Independent Presidential Candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. is right: vaccines haven’t been sufficiently safety tested.

In a recent New England Journal of Medicine article, a renowned vaccinologist and his co-authors supported Kennedy’s stance by explaining how U.S. post-market surveillance systems are inadequately funded, and existing funds haven’t been allocated toward vaccine-safety monitoring and science.

In addition, they said people want “public health authorities to mitigate and prevent rare but serious adverse reactions –which no longer seem rare when vaccines are given to millions or billions of people.”

Although vaccine-adverse events are indeed rare, they impact tens of thousands of people when administered on a large scale. Those injured are often ignored because it’s financially inconvenient to acknowledge their existence. However, if integrity and honesty are not restored in medical research, vaccine hesitancy will continue to rise.

I’m an instructor of a National Institutes of Health-based responsible conduct of research course, and I care deeply about science, health, education, and young people. Health authorities need to be reminded that bodily autonomy and informed consent are key tenets of our free society.