During a US Senate hearing on 22 April 2026, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told senators that one staffer could handle the nation’s rabies inquiries, given the low annual fatality rate. During that hearing, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) questioned Kennedy about the effect of CDC staffing cuts on the agency’s rabies response capabilities.

Disturbingly, the CDC, which is under Kennedy’s leadership, has “paused” rabies testing in humans. Kennedy is doing his best to make rabies great again.

However, in an online seminar for clinicians on 30 April 2026, a CDC official offered guidance on quickly preventing a dangerous viral infection that has an effective yet costly post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) vaccine.

This article will describe why rabies is and why it’s still dangerous, despite Kennedy’s claims.

All about rabies

Rabies is a viral disease that causes an inflammation of the brain in humans and other mammals. Infected mammals transfer the virus to humans through bites or scratches.

The rabies virus is slow to infect a human, although the course of infection is highly variable, depending on how much virus was transmitted from the infected mammal. The incubation period (the period between initial infection and the first symptoms) is about 1-3 months in humans, but can be as short as 4 days and as long as 6 years.

The initial signs and symptoms of rabies are nonspecific – they include fever and headache, which can be misdiagnosed as many other diseases. As the infection progresses and causes meningoencephalitis, an inflammation of the brain and/or meninges, it leads to more severe symptoms. These signs and symptoms can include paralysis, anxiety, insomnia, confusion, agitation, paranoia, terror, and hallucinations. This eventually leads to coma and death, usually 2 to 10 days after the first symptoms appear.

Once someone presents with the earliest symptoms of rabies, they have an extremely poor prognosis – approximately 100% will die.

The only prevention and treatment for rabies is the rabies vaccine. Although the vaccine is strongly recommended (and usually legally mandated) for your pets, it is generally not given to humans before infection except when someone is frequently in contact with rabies-infected mammals.

However, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has established a postexposure prophylaxis protocol to treat rabies. The recommendation needs to be implemented immediately after exposure to an infected animal (either confirmed or suspected) – once again, when symptoms appear, it’s too late.

This protocol includes the following steps:

• Thorough cleansing of the wound site with a virucidal soap and water.
• A proper injection dose (based on the weight of the patient) of human rabies immunoglobulin, which attacks the rabies virus.
• Four doses of the rabies vaccine, at days 0, 3, 7, and 14, boost the immune system to destroy the rabies virus.

The old method of several painful injections in the abdomen is long gone. All of these injections are done intramuscularly in the deltoid muscle. The success rate of this protocol, if done immediately after exposure, approaches 100%.

Thus, if you get immediate treatment for rabies after a bite or scratch from a confirmed or suspected rabies-infected mammal, your chances of living are quite high. If you wait until symptoms appear, the chances of survival drop to almost nothing. This should not be much of a choice.

Here’s what you need to know about rabies. It is nearly 100% fatal once rabies symptoms appear. Also, there are no effective treatments for rabies once those symptoms appear.

According to the CDC, an estimated 1.3 million people in the U.S. seek medical care for an animal bite, and about 100,000 of them (7%) get rabies PEP. There are an average of two daily rabies consultations in the approximately 3,000 health departments in the USA, and the CDC receives seven rabies consultations every day. Overall, the nation’s rabies prevention system costs about $7.2 billion per year to operate.

The disease is rare in people in the United States, with fewer than 10 deaths reported each year; one happened recently. This is because we aggressively attack the disease with the effective post-exposure prophylaxis vaccine, and because we have a strong rabies vaccination for our pets. However, because rabies is found in wildlife throughout the country (except for Hawaii), rabies poses a serious public health threat.

Kennedy and rabies

Kennedy looks at the relatively low number of deaths per year (less than 10) and thinks that rabies is not a critical public health issue. This is an ongoing issue with the anti-vaccine crowd — they look at the low number of cases and deaths while ignoring the vaccine impact on those numbers.

The reasons that rabies is so rare are because of an effective vaccination program for dogs and for people who may be at higher risk of contracting the disease, and because of an effective post-exposure prophylaxis vaccine.

The CDC offers clinicians two tools to quickly address rabies risks and to start treatment: a quantitative risk assessment for rabies tool to determine the probability that an animal has rabies, and a rabies PEP calculator that generates a PEP vaccination schedule. This is

Vaccines and an effective testing program are the reasons why rabies deaths are so rare. The USA spends billions of dollars a year treating people who may have been exposed to rabies with the post-exposure prophylaxis vaccine, and that’s why deaths are so low.

This is another case where Kennedy is completely clueless about public health, and he is in over his head. If he completely curtails the CDC’s rabies program, deaths from the disease will skyrocket across the USA.

Kennedy’s war on vaccines has no bounds.

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