal co-host Juan Williams replied.

Gutfeld in 2025: “Open-minded” RFK Jr. is defending “his vaccine policies” from “unglued” Democrats who “gave us Rachel Levine”

As Gutfeld warned, Trump’s 2015 vaccine comments were a harbinger of the GOP moving toward a “hysterical anti-science point of view about vaccines.” But it was his network that played an instrumental role in that shift, first helping supercharge anti-vaccine sentiment within the party, then propelling Kennedy into Republican prominence and then Trump’s cabinet. 

And Gutfeld, who once righteously ranted against both anti-vax Republicans and those who fail to offer a sufficiently vehement response to their lies, has taken up the side of the liars. He has long since made peace with Trump’s domination of GOP politics and rebooted himself as a MAGA diehard, adopting a tone far more deferential to the “bozos” he once decried.

In late January, following Kennedy’s confirmation hearing, Gutfeld could have tried to hold the line and urge Republican Senators to vote against someone who espouses a view he had described as “dangerous” and “deadly.” He did not, instead presenting the nominee as a “glorious mixed bag” whom the senators should support.

“On one hand, he's passionate, he's persuasive, he's open-minded, he's not woke, he's interested in the world around him, not himself,” Gutfeld explained to his co-hosts in The Five. “On the other hand, he has stuff on vaccines and autism that seems more reliant on his gut instinct than science, the correlation, the rise of childhood autism or autism and the use of vaccines, it's not cause and effect, it's a correlation.”

“If I were in the Senate — and who's to say I'm not? — I would vote for him,” he concluded. “All Republicans should say yes.” 

Republican senators, even those who had questioned Kennedy’s vaccine views, ultimately agreed with Gutfeld and confirmed Kennedy to lead HHS. Every Democratic senator and a single Republican — Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who survived childhood polio — voted against him.

Since ascending to the top position in the U.S. health bureaucracy, Kennedy has proved correct the critics who warned that he would use that power to carry out his political project of sabotaging the nation’s vaccination regime. Kennedy has slashed funding that went to vaccinate vulnerable children and terminated grants that supported research into next-generation mRNA vaccines. Amid a pediatric measles outbreak in the American Southwest, he went out of his way to talk down the need for children to be vaccinated against the disease.

But perhaps most concerning of all, Kennedy has replaced the members of a vaccine advisory board with his own picks — some of whom were notorious vaccine critics — who plan to review the childhood vaccination schedule. According to former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susana Monarez, she was asked to resign and then pushed out when she refused to preapprove that board’s recommendations; her removal last month triggered an exodus of top CDC scientists. 

When Kennedy appeared before the Senate Finance Committee last Thursday, he drew rebukes not only from its Democratic members but also from three Republicans who sit on the committee and voted for his confirmation. Notably, Sen. Bill Cassidy, a gastroenterologist, said that under Kennedy’s leadership, “we’re denying people vaccine,” while Sen. John Barrasso, an orthopedic surgeon, said he had “grown deeply concerned” with the secretary’s oversight of vaccination efforts. 

But Gutfeld, introducing a segment on the hearing later that day, simply disappeared all the critiques from Republicans. 

“RFK Jr. defending his vaccine policies against Democrats on Capitol Hill, furious over his ousting of the CDC director,” he said. “Junior says it's time for new blood at the health agency after they failed Americans during COVID.”

He alleged that “the Dems came unglued” at the hearing, and later mocked them on the grounds that “they don’t look like they’re in excellent health.”

Gutfeld had previously denounced Paul and Carson for not being strenuous enough in their criticism of Trump’s vaccine claims, arguing that as doctors, “they have a responsibility to defend the profession because there are doctors like them everyday who have to confront this argument.” But he never got around to addressing the Kennedy criticisms made by Republican senators who are also medical doctors — though he did argue that, in his opinion, babies don’t need the hepatitis B vaccine the CDC recommends they receive at birth.

Gutfeld returned to the subject of Kennedy’s hearing the following day, this time offering a firm defense of the HHS secretary.

“I can disagree with RFK on a lot of things and I have and I've written about it actually,” Gutfeld said, without outlining the subjects on which they disagree. “But I will never call him a liar. And I have seen him debate people who actually seriously disagree with him. And he does something that Democrats don't do: He listens.”

Gutfeld then recited a litany of examples he suggested show that it is Kennedy’s critics who are untruthful, claiming they are “disqualified from this discussion” because they purportedly “lied about” former President Joe Biden’s health; his son Hunter Biden’s laptop; the existence of man-made climate change; and “10% for the big guy.” 

“I honestly cannot be told that my side is anti-science when you gave us Rachel Levine,” Gutfeld concluded. 

That’s Gutfeld in a nutshell. A decade ago, he warned that Republicans would become “antiscience” if they adopted a Trumpian stance against vaccines. Now that has come to pass — but he won’t accept it because trans people exist.