Posted on 09/05/2025 8:08:58 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
“Doctors are being paid to vaccinate, not to evaluate,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a recent video.
“They’re pressured to follow the money, not the science.”
Doctors administer dozens of vaccines to many children in the United States. Adults are also advised to receive multiple shots.
Here’s what to know about vaccines and payments.
A review of studies confirms that some doctors profit from vaccinating.
In a 2020 paper, researchers found when analyzing three years’ worth of vaccination claims for five Colorado clinics that reimbursements averaged 125 percent of costs, making administering vaccines “financially favorable across the practices.”
Another study found that various providers in North Carolina, when receiving the maximum payment for reimbursement from insurers or the government, profited from vaccinating patients. Even if they received the minimum payment, pediatric and family medicine practices still reported positive income, according to the 2019 study.
On the other hand, other doctors say the costs of administering certain vaccines to certain people exceed the vaccine payments.
In a survey of 34 pediatricians, for instance, more than half said they do not profit from vaccinating, according to a 2009 paper.
A number of practitioners have also said they face escalating costs associated with vaccination, such as staffing, leading them to stop or consider stopping providing vaccines to patients with private insurance.
Reimbursement for vaccinating patients varies depending on whether patients have private or public insurance. Under a program called Vaccines for Children, the government also provides vaccines to doctors for free. It does not pay for related costs, but doctors can charge an administration fee that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says “helps providers offset their costs of doing business,” with the maximum varying by state.
A nurse prepares to give a COVID-19 vaccine to a boy as his mother comforts him in Denver on Nov. 3, 2021. Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images
Doctors can make extra money for vaccinating under incentive programs from insurers, as highlighted by Brian Hooker, a senior scientist with Children’s Health Defense—a group Kennedy chaired through 2023—and other witnesses during a hearing in July on vaccines held by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).
“Some pediatricians can make upwards to a million or more a year just in those incentives,” Hooker said.
Asked for citations, Hooker pointed The Epoch Times to documents he collected from insurance companies that list available bonuses.
Links to those and other documents that outline incentives and are available online are provided below:
Blue Cross Blue Shield Blue Care Network of Michigan: $400 per child who receives a set of 24 or 25 vaccine doses on or before their second birthday.
Aetna Better Health of Louisiana: $10–$25 per member, depending on level of COVID-19 vaccination coverage practice-wide.
Molina Healthcare of Ohio: $100 incentive for COVID-19 vaccination.
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield Medicaid: $50 per individual aged 6 months and older who received a COVID-19 vaccine by Dec. 31, 2022.
United Healthcare Community Plan of Michigan: Incentives for patients who receive the meningococcal, Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis), and HPV vaccines by their 13th birthday.
Meridian: Up to $120 per child who receives the 24 or 25 doses by their second birthday, or adolescents who received three certain doses by their 13th birthday, capped at $9,600 for each category.
BlueCross BlueShield of Illinois: $149 for each child, if 63 percent or more meet criteria, who received the 24 or 25 vaccine doses by the time they turn 2.
Central California Alliance for Health: Bonuses for children who receive at least 24 doses by the time they turn 2 and the three certain doses before they turn 13.
The sets of vaccines for which providers receive bonuses are recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Paul Thomas, who ran a pediatric practice in Oregon, estimated in a 2021 study that he was losing more than $1 million a year by offering parents what he called informed consent, or detailed discussions about the benefits and risks of the recommended vaccines.
Thomas—who surrendered his license in 2022 after the Oregon Medical Board determined that his alternative vaccination schedule posed a danger to the public—told The Epoch Times in an email that he was forced to work harder, freeze salaries, and impose an administration fee on every patient to cover income he did not receive due to administering fewer vaccines than many practices. Thomas has said he was unfairly targeted, in litigation denied by courts that found the board is protected by “absolute immunity.”
People attend an American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) conference in Anaheim, Calif., on Oct. 8, 2022. AAP, as well as some other groups and doctors, have said physicians are not motivated by money when vaccinating patients. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times
“It would be near impossible for current pediatric practices to survive if not clearly impossible if they were to suddenly lose half or all their vaccine income, not to mention the catastrophic nature of loss of ‘quality’ bonuses,” Thomas said.
Dr. Renata Moon, who sits on the board of directors for the American College of Pediatricians, said that her former employer in 2020 started tracking the vaccination rate for patients. She was unable to determine why and said she would not be surprised if they were receiving compensation.
“It is unethical for physicians to receive bonuses or monetary compensation for pushing the products of pharmaceutical companies. It’s a massive conflict of interest!” Moon told The Epoch Times via email. “Do they have the patient’s best interest at heart or are they focused on their bank accounts?”
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), as well as some other groups and doctors, have said physicians are not motivated by money when vaccinating patients.
“Pediatricians do not profit off vaccines,” the AAP said in a July 16 post on X.
The organization declined to make one of its experts available for an interview on the topic. When a spokeswoman was sent studies, including multiple published by the AAP’s journal Pediatrics, that show some pediatricians have made money from vaccinating, she pointed to an AAP webpage that states “pediatricians recommend childhood vaccines because they are one of our most effective tools to help keep children healthy and prevent diseases from spreading in communities.”
It also states, “pediatricians often take on significant costs to provide the vaccinations their patients need, and the minimal payments they receive do not always cover these costs.”
Among the costs, the group said: purchasing vaccines and storing them.
Dr. Todd Porter, a pediatrician employed in Illinois for a multi-specialty physician-led organization, said that he has not paid attention to whether he makes money from vaccinating children.
Doses of H1N1 influenza vaccine sit in a basket at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago on Oct. 6, 2009. Scott Olson/Getty Images
“I have to surprisingly side with the AAP on this one even though I no longer support the AAP on just about everything else,” Porter told The Epoch Times in an email. “As a pediatrician, my recommendation of routine childhood vaccines has nothing to do any reimbursement my office may receive and again I can honestly say I have no working knowledge of what that reimbursement would be.”
Porter says he has been motivated for the more than 20 years he has worked as a doctor to provide vaccines to minimize vaccine-preventable disease. He has never recommended the COVID-19 vaccines and believes the CDC and AAP did not provide adequate details around the risks and benefits of the shots.
“I have become a bit uncertain about the risk/benefit of each of the vaccines. I still would recommend these historical routine childhood vaccines, but with the growing vaccine hesitancy amongst parents I do not push them,” he wrote. “I also have stopped generally recommending the influenza vaccine until I see more rigorous data to show that it really works.”
Vaccination rates among kindergartners have declined in recent years, and a third of parents in a recent survey said they would be refusing some or all vaccines for their children.
Kennedy has spoken several times recently about the payments for vaccinations. During an interview released in June with political commentator Tucker Carlson, he mentioned an article stating half of the revenue for most pediatricians comes from vaccines.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for that alleged article.
“And then there’s a whole structure where Blue Cross and the other insurance companies pay bonuses to the pediatrician ... and that’s why your pediatrician, if you say, ‘I want to go slow on the vaccines,’ or, ‘I want to have a little different schedule,’ your pediatrician will throw you out of his practice because you’re now jeopardizing that bonus structure,” Kennedy said. “And these are all perverse incentives that stop doctors from actually practicing medicine and caring for the client because they’re looking at the bottom line.”
Twenty-one percent of pediatricians told surveyors that they dismissed families who declined one or more vaccines, Dr. Sean O'Leary, the current chair of the AAP Committee on Infectious Diseases, reported in a 2015 study. A 2020 review co-authored by O'Leary found evidence that dismissing families “appears to be increasing as a strategy for dealing with vaccine refusal.”
A form dismissal letter offered to doctors by the AAP states, “It has become clear that our philosophies regarding medical care differ greatly.” The letter directs parents to arrange for medical care for their children elsewhere.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 24, 2025. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times
O'Leary and other AAP officials said in a 2024 report that there are ethical issues about dismissing families, including whether doctors have a responsibility to care for all patients who come to them, Dismissal, they wrote, “can be an acceptable option ... after repeated attempts to help understand and address parental values and vaccine concerns, engender trust, and strengthen the therapeutic alliance.”
Kennedy added in the X video on Aug. 8 that “we’re scanning every corner of the health care system for hidden incentives that corrupt medical judgment” and that officials had found “doctors are being paid to vaccinate, not to evaluate.”
He said that officials discovered that more than 36,000 doctors had reimbursements from Medicare altered based on the vaccination rates of children in their practices.
The video was released as Kennedy announced officials were repealing a previous policy that favored hospitals that reported the vaccination rates of staff members.
“Doctors should be guided by medical judgment and their Hippocratic Oath, not by financial incentives or government mandates,” Kennedy said. “That’s what this policy change is about, and it’s just the beginning.”
Yes, it’s a money trail. Just follow the money.
My brother was a GP, General Practitioner. He never recommended the stuff from big farmasutical companies, outside of the basic MMR shots. There are incentives to promote other shots. This is well documented.
My pharmacy doesn’t even make enough per RX (on average) to paybfor the bottle we put it in, but vaccines are where all of the money is made. Without them, we’d close.
Allowing them to get sick. And, if pediatricians were solely driven by profit motives, this is the path they would take. Treating sick children is significantly more profitable than merely giving them a vaccine.
The cost of treating measles, for example, runs to tens of thousands of dollars. It was over $32k in this review: Estimating the impact: How much does a measles outbreak cost? But an MMR vaccine costs about $26 per dose. That means that the profit from treating measles is 1,231 times the profit from vaccinating against measles.
Likewise, a diphtheria vaccine costs about $25, but the treatment of diphtheria runs from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars.
Each of these diseases have the potential to allow the funeral industry to profit in addition to the medical industry. When a kid dies from a vaccine-protectable disease, a funeral is typically several thousand dollars.
With all of the profit to be made from refusing to vaccinate children, it's puzzling why pediatricians would choose the least profitable route of vaccinating kids. That is, it's only puzzling if one believes that the only motivation for pediatricians is profit, rather than saving lives.
Before the modern age of vaccinating children, most kids died before the age of five. Those who spread antivax propaganda don't care about the well-being of children. They want to return to the days of high child mortality. No, thanks.
After Covid, I realized that doctors can be as greedy as bank robbers.
RCK Jr is kicking ass!!
If most kids died before age 5 how did we get so populated today? Your math doesn’t add up.
Many children died before 5.
Sanitation, refrigeration, and better nutrition were the top factors in childhood health.
Clarification request. Do you consider people questioning the safety and efficacy of the covid vaccine as an anti-vax propagandist?
DOJ silent on this issue since the Bush years
Update.
Liz Churchill
@liz_churchill10
The more they uncover…the more appalling it gets…
“We’ve recently uncovered that more than 36,000 Doctors had their Medicare reimbursements altered based upon childhood vaccination rates. That’s not medicine. That’s coercion…”
From
Secretary Kennedy
2:10 PM · Oct 16, 2025 763.6K Views
https://x.com/liz_churchill10/status/1978886330139521351
With respect, Mr. Secretary, if those were in fact incentives and not penalties, I’d call that BRIBERY.
Your analysis is deeply flawed.
The more interesting question is whether you are intentionally lying or just ignorant of the facts.
The wild increase in the quantity of vaccinations is relatively recent and has zero connection with the reduction of child-hood diseases and fatalities.
Prior to widespread vaccination, women gave birth to many children. In my family tree, I can find women who had 13, 14, or 15 children. Women had so many children because they wanted at least one or two to survive to adulthood. It didn't always work; I learned about one family in Williamsburg, VA who lost all of their 19 children to a cholera outbreak.
When vaccines were introduced, people still had the habit of having large families. With the vaccines, most of those kids actually grew up. It took a generation or two to change the mindset about having kids. Instead of having large families, people could have small families and spend their energy on raising their two or three children as well as they could. It was during that shift in thinking about the optimal number of children that we had a population boom.
These days, the birth rate is below the replacement rate. It will probably remain low until the population decreases and people think they need to have larger families.
I've no idea what you are trying to say. Once a child has developed an infectious disease, a vaccine is useless. At that point, the child must be given antibiotics (for a bacterial disease like diphtheria) or pumped full of various medications to try to keep them alive during a viral infection. These treatments are far more costly than vaccinating the child.
Zero connection? Really?
A child who never catches measles because he/she was vaccinated is not going to die from measles. A child who is unvaccinated and catches measles has about a 1 in 500 chance of dying, and if they don't die immediately, measles can reemerge several years later and cause a fatal encephalitis in about 1 out of 1,000 survivors. In addition, measles can destroy the immune system, making the affected child susceptible to every disease, even if he/she has been vaccinated against that disease.
And measles is just one infection that killed children. There were also polio, influenza, chicken pox, streptococcus infections, diphtheria, tetanus (I probably missed a few) that also killed children.
There is a direct correlation between the number of vaccines and the decreased childhood death rate. And in this case, correlation actually does relate to causation, since there is a mechanism tying the cause (vaccination) to the effect (increased childhood survival).
I saw a grave once, of a two year old who died in the 1800s. It had this inscription: "Maggie, darling, you have left us. And your troubles are at rest. No one knew you but to love you. But God loved you the best." I'll never know which disease killed little Maggie, but I've never been able to look past the pain of these parents who lost their little girl. And these kinds of losses were common in the 1800s. Better sanitation had only a limited effect. Preventing diseases through vaccination was a much larger factor in the decrease of child deaths.
Bwahaha. You again.
There is a long list of childhood vaccines these days.
Most of them exist only to enrich big pharma and doctors—with highly debatable health benefits.
Highly debatable health benefits? Like all but eliminating childhood fatality and disability?
Your being the kind of person who thinks that protecting children is not a laudable goal... well, I can't say my thoughts on that here, this is a polite forum.
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