With national public health being run by RFK Jr., or run into the ground if you prefer, it’s been left to individual states to figure out where and how to fill in the gaps. Some states, such as Florida, have fully embraced Kennedy’s anti-scientific posture and are moving as quickly as possible to dismantle public health mandates and programs that have kept people, particularly children, from being infected with horrific infectious diseases. In other, saner states such as Colorado, state laws have been enacted such that state health policy no longer relies strictly on federal agencies like HHS and CDC, but instead takes into account other recommendations from NGOs that are more, well, let’s call them “traditional”.
It seems like California is about to go a step further than that and is constructing its own “Public Health Network Innovation Exchange” that will work with state health departments to advise on policy and advance public health in the state. Leading the charge for PHNIX (eyeroll) will be some familiar names.
The leaders of the new project are former CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez, whom RFK Jr. forced out of her job just 29 days after the Senate confirmed her, and Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s former chief medical officer, who resigned after Monarez was fired.
At a presser announcing the initiative, Newsom called the leaders of the new project a “dream team” of public health experts, noting that Drs. Monarez and Houry would also be joined by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, the founder and chief executive of the Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter. She’ll be advising the California Department of Public Health on building confidence in public health, which is kind of desperately needed after years of rightwing attacks on institutions and expertise.
Monarez is the former CDC director who was summarily fired by RFK Jr., reportedly for refusing to rubber stamp the anti-vaxxer nonsense that everyone knew would come out of Kennedy’s handpicked immunization panel at CDC. Kennedy disputes that as the reason for the firing, but his claims are as dubious as those he has about vaccines generally. Houry, meanwhile, was one of the senior CDC professionals that resigned in the wake of Monarez’s firing.
On the one hand, it’s an embarrassment of riches for California, to suddenly have leadership for public health in the state of the caliber of former high-ranking CDC professionals. The downside is that they’re now confined to 1 of 50 states instead of all of them. States like California shouldn’t have to do this sort of thing. And states should also not be in the position of jockeying to gobble up this talent before other states get there first simply because RFK Jr. is completely out to lunch.
But leadership isn’t about wishing for the best case scenario; it’s about making the absolute best you can with the hand of cards you’re dealt. I generally don’t think much of Gavin Newsom, to be honest, but in this case I’m impressed by his decision to lead for the benefit of his state.
In her new role, Monarez will be in charge of coordinating with the private sector, technology and academic partners, while Houry will engage with existing public health alliances.
“This collaboration,” the release continued, “is critical at a time when our public health community needs to coordinate our response to evolving gaps in federal leadership.”
Somebody has to do this job at the state level, in other words, because the Trump administration is too busy playing games with plaques about former presidents and installing gravel-mouthed charlatans in positions of authority over public health to do their damned jobs.
There are lots of good reasons to call for the impeachment or ouster or RFK Jr. He’s flatly unqualified for the role. He’s introducing all kinds of health risks for diseases we shouldn’t even have to worry about any longer because he’s an anti-vaxxer con-artist. He’s so bad at his job that high level administrators at DHS and its child agencies are leaving in droves, sometimes after only being on the job for weeks at a time. These are all great, righteous reasons to state publicly that RFK Jr. must go.
Please welcome Mike Pence to the team, I guess. His organization also recently stated publicly that RFK Jr. should be exited from his cabinet position. That it took a failure to review an abortion pill to get him there and not all of that other shit I mentioned is disappointing, though not in any way surprising.
In a statement posted on the social platform X, Pence’s nonprofit, Advancing American Freedom, said, “HHS Secretary RFK Jr. continues to refuse to review the dangerous chemical abortion pill, mifepristone. Despite the calls of state attorneys general across the country and pro-life promises made to Congress, RFK Jr. has followed in the footsteps of the Obama and Biden administrations by stonewalling pro-life efforts at HHS.”
“RFK Jr. must go,” the group added.
Folks, I’m in no way qualified to talk at any length about mifepristone and how safe or not it is. I can tell you that the current FDA website says that it is when properly used, as does the Johns Hopkins website. Basically every medical organization that has anything to do with obstetrics and gynecology has said that the drug is very safe (and you would think they would know). The American Medical Association has pointed out that reducing access to mifepristone would lead to real harm for patients. Basically, almost every credible expert on this topic appears to agree.
I can also tell you the listing of side effects on the Mayo Clinic’s site is long. So, is a review of the drug warranted? I’m going to rest comfortably on the idea that I am in no way qualified to say one way or the other.
Like me, Mike Pence is also not a medical professional. Unlike me, Mike Pence has been remarkably silent about RFK Jr. as he’s taken a flamethrower to HHS, to federal vaccine guidance, and has overseen the worst measles outbreak in America in over three decades. Apparently failing to review an FDA approved drug with a decades-long track record of safety is just a bridge too far.
No more aborted babies, all of you! If they aren’t brought to term, how are they supposed to get measles and Hep B?
In the enshittification era, companies rushing to profit off the gold mine of mass commercial surveillance are routinely intent on pushing their luck. Automakers spy on your driving habits (without telling you) to sell that data to insurance companies that raise your rates. Your ISP, phone, and even electrical meter all report on your every movement and choice, often with only middling consent.
So of course this has also now expanded to your toilet. Kohler is under fire now after a researcher discovered that the company’s smart toilet devices record all manner of sensitive data, then don’t do a particularly good job securing that information.
This entirely predictable story is centered around Kohler’s $600 Dekoda toilet attachment, which uses “optical sensors and validated machine-learning algorithms” to deliver “valuable insights into your health and wellness.” Read: it tracks how often you poop, in case you had difficulty with that.
But while Kohler explains this data on your pooping habits is “end to end encrypted,” a researcher named Simon Fondrie-Teitler found that description to be… inaccurate:
“Responses from the company make it clear that—contrary to common understanding of the term—Kohler is able to access data collected by the device and associated application. Additionally, the company states that the data collected by the device and app may be used to train AI models.”
“End-to-end encryption” (E2EE) secures transmitted data so both the recipient and the sender can read it. Ideally, it’s supposed to prevent everybody else, including the developer and host company, from reading it. Kohler’s “end to end encryption” doesn’t do that:
“I thought Kohler might actually have implemented a related data protection method known as “client-side encryption”, used by services like Apple’s iCloud and the password manager 1Password. This technique allows an application to back up a user’s data to the developers servers, or synchronize data between multiple devices owned by a user, without allowing anyone but the user to access the data.
But emails exchanged with Kohler’s privacy contact clarified that the other “end” that can decrypt the data is Kohler themselves: “User data is encrypted at rest, when it’s stored on the user’s mobile phone, toilet attachment, and on our systems. Data in transit is also encrypted end-to-end, as it travels between the user’s devices and our systems, where it is decrypted and processed to provide our service.”
Why is Kohler pushing its luck here and distorting the definition of end to end encryption? Because it’s not satisfied with charging you $600 for the hardware. It wants in on the cash flow generated by selling data on your every habit to a vast, largely unregulated cabal of dodgy data brokers, who in turn historically have done a piss poor job securing private data from bad actors.
And while your electrical usage, pooping habits, and daily movement habits individually may not seem like much of a threat, this data is often unified under profiles by both corporations and global governments (which refuse to regulate these markets because it allows them to avoid warrants) as part of our ever-expanding mass, hyper-commercialized surveillance state.
Why does the government and an unregulated coalition of global corporations need data on how often you poop in a system with almost zero real world accountability for privacy abuses? Why ask why! Just sit back and enjoy the innovation.
Companies, like Kohler does here, will often try to dodge responsibility for bad choices by also insisting this data is “anonymized,” but that’s always been a gibberish term. Here in the States, it’s the inevitable enshittified outcome of our corrupt inability to pass even basic internet privacy protections, or implement meaningful corporate oversight. So this sort of shitty behavior will only get worse from here.
Part of what makes it difficult for the importance of so much of what is happening in the Trump administration to break through to the public mind is that it’s all chaos, all the time. Moving layers deeper to get at specifics can actually make the problem worse, in fact. Take all of our coverage of RFK Jr., for instance. Recall all the topics on him alone that we’ve covered: his anti-vaxxer stances, his failures to advocate for his staff at HHS and its child agencies, his war on Tylenol, his swimming in a creek rife with human waste, his thoughts on sperm counts, his thoughts on circumcision, his hiring and firing practices at HHS, measles, ACIP, and goddamned chemtrails. How are you supposed to focus on anything meaningful in that cornucopia of chaos?
The problem is that it’s all interrelated. The overarching theme is that Kennedy is an anti-science ignoramus who espouses eugenic tendencies and puts his beliefs into practice as a matter of public policy and/or guidance, all of which leads to adverse impacts on the American public.
Let’s put some examples to that theme. We talked recently about how the CDC changed its webpage advising the public on concerns about vaccines and autism such that it now informs the public that there may indeed be a link. Its stated reason for doing this is, essentially, because a link between the two has not been “disproven”. As I mentioned in my post, that isn’t how science works. You don’t have to prove a negative in science. The onus of evidence is on the party making a claim. If there is no valid evidence to support a claim, the default is null, or to behave as if the claim is not true.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. personally directed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to update its website to contradict its longtime guidance that vaccines don’t cause autism, he told The New York Times in an interview published Friday.
“The whole thing about ‘vaccines have been tested and there’s been this determination made,’ is just a lie,” Kennedy said in the interview, which was conducted Thursday.
Again, this isn’t how science works. It’s not a “determination” that’s been made. It’s that the claim that autism and vaccines are linked has not been demonstrated through evidence and science and therefore is not considered a valid claim. If researchers want to do more peer-reviewed research, following good scientific methodology, have at it. More good data is always good. But we no more have to make a “determination” that vaccines don’t cause autism currently than we would need to make a “determination” that chocolate milk causes autism. A link has simply not been established, so we behave as though there is no link. That’s how this works.
Couple that with the even more recent news that Kennedy’s new Deputy Director of the CDC is Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham. Abraham himself has espoused many of the anti-vaxxer views that he shares with Kennedy.
Under Abraham’s leadership, the Louisiana health department waited months to inform residents about a deadly whooping cough (pertussis) outbreak. He also has a clear record of anti-vaccine views. Earlier this year, he told a Louisiana news outlet he doesn’t recommend COVID-19 vaccines because “I prefer natural immunity.” In February, he ordered the health department to stop promoting mass vaccinations, including flu shots, and barred staff from running seasonal vaccine campaigns.
While he doesn’t support lifesaving vaccines, he is a big fan of using the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and the de-worming drug ivermectin to treat COVID-19, despite studies finding both ineffective against the viral infection. In his newsletter, Faust notes that in 2021, Abraham was the seventh-highest prescriber of ivermectin out of 12,000 practicing physicians in the state. This fits with his longer record of troubling prescriptions. In 2013, he was one of the top opioid prescribers.
So, Kennedy publicly puts anti-vaxxer talking points on display as public guidance via the CDC website, not to mention all the words that manage to tumble from his mouth, and continues to put anti-vaxxer and anti-medicine officials to lead HHS and its child agencies. What’s the result? Pertussis is on the rise. America is about to lose its elimination status of measles.
And, if you want to put a local lens on all of this, communities in South Carolina, that have essentially behaved as Kennedy would wish, are suffering from outbreaks of measles and still people won’t get vaccinated.
South Carolina’s measles outbreak isn’t yet as large as those in other states, such as New Mexico, Arizona, and Kansas. But it shows how a confluence of larger national trends — including historically low vaccination rates, skepticism fueled by the pandemic, misinformation, and “health freedom” ideologies proliferated by conservative politicians — have put some communities at risk for the reemergence of a preventable, potentially deadly virus.
“Everyone talks about it being the canary in the coal mine because it’s the most contagious infectious disease out there,” said Josh Michaud, associate director for global and public health policy at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. “The logic is indisputable that we’re likely to see more outbreaks.”
10% of children enrolled in Spartanburg County do not meet the vaccination requirements, including for the MMR vaccine. Many have religious exemptions, which are laughably easy to obtain and don’t require any affirmative description of what religion we’re even talking about. And the drop from 95% vaccinated status, the percentage in which a community will obtain herd immunity, happened in the last five or so years. Right when Kennedy became a nationally public figure. Go back a decade and its even worse.
The number of students in South Carolina who have been granted religious exemptions has increased dramatically over the past decade. That’s particularly true in the Upstate region, where religious exemptions have increased sixfold from a decade ago. During the 2013-14 school year, 2,044 students in the Upstate were granted a religious exemption to the vaccine requirements, according to data published by The Post and Courier. By fall 2024, that number had jumped to more than 13,000.
Public health officials are putting on mobile vaccination clinics in the area, but very few people are showing up. Misinformation, it seems, is more powerful than watching your fellow neighbors get infected with measles.
This all looks like chaos. And to a large degree it is chaos. But you can draw a straight line between the national bullshit that Kennedy and his cadre of sycophants are engaging in and the illness that is taking hold in places like Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Do not mistake one as being separate from the other. They are in direct relation.
Unlike the many causes Kennedy has claimed for autism.
Nobody who has read any of my posts about RFK Jr., particularly since his vulgar appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services, will be under any misunderstandings about my opinion of the man. I have made it clear that I believe he is a health crackpot, dealing in wildly dangerous conspiratorial theories, the adoption of which will lead to sickness, misery, and death. I’ve called him plainly incompetent, ignorant of how science works, and incapable of leading the agency in which he’s been put in charge.
But what if all of that is wrong and he’s just a grifting charlatan? I have to wonder if that is the case, reading about his public admiration for Mom’s Meals, a company that delivers cheap, ready-made meals for people on Medicaid and Medicare.
Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday praised a company that makes $7-a-pop meals that are delivered directly to the homes of Medicaid and Medicare enrollees.
He even thanked Mom’s Meals for sending taxpayer-funded meals “without additives” to the homes of sick or elderly Americans. The spreads include chicken bacon ranch pasta for dinner and French toast sticks with fruit or ham patties.
“This is really one of the solutions for making our country healthy again,” Kennedy said in the video, posted to his official health secretary account, after he toured the company’s Oklahoma facility last week.
That whole “without additives” is doing a great deal of vague work for Kennedy. Look, as the saying goes, even a broken Kennedy is right twice a day, and his public and vocal crusade against ultra-processed foods is not without merit. He’s called such food “poison” in past weeks and, while he’s being a bit dramatic in saying so, he’s not wrong that American diets are generally trash and contribute to a bunch of health concerns. And, to the point, ultra-processed foods are a big part of the problem.
Which makes it more than a bit jarring to see him pimp this company that makes food which is, you guessed it, ultra-processed.
The meals contain chemical additives that would render them impossible to recreate at home in your kitchen, said Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University and food policy expert, who reviewed the menu for The AP. Many menu items are high in sodium, and some are high in sugar or saturated fats, she said.
“It is perfectly possible to make meals like this with real foods and no ultra-processing additives but every one of the meals I looked at is loaded with such additives,” Nestle said. “What’s so sad is that they don’t have to be this way. Other companies are able to produce much better products, but of course they cost more.”
Now, to be clear, Mom’s Meals’ food products do not contain the artificial food coloring that Kennedy has also railed against. But that is a far cry from claiming that these meals don’t have any additives and aren’t processed foods. They absolutely are, though I expect Kennedy to play word games as to what “ultra-processed” means. It’s his way.
But the end result of all of this is we can believe one of two realities. Either Kennedy is a combination of so poor a communicator and so incompetent on matters of health to make all of this yet another blunder in his role at HHS…or he’s just completely full of shit and doesn’t actually care about any of this further than what it does for his own grasp on power and/or money.
Either way, well, it’s pretty freaking terrible and a flat-out lie to say this company makes the kind of food Kennedy himself has advocated for all these years.
As RFK Jr. has presided over the decimation of the Health & Human Services department he runs, along with HHS’ child agencies, his anti-vaxxer stance has shown through. And, really, his appointment, confirmation, and subsequent actions should fully put to bed any question of the utility of congressional approval of cabinet positions. During those hearings, in which Kennedy spent most of the time either refusing to answer perfectly legitimate questions or else demonstrating that he had zero understanding how the programs he would be running actually work and are funded, Kennedy also voiced his support for vaccines generally, particularly for children. This flew in the face of the decades Kennedy has spent blaming vaccines for autism rates increasing, among other things. The consequences for what was a spectacular fail-job of a confirmation hearing was his appointment to Secretary of HHS.
Since his confirmation, Kennedy has helpfully put his incompetence on full display. He has bungled a measles outbreak that is the 2nd largest in three decades and still expanding, prattled on about chemtrails, committed to knowing the cause of autism this year only to walk that back, and at least attempted to pull back CDC guidance on COVID-19 vaccines for children and pregnant women. All of this should have laid to bare for government leaders that Kennedy is anti-science, anti-vaccine, and grossly incompetent to run a small medical clinic, never mind HHS.
But in case you needed an example the contrast turned all the way to 100%, Kennedy this week decided to fire every single member of the CDC’s immunization advisory panel. This decision was announced not in a press conference, nor in a congressional hearing, but by an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
In an opinion piece published Monday in The Wall Street Journal, Kennedy announced that he had cleared out the committee, accusing them of being “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest” and a group that has “become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.”
“Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028,” Kennedy added.
The committee—CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—meets periodically to publicly review, evaluate, debate, and make recommendations on immunization practices. The CDC typically adopts the committee’s recommendations. The CDC’s vaccination schedules and recommendations set clinical standards for the country and determine insurance coverage.
The group is pretty damned important, in other words, when it comes to how the CDC, clinicians, and insurance companies throughout the country organized their parts of various vaccination programs throughout the country. Programs that Kennedy has historically railed against, regularly engaging in conspiracy theories. And you really do have to couple this news with Kennedy’s rejection of the germ theory of disease, which has been powering modern medicine for the past century or so. Put more simply: a man who has spent decades railing against modern vaccine practices and who rejects the cornerstone of modern medicine conducted his own less directly violent version of the Comrade’s Massacre, with the public ouster of these experts coupled with a public declaration of their being unfit to serve.
If you think that comparison is too harsh, you aren’t paying attention to the authoritarian playbook, which Kennedy has obviously adopted. Worse than accusing ACIP members of being purposefully corrupt, Kennedy outlines why they simply can’t help but be corrupted. There’s no agency in any of this among those he ousted. They are corrupt by a combination of any connection Kennedy could draw to the medical industry and his own declaration that they are so.
In Kennedy’s article, he criticized ACIP and FDA advisors for being in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry. However, he argued that the “problem isn’t necessarily that ACIP members are corrupt.”
“Most likely aim to serve the public interest as they understand it,” he wrote. “The problem is their immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy.”
In Kennedy’s op-ed, he indicates that new ACIP members will be appointed who “won’t directly work for the vaccine industry. … will exercise independent judgment, refuse to serve as a rubber stamp, and foster a culture of critical inquiry.”
Read all of this any way you like, but it’s fairly straight forward. Kennedy thinks that ACIP was working for the big pharma industry against the interests of the American people and their health, particularly when it comes to all things vaccines. He purged them and will replace them with his own hand-picked advisors that will almost certainly be plagued by similar misguided views. And that group, currently populated by nobody at all, will meet in 2 weeks to talk about immunization programs according to Kennedy.
Critics of this purge abound, as you would expect. And, because they come from the very medical experts and industries that Kennedy claims are conspiring against us all in order to, I guess, sell vaccines, they can be easily dismissed by his cadre of sycophants.
Kennedy’s move was quickly rebuked by a number of doctors groups. A statement released by the American Medical Association said it “upends a transparent process that has saved countless lives.” The American Academy of Pediatrics called it part of an “escalating effort by the Administration to silence independent medical expertise and stoke distrust in lifesaving vaccines.”
“This is horrifying,” a CDC official said of Kennedy’s move.
The American Public Health Association denounced it as an undemocratic “coup” of the process. The Infectious Disease Society of America called it “reckless, shortsighted and severely harmful.” The American College of Physicians accused Kennedy of having “circumvented the standard, transparent vaccine review processes” at the CDC.
If you thought that Kennedy would be allowed to retain his position, one for which he is hopelessly unqualified, and the extent of the fallout from it would be a mere measles outbreak, conspiracy talk, and maybe a handful of dead bodies, it really could get so, so much worse than that. A change in the government’s immunization guidance that deviates from actual medical science can’t help but filter down to some percentage of doctors and the public.
And people will get sick, and indeed some will die, as a result. In fact, that has already started to happen. The only question now is just how large a body count Kennedy will manage to rack up.
The remarkable successes of the decades-old partnership between biomedical research institutions and the federal government are so intertwined with daily life that it’s easy to take them for granted.
The negative consequences of defunding U.S. biomedical research can be difficult to recognize. Most breakthroughs, from the basic science discoveries that reveal the causes of diseases to the development of effective treatments and cures, can take years. Real-time progress can be hard to measure.
As biomedicalresearchers studying infectious diseases, viruses and immunology, we and our colleagues see this firsthand in our own work. Thousands of ongoing national and international projects dedicated to uncovering the causes of life-threatening diseases and developing new treatments to improve and save lives are supported by federal agencies such as the NIH and NSF.
Considering a few of the breakthroughs made possible through U.S. federal support can help illustrate not only the significant inroads biomedical research has made for preventing, treating and curing human maladies, but what all Americans stand to lose if the U.S. reduces its investment in these endeavors.
Basic science research on what causes cancer has led to new strategies to harness a patient’s own immune system to eliminate tumors. For example, all 12 patients in a 2022 clinical trial testing one type of immunotherapy had their rectal cancer completely disappear, without remission or adverse effects.
Despite these incredible successes, there is still a long way to go. In 2024, over 2 million people in the U.S. were estimated to be newly diagnosed with cancer, and 611,720 were expected to die from the disease.
Nearly every family is touched in some way by autoimmune andneurodegenerative diseases. Government-funded research has enabled major advances to combat conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers are also gaining insight into what causes multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks the protective covering of nerves and can result in paralysis. Scientists recently found a link between multiple sclerosis and Epstein-Barr virus, a pathogen estimated to infect over 90% of adults around the world. While multiple sclerosis is currently incurable, identifying its underlying cause can provide new avenues for prevention and treatment.
Alzheimer’s disease causes irreversible nerve damage and is the leading cause of dementia. In 2024, 6.9 million Americans ages 65 and older were living with Alzheimer’s. Most treatments address cognitive and behavioral symptoms. However, two new drugs developed with NIH-supported research and clinical trials were approved in July 2023 and July 2024 to treat early-stage Alzheimer’s. Federal funding is also supporting the development of blood tests for earlier detection of the disease.
None of these breakthroughs are a cure. But they represent important steps forward on the path toward ultimately reducing or eliminating these devastating ailments. Lack of funding will slow or block further progress, leading to the continued rise of the incidence and severity of these conditions.
Infectious diseases and the next pandemic
The world’s capacity to combat infectious disease will also be weakened by cuts to U.S. federal support of biomedical research.
Over the past 50 years, medical and public health advances have led to the eradication of smallpox globally and the elimination of polio in the U.S. HIV/AIDS, once a death sentence, is now a disease that can be managed with medication. Moreover, a new version of treatments called preexposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, offers complete protection against HIV transmission when taken only twice per year.
Similarly, the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the critical role biomedical research plays in responding to public health threats. Increased federal support of science during this time allowed the United States to emerge with new drugs, vaccine platforms with the potential to treat a variety of chronic diseases, and insights on how to effectively detect and respond to pandemic threats.
The National Institutes of Health contributed over $100 billion to support research that ultimately led to the development of all new drugs approved from 2010 to 2016 alone. Over 90% of this funding was for basic research into understanding the causes of disease that provides the foundation for new treatments.
Defunding biomedical research will result in a cascade of effects. There will likely be fewer clinical trials, fewer new treatments and fewer lifesaving drugs. Labs will likely shut down, jobs will be lost, and the process of discovery will stall. The U.S.’s health care system, economy and standing as the world’s leader in scientific innovation will likely decline.
University shortfalls directly resulting from cuts to research support will dramatically reduce the capacity of American institutions to educate and provide opportunities for the next generation. Funding cuts have led to the shuttering or heavy reduction of training programs for future scientists.
Graduate students and postdoctoral trainees are the lifeblood of biomedical research. Supporting these young people committed to public service through research and health care is also an investment in medical advancements and public health. But the uncertainty and instability resulting from the divestment of federally funded programs will likely severely deplete the biomedical workforce, crippling the United States’ ability to deliver future biomedical breakthroughs.
By cutting biomedical research funding, Americans and the rest of the world stand to lose new cures, new treatments and an entire generation of researchers.
The measles outbreak is not going away and RFK Jr. is making it worse. There is no need for equivocation in that statement. The facts are plain for all to see. Through a combination of half-hearted statements on getting the MMR vaccine followed up first by a pivot to nutrition, then another pivot to purposeful exposure being the best course, only for there to be another pivot to so-called “alternative treatments” for measles such as Vitamin A and cod liver oil, the Secretary for Health and Human Services is on a course to make the humans under his care less healthy.
The last time I wrote about this topic was in the last week of March. Here was the measles outbreak data at the time of that writing.
And here it is today, roughly a week later.
Over a 100 more confirmed cases, with more likely unconfirmed out there, in a week. The biggest jump in those numbers are among children, while the overwhelming percentage of the impacted by the disease are unvaccinated. We’re currently on pace to have the most total measles cases in America since 2019, when there were 1,274 cases, also as a result of outbreaks among the unvaccinated, largely in the south and in certain religious groups in New York.
Cases this year are tracking well above the 285 cases reported for all of 2024 and are at the highest level since 2019 when 1,249 cases were reported. Most of those cases were reported in underimmunized, close-knit communities, including two outbreaks in New York’s Orthodox Jewish communities.
The surge in cases that year, the highest since 1992, threatened the United States’ measles elimination status.
The problem, of course, is that we’re only in the beginning stages here. It’s April and we’re already eclipsing the total annual cases of the previous year. It may seem like we’re tracking under the 2019 numbers, but that’s only if you ignore the exponential nature of outbreak growths that aren’t properly managed. Infectious diseases, as it turns out, typically have trouble obeying the speed limit.
RFK Jr. is compounding the problem in multiple ways. His hesitancy on vaccination, to put it unbelievably mildly, is preventing the best cure for this outbreak from being implemented. His advocacy and garbled imprecise language around alternative treatments that didn’t result in measles being officially obliterated has led to other negative healthcare outcomes, such as Vitamin A toxicity. Again, in children.
Dr. Anita Patel and Joel Bervell are among many concerned that RFK Jr.’s inability to understand either the science or how to communicate to the public is garbling the message. She rightly notes that concentrated application of Vitamin A in a hospital setting by medical professionals can indeed serve as a treatment for measles post-infection. But that is where the agreement ends.
“The kernel of truth is that he’s right. Vitamin A at very high doses — high doses that you would never administer by yourself at home — but high-dose vitamin A administered in the hospital has shown to reduce both mortality and duration and severity of [measles] illness,” Patel said.
“The lack of truth in the statement he made is that giving vitamin A in the form of cod liver oil as like a panacea for all the people in Texas … is unequivocally wrong,” Patel added.
More, taking too much of any vitamin, including vitamin A, can lead to complications and toxicity, Bervell said. “It can cause … liver damage to fatigue to hair loss and headaches.” According to Texas Public Radio, the hospitalized children who are now being treated for vitamin A toxicity have abnormal liver function.
Vitamin A also can interact with other medications, which can lead to more problems, Patel said.
I’m going to keep stating this for as long as it takes: none of this is necessary. We have the preventative cure for measles: the MMR vaccine. It’s been employed for decades. The scientific community and studies done indicate the vaccine is safe for most people. Far safer than, say, measles.
Public policy has to be made in ways that are extremely clear. The average American doesn’t have the training to know that the amount of Vitamin A in cod liver varies wildly. They don’t know that there is such a thing as too much Vitamin A. They don’t know what herd immunity is or why it’s important. And they have no memory of a time when measles was rampant, nor the devastating consequences it can bring, even for those that survive it.
RFK Jr. has demonstrated that he is either completely incapable of leading on this issue, or else he’s too ego-driven to reverse his stance on vaccinations to put an end to it. And while I’m not one who thinks compulsory vaccinations should be mandated, it’s also simply the case that the man doesn’t have to offer up any alternative treatments or crackpot theories about how to combat it, either. Someone must do something better on this.
Or else we could see Warp Speed 2 put in place. Only this time, instead of an effort to manufacture a vaccine, it will be an industrial effort to build tiny coffins.
The reemergence of measles, a disease once declared officially eradicated in the United States, didn’t start with the second Trump presidential term. It didn’t even begin with Trump’s first term. Instead, it started through an unholy alliance between far-right, often religious groups that have pitched the vaccines as either unnecessary or dangerous combined with a far-left group that is often celebrity-driven pushing the same thing. But it’s also true that this unlikely alliance is reflected in the latest iteration of the Trump administration. Trump, as should be obvious, is aligned with the GOP. RFK Jr. has traditionally been a liberal. Those two have combined, through RFK Jr.’s obscene appointment to the Department of Health and Human Services, to propel measles back to being a danger unlike we’ve seen in decades.
The most recent measles outbreak began in the south, in Texas by all accounts. As RFK Jr. has noted, there have been brief outbreaks of measles that have occurred pretty much every year. Unnoted by the Secretary, however, is that these outbreaks traditionally occur in under-vaccinated geographical areas and that most of the infections and harm occur among the unvaccinated. Instead of consistently pushing for higher vaccination rates to combat this outbreak, RFK Jr. has instead pivoted to blaming nutrition for adverse effects from measles, while also suggesting that it would be better for everyone to just go ahead and get measles so that they have natural immunity. This, of course, follows years of vaccine skepticism from RFK Jr. that was picked up by people from both sides of the political aisle.
The consequences for this history and RFK Jr.’s recent appointment are smacking us in the face. Or, rather, they’re mostly smacking our children in the face. There are currently measles cases that occurred this year in a double-digit number of states, with most of the cases occurring in Texas, New Mexico, and Kansas. According to the CDC’s own data, the infections, hospitalizations, and 1 of 2 of the deaths from measles in 2025 have largely occurred among children and among the unvaccinated.
That data is not ambiguous. It isn’t difficult to parse. And the consequences are only growing. Cases are doubling in Kansas every week at this point. One child has already died. And we haven’t even really gotten into what will be eventual instances in which people, especially children, who can’t be vaccinated due to other health issues, will eventually fall victim to the callous and self-centered attitudes of the ignorant. And they will be cheered on by an HHS Secretary more invested in conspiracy theories and not admitting error than the health of, you know, children.
The measles is spreading. And it’s spreading, in part, directly because of the words that have come out of RFK Jr.’s mouth.
On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that as measles continues to spread, parents have continued to eschew vaccines and instead embraced “alternative” treatments, including vitamin A, which has been touted by anti-vaccine advocate and current US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Vitamin A accumulates in the body and can be toxic with large doses or extended use. Texas doctors told the Times that they’ve now treated a handful of unvaccinated children who had been given so much vitamin A that they had signs of liver damage.
So we’ve now entered the realm in which we have compounding health issues, both from measles itself, as well as the misapplication of so-called alternative health methods. And all of it is completely unnecessary. People, children, don’t have to get sick. There doesn’t need to be the first couple of deaths from measles, so far, in a decade.
No, this is a result of a deliberate choice made by a leader more intersted in trolling the libs than governing in a responsible way. Why the country appears to be so sanguine about the federal government sacrificing our children for ego is simply beyond me.
Let’s stipulate something before we dive into this post so that there is no misunderstanding: the rise of the anti-vax movement did not begin with Donald Trump’s foray into American politics. It’s been around since well before 2016, slowly but surely gaining momentum among a strange combination of West Coast liberal elites and a certain portion of conservatives. It gave rise to once-eradicated diseases for some time and was then supercharged by the bevy of misinformation and speculation around the COVID vaccines.
But Trump hasn’t helped. The eradication of truth as replaced by speculation, the “I’m just asking questions” routine, and a willingness to say anything that comes to mind with no thought to the consequences have all combined to propel the anti-vax crowd further than it has ever gotten. That is especially obvious with Trump putting the living avatar for the anti-vax movement, RFK Jr., in charge of the health of our nation.
Kennedy said in his NPR interview that vaccines were “not going to be taken away from anybody”. He says he wants to improve the science on vaccine safety which he believes has “huge deficits” and that he wants good information so people “can make informed choices“.
While Kennedy has denied on several occasions that he is anti-vaccination and said he and his children are vaccinated, he has repeatedly stated widely debunked claims about vaccine harm.
One of his main false claims – repeated in a 2023 interview with Fox News, was that “autism comes from vaccines”.
His answers are so all over the map that anything can be true, which means nothing is. And that sort of thing isn’t relegated only to whatever his actual stance on vaccines is. You get the same thing when it comes to the recent outbreak of measles in the American south. Should people get vaccinated in that area, where under-vaccination is a problem? RFK Jr. said yes and with an impressive amount of force in a March 3rd post on the HHS.gov site.
Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.
The current Texas outbreak has predominantly affected children, with 116 of the 146 cases occurring in individuals under 18 years of age. The DSHS reports that 79 of the confirmed cases involved individuals who had not received the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, while 62 cases had unknown vaccine status. At least five had received an MMR vaccine.
Great, except we have a couple of problems here. The measles outbreak began in January. RFK Jr. was confirmed as the HHS Secretary on February 13th. Why did it take until March 3rd to recommend vaccination?
And why is RFK Jr. now saying some incredibly stupid things about measles and disease in general that seem to point to other strategies besides vaccination?
While vaccines are widely regarded as the first line of defense, some experts have suggested that nutrition plays a role in reducing the severity of the disease.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. discussed the topic during a recent exclusive interview with Dr. Marc Siegel, clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health and Fox News’ senior medical analyst.
“We need to understand the relationship between good health and chronic disease,” RFK Jr. told Siegel. “If you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease, in modern times — because we have nutrition … and access to medicines. What we need is good science on all of these things so that people can make rational choices.”
Read that again. “If you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease.” I will assume that this inartfully worded statement is saying that if you’re otherwise healthy then it’s nearly impossible to die from an infectious disease. I also have zero idea as to what evidence RFK Jr. is basing that on. And the “rational choices” line is obviously a subtle nod to the anti-vax crowd, though it’s carefully worded so that Kennedy can deny that.
But come on: there are a ton of infectious diseases that can kill you quite easily, even if you’re eating habits are tip top. AIDS comes to mind. Ebola, Smallpox, and all kinds of bacterial infections as well. This isn’t secret information and the HHS Secretary saying otherwise is bonkers.
Folks, this is dangerous. A lack of clarity on the best plan to re-eradicate a disease we declared gone decades ago is going to prolong this outbreak and spur on others. The main victims of this disease are fucking children. The first death of this outbreak was a school-aged child. Measles should be a mere nightmare in 2025. Instead, the nightmare has become real through misinformation, doublespeak, and the distrust in science that has been in a supercharged state ever since the current President presided over the worst health crisis in a century during his first term. Largely because that same President decided he’d rather deny simple facts and/or find something/someone to blame than deal with reality and provide actual leadership.
Now, it’s not as though the concept that people who have access to quality nutrition will respond to measles better is wrong in and of itself, to be clear. That’s almost certainly true. The problem is several fold: the administration RFK Jr. works for is cutting nutrition programs from the government, vaccines work even for those suffering from malnutrition, and, because of the quality of our healthcare, malnutrition plays much less of a role in the United States than other countries.
Dr. Jacob Glanville, CEO of Centivax, a San Francisco biotechnology company, agreed that measles is more likely to severely affect children in developing countries who are extremely malnourished.
“Historically, less than 1% of American children die from measles, while the Pan American Health Organization reports that as [many] as 10% of children die from measles in some developing countries, and it has been reported as high as 25% to 50% in a study of malnourished African infants,” he told Fox News Digital.
The lack of quality medical care in many areas of the developing world also contributes to disease severity, Glanville noted.
“While better nutrition is important for American children, it’s unlikely to make a difference when it comes to measles infection or severity — 90% of well-fed but unvaccinated American children exposed to measles will become infected, around 20% of those children will be hospitalized, and 0.1-1% of those children will die.”
But when it comes to RFK Jr., the man simply cannot be clear. Because, I suspect, he is an anti-vaxxer at his core. He has to pretend otherwise now, first to be confirmed as HHS Secretary and now so a larger uproar over his post there won’t begin. But responses like those below simply don’t help.
RFK also recognized the importance of vaccines, noting that the HHS is “making sure that anybody who wants the vaccine can get that vaccine.”
“The measles vaccine protects the community,” he told Dr. Siegel. “We are recommending that people in this country get vaccines … [and] we are also respectful of their personal choices.”
There was no need for the last part of that statement. It’s what the vaccine skeptics will glom onto, refusing to vaccinate their children, harming herd immunity for these solvable diseases, and endangering us all.
