Vaccine safety advocates hailed HHS Secretary Kennedy’s plan to create an agency within the CDC focused on vaccine injuries and also long COVID and Lyme disease. In an interview with Chris Cuomo, Kennedy also revealed that when he asked an HHS agency for patient data, he was told he’d have to purchase it.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is creating a new sub-agency under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that will focus on vaccine injuries.
During an interview Thursday night with Chris Cuomo on “NewsNation,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said:
“We’re incorporating an agency within CDC that is going to specialize in vaccine injuries.
“These are priorities for the American people. More and more people are suffering from these injuries, and we are committed to having gold-standard science to make sure that we can figure out what the treatments are and that we can deliver the best treatments possible to the American people.”
Kennedy said the sub-agency is part of a broader focus on conditions that include long COVID and Lyme disease.
He said the pathway to creating the sub-agency wasn’t easy, elaborating on what he said Thursday, when he announced a major restructuring of HHS and the agencies it oversees, that when he requested data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), an HHS agency, he was told HHS would have to purchase it.
We are streamlining HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective. We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America or AHA. This… pic.twitter.com/BlQWUpK3u7
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) March 27, 2025
Kennedy told Cuomo:
“I tried to get the CMS patient information, which belongs to the American people and belongs to HHS, and the sub-agencies said we have to buy it from them, and it doesn’t make any sense. This is depersonalized data, and we need it to Make America Healthy Again.”
In February, shortly after being confirmed to run HHS, Kennedy promised that under his watch, HHS and CDC would establish a better system for tracking vaccine injuries.
