No, the US Supreme Court has not ruled that Covid vaccines are ‘not vaccines’

A Facebook post claiming that the US Supreme Court ruled that Covid-19 vaccines are not vaccines is circulating again—but there’s no truth to it.

The post says: “Great and groundbreaking ruling by the US Supreme Court. Covid vaccines are NOT vaccines. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won his lawsuit against all pharmaceutical lobbyists.”

It goes on to say that the Supreme Court confirmed “that the damage caused by gene therapies of RNA against Covid is irreparable”.

As other fact checkers have reported in 2021 and 2023, the US Supreme Court hasn’t issued any rulings that Covid vaccines are not vaccines. Full Fact has searched the Supreme Court’s recent rulings in 2024 and 2025 and found no evidence of any rulings saying this about Covid vaccines.

RFK Jr is the US Health and Human Services Secretary and has a history of vaccine scepticism, reportedly filing nearly 30 lawsuits targeting vaccines and public health mandates since 2020 via the non-profit Children’s Health Defence, which he founded and used to lead. But he has rejected any association with similar claims. We’ve searched the Supreme Court’s recent legal cases and haven’t found any that match the one described in the post.

Asked about articles claiming his involvement in a case like this, he told the Associated Press in 2021: “Clearly somebody made it up and is promoting it because the same quote keeps coming back no matter how many times I deny it.”

We’ve contacted the Department of Health and Human Services and Children’s Health Defence for comment and are yet to hear back.

Covid-19 vaccine is not gene therapy

As for whether or not mRNA Covid-19 vaccines are “gene therapies”: we’ve written about this before and, in short, it’s also not true.

Gene therapy refers to a type of treatment for genetic diseases which changes a patient’s DNA. While mRNA vaccines use genetic material, they don’t change your genetic make-up or DNA.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) says that “while mRNA vaccines use genetic code, they are not gene therapies.”

A spokesperson from the MHRA has also previously told Full Fact it doesn’t consider Covid vaccines to be gene therapies, pointing to UK legislation that states: “A vaccine against infectious diseases is not to be treated as a gene therapy medicinal product.”

That legislation defines gene therapy as: “A “gene therapy medicinal product” [that] is a biological medicinal product which has the following characteristics—

(a) it contains an active substance which contains or consists of a recombinant nucleic acid used in or administered to human beings with a view to regulating, repairing, replacing, adding or deleting a genetic sequence; and

(b) its therapeutic, prophylactic or diagnostic effect relates directly to the recombinant nucleic acid sequence it contains, or to the product of genetic expression of this sequence.”

Calling Covid vaccines gene therapies is a common form of vaccine misinformation. Health misinformation can cause direct damage to people’s physical or psychological health, and can put particular communities and vaccine coverage levels at risk.