Reportable Disease Cases Since RFK Jr. Took Over HHS

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became Secretary of Health and Human Services in February 2025 and has since removed the CDC's entire vaccine advisory committee, bypassed it to change the childhood immunization schedule directly, and rewritten the committee's own charter. That's a real, dated, verifiable set of actions, not a claim. What isn't settled is what it means for actual case counts on the ground, state by state, so I built the map that puts both in front of a reader at once instead of asserting a conclusion for them.

Every notifiable disease, not just the convenient ones

It would have been easy to cherry-pick a handful of vaccine-preventable diseases likely to show a dramatic post-2025 spike and leave it there. Instead the map pulls all 139 diseases and conditions CDC's National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System currently tracks, for every state, every year 2022 through the most recently reported week of 2026. Seven vaccine-preventable diseases most directly relevant to the recent policy changes are highlighted at the top of the picker; everything else NNDSS tracks, from Lyme disease to legionellosis, is still there below them, not filtered out because it doesn't fit the narrative.

Rate, raw count, and percent change, honestly

A per-100,000 rate and a raw case count are both available for every selection, since a public-health audience and a general audience read those numbers differently. A percent-change view compares each state's current count against its own 2022–24 baseline — but a state averaging under 1 case a year in that baseline can turn one new case into a mathematically valid, practically meaningless five-digit percentage. Those states are labeled "new" instead, the same small-count-honesty rule used on my Illinois Mental Health Map, rather than let a stray outlier dominate the map's color scale.

Alaska and Hawaii, actually shown

Both states get real cartographic inset maps in the bottom-left corner, fully interactive and colored by the same live selection as the main map, rather than being cropped out of frame the way a plain Mercator view usually drops them. Alaska's true shape crosses the antimeridian — the westernmost Aleutian tip sits at positive longitude in Census data — which breaks a naive auto-fit and quietly zooms out to fit almost the entire globe, so the inset uses a manually corrected bounding box instead.