This year is expected to be the worst tick season in a decade — and RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine agenda is making a dangerous public health threat even worse.

Lyme disease already sickens hundreds of thousands of people each year. Other tick-borne threats, including alpha-gal syndrome and Powassan virus, are also becoming more urgent as ticks expand into new regions. Climate change is helping ticks survive, spread, and stay active longer — which means each future season could get even worse as the planet gets warmer.

Now the Trump/RFK Jr. health apparatus is sending mixed signals. HHS has announced a new Lyme disease initiative, but broader biomedical research cuts, grant delays, and attacks on vaccine science threaten the very tools needed to prevent, test, treat, and stop tick-borne disease.

Send a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now. Tell him to stop undermining vaccine science and commit to a real national plan to fight Lyme disease and other tick-borne threats.

RFK Jr. has spent years promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories that erode public trust in lifesaving medicine. That matters now because a Lyme disease vaccine may finally be within reach — but vaccines only work if public health leaders defend science, support evidence-based review, and help people trust accurate medical information.

Instead, RFK Jr.’s record sends the opposite message. You cannot claim to fight Lyme disease while fueling the anti-vaccine movement and weakening the research infrastructure needed to stop it.

Families deserve better than political theater. They deserve strong NIH and CDC funding, better testing, more research into treatments and prevention, clear public education, stronger surveillance, and a fair, evidence-based review process for vaccines and other tools that could save people from years of illness.

RFK Jr. has the power to change course. He can stop spreading doubt, protect public health science, and make sure HHS’s Lyme initiative is more than a press release.

Send your letter now and demand that RFK Jr. stop sabotaging Lyme disease prevention.