Trump Administration Cuts $1 Billion from Global Vaccine Alliance

On June 25, 2025, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced that the agency will cut over $1 billion in funding previously pledged to Gavi, the international vaccine alliance. In a video message shared at a Gavi pledging summit, RFK accused the organization of having “neglected the key issue of vaccine safety," citing a 2017 study of 3- to 6-month-old infants in the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau who received the diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTP) vaccine. The study found that children who got the DTP vaccine were five times more likely to die before 6 months old than children who had not received it yet. 

Experts have raised several concerns about the study, including that: (1) it relies on data from the 1980s, when vaccines were not widely used in the country studied; (2) in 2022, two of the study’s authors published another study on the same age group and country, but based on more recent data, that found "no effects on all-cause mortality"; (3) there are methodological and substantive issues with the study, which did not use a randomized controlled trial and instead relied on observational data, failed to account for external factors, and did not include any explanation of how the vaccines could be causing the deaths; (4) the current DTP vaccine is different from the one used in the study; and (5) several groups and task forces have since studied the vaccine, and all have found no negative effects of the DTP vaccine.

Dr. Atul Gawande, who oversaw global health work for the U.S. Agency for International Development under President Biden, said that "[o]f all the global health programs that have been cut, this will likely mean more deaths than any [other cut].”