Before he set foot in 200 Independence Avenue, Washington DC, Robert F Kennedy Jr, US president Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services, had raised more than a few eyebrows from America’s medical establishment. Around 17,000, to be precise – that’s how many doctors signed a letter from the Committee to Protect Health Care urging senators to reject his nomination, saying he was “unqualified to lead” and was “actively dangerous”.

Their petition failed. Today, Kennedy Jr, better known as RFK, is head of an agency with an almost two trillion-dollar budget and a little over 80,000 employees. On Monday, speaking from the White House, Trump and the US secretary of health and human services said women should not take acetaminophen, also known by the brand name Tylenol, “during the entire pregnancy.” It was announced that the Food and Drug Administration would begin notifying doctors that the use of acetaminophen “can be associated” with an increased risk of autism, but neither Trump or Kennedy Jr provided any peer reviewed medical evidence to support this. They also raised unfounded concerns about vaccines contributing to rising rates of autism.

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President Trump tied the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy to autism and made several other claims about vaccines. William Brangham discussed those claims and the concerns about what the president said with Alycia Halladay of the Autism Science Foundation and Jennifer Nuzzo of Brown University’s School of Public Health.

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The committee that offers vaccine advice to the nation’s top public health agency voted Friday against recommending the updated COVID-19 vaccine to people aged 6 months or older, instead leaving the decision to individuals. The panel also decided against recommending that states and local authorities require a prescription for COVID-19 vaccines.

On many levels, people watching the two-day proceedings of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) did not know what to expect. Much of the week was uncharted, and a planned vote on the hepatitis B vaccine was tabled despite being on the agenda.

(TNND) — The panel that develops vaccine recommendations for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proposed one change to childhood immunizations but tabled a vote for another before turning their attention to the hotly debated COVID-19 vaccines.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices continued its two-day meeting Friday after voting Thursday to recommend a standalone chickenpox vaccination in toddlers to reduce their risk of febrile seizures.

A combination MMRV vaccine is available, which includes measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chickenpox) immunizations.

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In April 2023, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his presidential bid in Boston, promising to “Make America Healthy Again.” Since becoming President Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has made a mockery of this promise, undermining decades of public health consensus.

His tenure recently reached its lowest point, with the explosive departure of Director Susan Monarez from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Four other officials left the CDC over Kennedy’s leadership, with one accusing him of “weaponization of public health.”

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The Trump administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo doesn’t appear to be following the playbook used in previous outbreaks, and it’s sounding alarm bells among biosecurity experts.

Current and former leaders of the U.S.’s infectious disease response apparatus are warning that they’re not seeing the level of coordination between federal agencies that’s needed to successfully respond to such outbreaks abroad.

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The world’s market for vaccines, as it exists today, depends on the United States. The U.S. has poured immense resources into the design and development of vaccines, and has paid far higher prices for doses than most other nations can afford. The federal government has issued broad vaccine recommendations, generating strong, consistent demand. “That’s a predictable market,” Richard Hughes IV, a public-health-law expert and the former vice president of public policy at Moderna, told me. It’s also a huge one. Seth Berkley, the former CEO of Gavi, which supports the immunization of about half the world’s children, told me that the U.S. accounts for 35 to 40 percent of global vaccine revenue at a minimum, more than all of Europe combined.

Americans across the political spectrum are aligned on at least one belief, albeit for different reasons: The CDC is a mess. In a poll conducted this summer by The Washington Post and KFF, a nonpartisan health-policy organization, Democrats and Republicans alike expressed low confidence that the agency could be trusted to make independent decisions based on scientific fact. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the head of Health and Human Services, has described the CDC as dysfunctional and politicized; according to the former CDC director Susan Monarez, he has also disparaged the agency’s workers as child murderers. Meanwhile, public-health experts—a group that has historically worked in tandem with the CDC—now question the agency’s credibility with Kennedy in charge. “You can’t trust anything that comes out of the CDC,” Michael Osterholm, who directs the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, told me.

David Baltimore explained to Mr Mandela, in a language so precise as only he could, that there was no vaccine for Aids and that an aggressive rollout of antiretrovirals, tough management of needlestick use and a high visibility public campaign for safe sex were key.

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On Sunday, after four days of silence about how Ladapo’s all-encompassing goal would be achieved, the health department issued a statement saying it was proposing a rule change “to remove requirements for childhood immunizations … not required for school entry” such as hepatitis B, varicella (chickenpox), and influenza.

Vaccine requirements for polio, diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, mumps and tetanus, it said, “remain in place, unless updated through legislation”, and “all vaccines will remain available to families throughout Florida”.

Scott Rivkees, an infectious diseases expert at Brown University and former Florida surgeon general under DeSantis, told the Guardian it appeared Ladapo was in retreat.

An artificial intelligence tool out of Boston University aims to enhance surveillance of disease outbreaks across the globe, a task traditionally informed by several federal agencies that have been dismantled or cut back in the second Trump administration.

The project known as the Biothreats Emergence, Analysis and Communications Network, or BEACON, took more than a year to develop. It launched in April, as the Trump administration slashed the workforce and budget at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, all but eliminated the U.S. Agency for International Development and cut ties to the World Health Organization.

Vaccines have been making a lot of headlines over the last five years. First, because of the remarkable speed with which the Covid vaccine was developed, and more recently, because of the Trump administration’s hostility to vaccines. I can’t think of a better time to have a conversation with today’s guest, Seth Berkley, who for more than a decade ran the largest vaccination program in the world.

Public health in America is undergoing dramatic changes, from changing access to vaccines to defunding research into treatment and prevention of diseases. This is all the work of the second Trump administration, more specifically, the leadership of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior and it’s having effects beyond America.

In recent years, the U.S. has played a major role in battling malaria, providing more than a billion dollars annually to fight it. That is, until this year, when the Trump administration froze foreign aid.

The effects of that are covered in a recent article from the publication Science. Public health experts weigh in on that and the broader changes in public health in America.

To protect the people of Massachusetts from deadly bird flu in the U.S., the state’s health director, Robert Goldstein, is relying on an artificial intelligence platform that reads newspapers for outbreak information. It also searches for signals of outbreaks of other deadly diseases, such as Ebola, that are farther away. Those data used to come from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But with the U.S. withdrawing from the former and cutting thousands of jobs from the latter, Goldstein is trying to fill huge gaps in any way he can. The AI platform in Massachusetts, called BEACON, scans news reports in local languages and draws on a network of outbreak analysts from around the world, searching for early signs of looming disease threats.

When Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended his vision of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a recent op-ed, he cited one of the agency’s biosurveillance programs as a prime example of the agency’s capabilities: the Biothreat Radar Detection System.

But the “Biothreat Radar Detection System” doesn’t appear to exist — at least, not yet, sources inside and outside the CDC told NOTUS. And new details about how the program might apply AI to biosurveillance are giving biosecurity experts some pause.

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Earlier this week, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, with Gov. Ron DeSantis at his side, likened childhood vaccines to slavery and recommended that requirements for childhood vaccination be eliminated. Children in Florida will now be more at risk of vaccine-preventable illnesses than at any time in recent history, but the move will also have an impact in the broader population.

(TNND) — Republican senators who are also doctors stood up for vaccines during this week's hearing with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted vaccine skeptic.

Senators of both parties grilled Kennedy over his statements and actions since taking the helm at Health and Human Services, including the big changes to vaccine policy.

“I'm approaching this as a doctor, not as a senator,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana. “I am concerned about children's health, seniors’ health, all of our health.”

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Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo is Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. Her work focuses on global health security, public health preparedness and response, and health systems resilience. She joins Joel Heitkamp on "News and Views" to talk about Secretary Robert F. Kennedy's Senate hearing yesterday, and the importance of vaccine transparency.


(Joel Heitkamp is a talk show host on the Mighty 790 KFGO in Fargo-Moorhead. His award-winning program, “News & Views,” can be heard weekdays from 8 – 11 a.m. Follow Joel on X/Twitter @JoelKFGO.)

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With the CDC in disarray and its future uncertain, this episode explores what’s driving the exodus of agency staff and what this means for national health security.

TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) – There’s mixed reaction among Floridians following Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo’s push to end vaccine mandates.

One person against this new push is Dr. Scott Rivkees, who was state Surgeon General from 2019 to 2021 with the DeSantis Administration.

“From a public health, medical, and view as a parent, this is a sad day for Florida,” Rivkees said.

The former state health official is now a professor at Brown University in Rhode Island. Rivkees questions the purpose of the state’s push for vaccine mandate elimination.
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(TNND) — Florida plans to end all vaccine mandates, a move criticized by leading medical groups.

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo made the announcement Wednesday at an event focused on “medical freedom” in the Sunshine State.

“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and, and slavery,” Ladapo said of vaccine mandates.

Ladapo said he doesn’t have the right to tell people what they must put in their bodies.

“Your body, your body is a gift from God,” he said at the event.

Ladapo called vaccine mandates “immoral.”

(TNND) — Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended his "Make America Healthy Again" agenda during a heated congressional hearing on Thursday against members of both parties.

Kennedy testified before the Senate Finance Committee, where he faced tough questions amid the ouster of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director and big changes in vaccine policy.

Susan Monarez was ousted as CDC director after less than a month on the job.

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A decades-long, nationwide commitment to a wholesale vaccination policy began unraveling Wednesday, with some states moving to preserve broad access to inoculations while others lurched in the opposite direction.

In Massachusetts, Governor Maura Healey essentially wrote a prescription for COVID shots for every person in the state over the age of 5, a move that would blunt potential federal restrictions on COVID boosters.

Meanwhile, Florida’s surgeon general announced a plan to phase out vaccine mandates altogether, including those for children attending its public schools.

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(TNND) — President Donald Trump called on drug companies to "justify" the success they claim over COVID-19 vaccines.

“Many people think they are a miracle that saved Millions of lives. Others disagree! With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer, and I want it NOW,” Trump said in a Truth Social post Monday.

Trump said he’s seen “extraordinary” information from drugmakers that hasn’t been shared publicly.

Trump specifically mentioned Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. among those who “rip themselves apart” to figure out if the COVID-19 vaccines work as advertised.

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There are many reasons for the widespread condemnation of the decision by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to cancel half a billion dollars in research and development of mRNA vaccines. Indeed, halting work on one of the most promising areas of biomedical innovation—one that brought an end to the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic and also promises treatments even for non-respiratory diseases like cancer—represents an astounding level of short-sightedness.

The Trump Administration has made significant changes to the departments in charge of public health. Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency medicine physician who teaches public health policy at Brown University, discusses the impact he expects on the health of average Americans and for the future of public health research.

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"There is no American health without a strong, vibrant and evidence-based U.S. CDC."Jennifer Nuzzo on who families can turn to for reliable medical info after the firing of the CDC head and resignation of several officials

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The White House’s AI Action Plan, released in July, mentions “health care” only three times. But it is one of the most consequential health policies of the second Trump administration. Its sweeping ambitions for AI—rolling back safeguards, fast-tracking “private-sector-led innovation,” and banning “ideological dogmas such as DEI”—will have long-term consequences for how medicine is practiced, how public health is governed, and who gets left behind.

In addition to Covid prevention, medical researchers are discovering ways mRNAs could treat various cancers, HIV, and sickle cell anemia. But RFK Jr. and the Trump administration are threatening their efforts.

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Turmoil at the nation’s preeminent public health institution reverberated across the country Thursday as a sudden purge of top leaders and abrupt policy changes threatened to confuse Americans on a myriad of health issues and risked leaving the country unprepared for the next pandemic, medical and public health experts said.

On Wednesday, US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired Susan Monarez, who was confirmed as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just one month ago. President Trump affirmed her dismissal Wednesday night.

Rattling departures of high-ranking officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention appear to be sending the U.S. public health agency into unsettling disarray, experts say, after the White House abruptly dismissed CDC director Susan Monarez on Wednesday evening following alleged disagreements on health policy.

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Arguably, one of humanity’s most dramatic successes has been the application of science to understand and then decisively intervene to improve these harrowing conditions. The global infant mortality rate is now less than 25 per 1000, with the US at 5.2 per 1000. Although clean water, sanitation, improved nutrition, and advances in neonatal and perinatal care have all played crucial roles in this progress, the greatest single contributor has been the development and widespread use of vaccines. The World Health Organization (WHO) Expanded Programme on Immunization is estimated to account for a 40% reduction in global infant mortality rate over the last 50 years, not including the dramatic effects of smallpox eradication.

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It’s been a tumultuous week for US health agencies, with the departure of several top officials, uncertainty around new Covid vaccine restrictions, and even more experts calling for the removal of top health official Robert F Kennedy Jr.

The director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Susan Monarez, was fired by the Trump White House after some controversy, and four other top officials also resigned.

“[The] CDC basically imploded yesterday and now it’s truly in shambles,” said Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist and former senior adviser for the CDC. “This is a national security risk to Americans. Without steady-headed, evidence-informed leadership, everything from outbreaks to data to chronic diseases to injury is in jeopardy.”

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Dr. Susan Monarez, who was sworn in as director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on July 31, has been removed from the position, the White House said Wednesday.

Several high-level veteran agency officials resigned after word spread about her departure, leaving the CDC leaderless at a perilous time. HHS has not named an acting director to lead the CDC.

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Toward Cleaner Indoor Air: Mapping State Legislative Progress

While the public health and regulatory communities focused their initial recommendations on handwashing, personal protective equipment (PPE), testing, isolation, and, eventually, vaccination, the idea of improving indoor air quality came up repeatedly.

Vendors quickly began promoting a range of products claiming to clean the air and prevent infections, leaving decision makers to weigh those claims and determine what, if anything, to do. Could cleaner indoor air really help reduce the spread of respiratory viruses like COVID-19?

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Texas health officials on Aug. 18 declared the end of a measles outbreak that had sickened more than 760 people across the state and killed two children. Doctors and public-health officials involved in the outbreak, most of whom had previously never encountered a measles patient, are now taking stock of what they’ve learned about the virus and the best ways to prevent and control outbreaks of the disease.

Measles, they say, is as contagious as feared, and unvaccinated people are the most vulnerable. But while vaccination remains the best way to prevent measles, Texas public-health officials say they could have adopted a more inclusive approach when engaging with vaccine-hesitant communities about the virus and its risks. More investment is also needed, they say, into building trust between rural communities and health officials.

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As measles surged in Texas early this year, the Trump administration’s actions sowed fear and confusion among CDC scientists that kept them from performing the agency’s most critical function — emergency response — when it mattered most, an investigation from KFF Health News shows.

The outbreak soon became the worst the United States has endured in over three decades.

In the month after Donald Trump took office, his administration interfered with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention communications, stalled the agency’s reports, censored its data, and abruptly laid off staff. In the chaos, CDC experts felt restrained from talking openly with local public health workers, according to interviews with seven CDC officials with direct knowledge of events, as well as local health department emails obtained by KFF Health News through public records requests.

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(TNND) — The American Academy of Pediatrics issued vaccine recommendations that differ from the government's guidance on the hot-button issue of COVID-19 shots.

And several vaccine experts said Wednesday that they expect pediatricians will listen to the AAP on this one, not the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I expect nearly all pediatricians are going to follow the science-based guidelines, which is what the American Academy of Pediatrics is recommending,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of Brown University's Pandemic Center.

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A primary driver of the monumental endeavour to develop the yellow fever vaccine was a shared sense of responsibility that America, having the means and knowledge, should use its resources for the good of all. That sense of responsibility is now waning.

Max Theiler is the first of 13 South Africans to receive a Nobel Prize (1951, physiology and medicine) for developing what became known as an attenuated vaccine for yellow fever. His discovery changed the course of medicine as it treated, cured and prevented the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people. His Swiss-born father, Sir Arnold Theiler, was the inaugural director of the Onderstepoort Veterinary Research Institute outside Pretoria.

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t’s late August, there’s a hurricane coming up the East Coast, schools are starting to open, and no one has any idea who can get an updated Covid-19 shot.

The Covid-19 pandemic is over, but the virus persists. It has killed up to 56,000 people in the U.S. since last October, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and sickened up to 18 million. Pfizer

PFE +1.67% , Moderna MRNA -2.38% , and Novavax NVAX -10.41% all plan to launch new versions of their Covid-19 vaccines this fall, updated to target a family of Covid-19 viruses called JN.1.

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Dr. Elias Sayour is working on groundbreaking research toward a universal cancer vaccine, and he’s concerned that a recent decision from the Department of Health and Human Services could impede his team's work and the research of others hoping to develop new vaccines for diseases.

Sayour, a pediatric oncologist and professor at the University of Florida,is leading a team that’s using mRNA technology to help create a vaccine that fights cancer.

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Four and a half years ago, fresh off the success of Operation Warp Speed, mRNA vaccines were widely considered—as President Donald Trump said in December 2020—a “medical miracle.” Last week, the United States government decidedly reversed that stance when Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. canceled nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of grants and contracts for mRNA-vaccine research.

With Kennedy leading HHS, this about-face is easy to parse as yet another anti-vaccine move. But the assault on mRNA is also proof of another kind of animus: the COVID-revenge campaign that top officials in this administration have been pursuing for months, attacking the policies, technologies, and people that defined the U.S.’s pandemic response. As the immediacy of the COVID crisis receded, public anger about the American response to it took deeper root—perhaps most prominently among some critics who are now Trump appointees. That acrimony has become an essential tool in Kennedy’s efforts to undermine vaccines. “It is leverage,” Dorit Reiss, a vaccine-law expert at UC Law San Francisco, told me. “It is a way to justify doing things that he wouldn’t be able to get away with otherwise.”

Scientists have discovered the ability to “personalize” cancer treatments using cutting-edge genetic technology - but experts fear that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s, recent funding cuts will have “a profound chilling effect” on U.S. progress in this area of medicine.

The new mRNA vaccines are specifically engineered to address the genetic differences of each patient with stomach cancer, according to Japanese researchers in a study published Tuesday, which makes them more effective than standard treatments.

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When the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was authorized for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December 2020, President Donald Trump referred to it as a "medical miracle."

"This is one of the greatest scientific accomplishments in history. It will save millions of lives and soon end the pandemic once and for all," Trump said at the time in a speech delivered from the Oval Office.

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As of last month, there is no one left in the White House whose sole job is to keep the nation safe from biological threats. The leader of the National Security Council’s biosecurity directorate recently resigned. His staff had been pushed out, and his unit is now defunct. The Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, established by Congress in 2022, has dwindled from a staff of about 20 under President Joe Biden to a staff of zero.

The Trump administration has said that it’s just reorganizing the bureaucracy and is prepared to handle biothreats. But our experience suggests otherwise. Without a leader from the NSC embedded in the White House and ready to coordinate other agencies, more people—including Americans—will get sick and die.

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This week, President Donald Trump called Operation Warp Speed, a public-private federal program that helped speed up the development and distribution of mRNA Covid-19 vaccines in record time “one of the most incredible things ever done in this country.” It was just a day after US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the federal government was canceling a half-billion dollars in investments into the same technology, saying no new mRNA projects will be initiated under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.

Vaccine and preparedness experts said the decision could be disastrous for the United States, rendering another Operation Warp Speed impossible in case of threat from disease or bioweapons.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to cancel $500 million in grants and contracts for mRNA vaccine development jeopardizes the health and safety of Americans — both now and for years to come.

The Nobel Prize-winning technology enabled the first Covid-19 vaccines to be developed with breathtaking speed during the first year of the pandemic, ultimately saving millions of lives. Yet Kennedy spent years undermining confidence in mRNA, a misinformation campaign that he continued after he took office. Now, he’s systematically dismantling the very infrastructure we need to respond to a future pandemic.

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