(LifeSiteNews) — All new vaccines will be required to undergo placebo-controlled safety trials by the order of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in a break with longstanding establishment policy and triggering protests from mainstream media outlets. 

HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said that, according to the new policy, such safety trials for all “new vaccines” will be required for licensure, a “radical departure from past practices.”

Placebo trials allow researchers to identify adverse side effects from a drug, clarifying that symptoms are not due to other factors such as the disease the drug seeks to protect against. For this reason, placebo trials are “critical for determining the safety profile of the new drug,” as BioPharma Services has noted.

“Except for the COVID vaccine, none of the vaccines on the CDC’s childhood recommended schedule was tested against an inert placebo, meaning we know very little about the actual risk profiles of these products,” HHS said in a statement.

“HHS is now building surveillance systems that will accurately measure vaccine risks as well as benefits — because real science demands both transparency and accountability,” an HHS spokesperson told The Washington Post.

For years, Kennedy has criticized the fact that vaccines have been exempted from a placebo trial requirement in place for other medicines. 

“A lot of the injuries that come from medication are autoimmune injuries and allergic injuries and neurodevelopmental injuries that have long diagnostic horizons or long incubation periods, so you can do the study and you will not see the injury for five years,” Kennedy said in a 2021 interview. 

Last year, during a NewsNation Town Hall he highlighted the fact that not one of the 72 vaccine doses now mandated for U.S. children “has ever been subject to a pre-licensing, placebo-controlled trial.”

At the time, the host insisted that this was “not true.” Now that the mainstream media and medical establishment cannot dispute that this has been the case, outlets such as NPR and the BBC are criticizing placebo safety testing trials by claiming that this will allegedly limit access to vaccines and undermine confidence in them – as if access to vaccines takes precedence over whether they have been shown to be safe.

The Washington Post quoted Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, who accused the HHS of “Claiming vaccines have risks the data doesn’t show” and of “trying to overstate vaccine risks,” seemingly unaware of the absurdity of her criticism. If there is a lack of data for vaccine risks, it could be because there haven’t been placebo trials to produce such data.

Kennedy recently told Daily Wire host Michael Knowles that “everything is going to change” regarding the development of vaccines, for which much of the public has concern.

He pledged to “fix” the Centers for Disease Control’s current flawed VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) online mechanism, which Kennedy noted vastly underreports vaccine adverse events. 

Pointing out that vaccines are “the only product that’s exempt” from pre-licensing safety testing, Kennedy noted that the protocol has instead been to document injuries “afterward.”

However, “they have a system that doesn’t capture them. In fact, CDC’s own study of its own system said it captures fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries,” Kennedy said. “It’s worthless, and everybody agrees it’s worthless.”

“Why have we gone for 39 years and nobody’s fixed it?” he wondered, promising, “We’re gonna fix it.”