My cancer is back. This is disappointing but not unexpected; of the 2/3 of people who survive their first bout with ovarian cancer, 80% usually have it recur at some point. For me it was sooner than expected, and disheartening because, even if I beat it back this time, it will likely come back again and again at shorter and shorter intervals. On the other hand, it took long enough that I’m still considered “platinum sensitive” and eligible for treatment with platinum-based drugs, which are currently among the most effective for this cancer. Unfortunately, over time the cancer becomes resistant to it, which makes it very difficult to treat, let alone cure once and for all, and those treatments themselves are fairly caustic and difficult for the rest of the body to endure.
Fortunately there has been some exciting science happening, not just for my cancer but all cancers, to find treatments that, separately or in combination, are more effective, longer lasting, and less toxic in their side effects. For instance, some drugs are being developed that can look for certain characteristics of tumors and then deliver a chemo payload only to cells that have that characteristic, which is more likely to be just be the nefarious malignant ones, thus sparing as many of the rest of the body’s cells as possible the chemo toxicity. For ovarian cancer in particular, which is especially intractable, some drugs find ways to reset the platinum sensitivity so that standard treatments can work effectively again. Others try to defeat the mechanisms themselves that make the cancer so entrenched.
And then there are therapies aimed at getting the immune system on board to help the body rid itself of these nefarious cells. Immune systems spend their days attacking things that don’t belong in healthy bodies, and yet cancers happen because for some reason they can’t manage to recognize or deal with certain cells, which then run amok. So there are a variety of modalities being looked at to help bodies do a better job of hunting these cells down and destroying them before they can get entrenched. Sometimes these therapies involve drugs with direct effects on tumor cells or the tumor cell environment in a way that will deter their proliferation. Other times it’s a therapy designed to reprogram the body’s own immune system to recognize and destroy the bad cells, like through T-cell therapy, or, by working with the body’s own “natural killer” cells, which tend to do a better job of remembering the threat and staying on guard against it. And then there are a variety of vaccine possibilities, including some using mRNA technology, all of which are designed to do for an immune system what a vaccine is always designed to do: teach it what a danger looks like and give it what it needs to fight it, ideally without all this extra poison, and hopefully once and for all.
It is, in some ways, a very exciting time to be a cancer patient. Cancer is already not what it used to be, and even for my extremely lethal one I was happy to discover last year that a late-stage diagnosis did not automatically mean a death sentence—at least not right away. But it is also terrifying. Every patient is in a race with the science to hang on long enough to benefit from the fruit of these discoveries. Someday we may all be saved, but will our own rescue come in time?
And now, here in 2025, it is even more terrifying. Because while on the one hand we stand on the precipice of finally being able to tame this monster, we have the US government making the affirmative choice to let the cancer win.
The cuts in funding closing labs may be closing down the very science that was going to save the person you know and love. The hysteria maligning vaccines moreover threatens to close down some of the most promising avenues for delivering real cures. Meanwhile a politicized FDA stands to slow approvals for new trials and treatments. And a CDC that no longer can be trusted to control disease only gives aid and comfort to the pathogens that would seek to ultimately kill us all.
And for women’s cancers in particular, a politicized public health system that deems the specific science of our bodies to be icky and criminal deprives us of all sorts of avenues for treatment and cures. There is evidence, for instance, that abortifacients like mifepristone can defeat the mechanism that makes our ovarian cancers so resistant to treatment, because it may be the same mechanism that protects pregnancies that is now misfiring to protect our tumor cells. And yet, there is currently little science exploring this vector of opportunity because how can there be? That science is all but illegal. As nearly all science is now becoming.
Mankind has made enormous strides in understanding the science of the human body, down to an even molecular level. We increasingly understand how to maintain the health of these amazing walking chemistry sets that somehow manage to spark into souls. And yet this government would damn us back to the days when all we had were leeches and deity beseeches, thanks to a hostility to science that is a hostility to life itself. The gift civilization has given us, of being able to control our own medical destiny, has been cast aside by this government. And it means that people will die—needlessly, avoidably, and heartbreakingly.
No claim of controlling “waste” could possibly justify what the Trump Administration has done. The true waste is measured not just in lost science and aborted research but in the lives that will be needlessly lost with it, including the lives of everyone who could be using their own lifeforce to make this world better if they weren’t having to succumb to diseases we are capable of abating. The cost of these policy decisions far, far exceeds any supposed “savings” these misanthropic policies pretend to offer. There is absolutely nothing of value that these cretinous, gleefully ignorant anti-science policies could possibly hope to gain, and there is so much hope to be lost if they are not soon reversed so that we can once again have the world class public health system that we first met the 21st century with.
If they are not, and soon, I fear my own life will be doomed. And so will we be all.
I’ll start with this: I am certainly not fully politically aligned with Senator Bill Cassidy, but I have typically found him to be genuine and intelligent. Points of disagreement aside, he doesn’t strike me as a grifter or psychopath, which is unfortunately quite rare amongst government these days. He is a doctor, specifically a gastroenterologist, and typically pretty good on medical issues.
But come on, man: do something.
Cassidy was a key vote in confirming our own national embarrassment, RFK Jr., as head of HHS. Kennedy’s chaotic activity during these first nine months is well documented in that link above, but I’m going to reiterate what I said in a post about how polling is demonstrating that the American people are done with Kennedy’s bullshit.
But the context around this is that plenty of GOP members of Congress are looking ahead to the midterms and some percentage of those same people are in districts that are either swing districts or not solidly safe GOP districts. And every bit of chaos that comes out of this administration, and HHS has produced a ton of that chaos, makes the reelection chances of those House and Senate members that much worse.
Cassidy is one of those that are campaigning for reelection at the midterms. He last won in 2020 with 59% of the vote, which wouldn’t strike you as a particularly risky place to be, except he’s getting attacked from both the right and the left. His fellow senators have made it quite clear that they look to his guidance on matters of healthcare, and specifically on how he views and handles RFK Jr. During Kennedy’s most recent congressional hearing, he said many strong and tough things directly to and about Kennedy.
But come on, man: do something.
All we have gotten is words. There has been no public whipping of support to pushback on Kennedy and the disastrous things he’s done for nine months. No public followups from the hearing. No real oversight of any kind. I know this, because Kennedy and Trump recently came out and made the scientifically illiterate claim that pregnant mothers ingesting Tylenol is responsible for the uptick in rates of autism.
Cassidy first addressed the president’s words on X, saying studies don’t back up the claims he made at a clunky press conference on Monday.
“The preponderance of evidence shows that this is not the case,” Cassidy wrote. “The concern is that women will be left with no options to manage pain in pregnancy. We must be compassionate to this problem.” He added that HHS, helmed by vocal health conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “should release the new data that it has to support this claim.”
We already know there is no “new data.” The studies cited by Kennedy and Trump were old studies. The new study that they used to push this unfounded claim didn’t do any new research itself, but rather analyzed a bunch of existing research instead. Oh, and that study’s own authors disagreed with the conclusions Kennedy and Trump drew from it. The data isn’t new, so Cassidy’s request is moot.
Cassidy expanded on all of this on local radio.
The “best” study on Tylenol usage during pregnancy and autism doesn’t back up Trump, he told Talk 107.3 host Brian Haldane.
“There is an article out of Sweden ― two million people followed ― and what they did is they looked at someone who had autism and they compared them to a sibling who did not have autism, and they found no association, effectively, between taking Tylenol or not,” Cassidy pointed out, calling it the “highest quality” and “best controlled” study on the subject.
The findings Trump was referencing Monday appeared to be from “a study which found an association,” he said. “Now that’s the key thing: an association. That doesn’t mean it causes it; it just means that it’s associated.”
Yes, exactly right! Kennedy and the Mad King are going to harm mothers and the unborn with this nonsense. Cassidy is correct that the advice coming from HHS and the goddamned President is not trustworthy, nor based in good science.
But come on, man: do something.
Do something more than words. Back the folks in the House that are seeking to impeach Kennedy. Break with him publicly. Demand more accountability. Haul him before Congress as often as it takes to expose the very real harm that is being done to the health of the American people.
Do no harm, Senator. That’s an oath you once took, before you entered the pretzel-twisted world of federal politics. Your inaction is doing harm.
It’s been a little over half a year since RFK Jr. was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services and his tenure thus far has been chaotic, to put it mildly. Listing all of the various forms of fuckery that have already occurred under his watch would be a full length post of its own, but there are certainly some lowlights. There was the bizarre comments about getting to the bottom of chemtrails. He presided over the largest measles outbreak in decades and essentially blamed the victims for it. It sure looks like he had AI write up some of his MAHA health report, including references to studies that don’t exist and misinterpreting the ones that did. But in more recent and rapid succession, he fired every member of the CDC’s ACIP panel, replaced them with anti-vaxxers, fired the head of the CDC after only a month on the job, and then concluded that pregnant mothers shouldn’t take Tylenol because it causes autism. And we haven’t even mentioned his revising of vaccination schedules, the defunding of mRNA vaccine research, or his disaster of a congressional hearing.
There are all kinds of pressures that Donald Trump refuses to bow to, to be sure. But the man does pay attention to public sentiment polling, no matter how much hand-waiving over “fake polls” he might espouse. And Kennedy’s public approval ratings are fucking terrible.
The findings come from the most recent Quinnipiac University poll released this month, which surveyed around 1,200 registered voters across the country. Exactly 33% of respondents said they currently approved of Kennedy’s stint as HHS secretary, while 54% disapproved. The numbers are a noticeable drop from a similar poll conducted earlier this year, prior to the internal collapse of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set off by RFK Jr.’s antivaccine agenda.
So, some caveats here, and from someone who is not steeped in horse race politics. First, this is a single poll. Polls are a snapshot in time and suffer all kinds of factors that can impact how accurate a snapshot they represent. Chief amongst them would be sample size issues and 1,500 respondents is not a huge sample size, though it isn’t tiny either. Second, the Trump administration at least likes to pretend like polls they don’t like are wrong, or fake, or that they don’t actually matter in the decision making process. And, third, Kennedy still enjoys majority support from Republican voters.
Unfortunately, these waning numbers for RFK may not mean all that much. According to the Quinnipiac poll, 71% of Republicans still approve of Kennedy as HHS chief. And while some members of the GOP have become more critical of RFK Jr.’s performance, especially following the CDC defection, many are still roundly in his corner—most notably President Donald Trump himself.
All of that is true. But the context around this is that plenty of GOP members of Congress are looking ahead to the midterms and some percentage of those same people are in districts that are either swing districts or not solidly safe GOP districts. And every bit of chaos that comes out of this administration, and HHS has produced a ton of that chaos, makes the reelection chances of those House and Senate members that much worse.
If you want the silver lining here, it’s that the American people are seeing through the propaganda to an appreciable degree. Kennedy, in particular, is a master manipulator of false information… but it isn’t working. The public is seeing through the chaff. And since Trump loves nothing in this world more than the accumulation of power, that might just move the needle.
When you’re brought before Congress to testify, you’re not supposed to lie. I realize that sounds rather obvious to many of you, but I’ll remind you that this is the year of our lord, 2025, and such common sensibilities are not quite as common as they used to be. Even if you’re not under oath, which was the case when RFK Jr. testified before Congress recently, you’re just not supposed to lie to Congress. While the hearing was to get Kennedy’s input on all the crazy, fucked up things he’s doing on matters of health, vaccines, and in response to health concerns, it also delved into Kennedy’s firing of Dr. Susan Monarez as CDC Director after less than three Scaramucci’s worth of time, which would have been 33 days.
Well, somebody is definitely lying, because Monarez went before Congress herself this week and her testimony stands in direct rebuttal to some rather unbelievable testimony from Kennedy. Let’s break it down.
Kennedy claims he fired Monarez because she told him, a quote according to Kennedy, that when he asked if she was a trustworthy person, she responded “no”.
Yes, that was his claim. Here it is in video form.
As I said at the time, this claim is simply not believable. It’s a form of an old catch-22. If a known liar tells you they are lying, do you believe them? If someone who is untrustworthy tells you they are untrustworthy, how do you know if you should trust that statement?
The whole thing is silly. Bad actors don’t tell others not to trust them. So… what happened?
Monarez told a different version of events on Wednesday, saying Kennedy had grown “very concerned” that she had spoken to members of Congress and told her not to do it again.
“He told me he could not trust me because I had shared information related to our conversation. … I told him, ‘if you cannot trust me, then you can fire me,’ ” she said.
That is a very, very different story from what Kennedy told. One has her telling him she’s not trustworthy. The other has him telling her that, with her responding that he should fire her if he felt that way. Related as they may be, this is not the sort of thing that would cause a case of misremembering or confusion. One of them is lying.
So, why was she fired?
In addition, Kennedy claims that Monarez’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, in which she claimed that Kennedy fired her because she refused to rubber stamp the newly reconstituted ACIP panel’s recommendations for vaccination schedules without a review of the scientific evidence, was a lie.
Here again, you can hear this at the beginning of the following exchange with Senator Bernie Sanders.
It’s one thing to write something in an op-ed. It’s quite another when you’re testifying before Congress. Dr. Monarez was unequivocal in her description of her firing.
Monarez also said that on August 2, she learned from media reports that Kennedy had removed liaison members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP — an influential group of outside experts who advise the agency on vaccinations – essentially being blindsided by the news.
Then, “on the morning of August 25, Secretary Kennedy demanded two things of me that were inconsistent with my oath of office and the ethics required of a public official,” Monarez said. “He directed me to commit in advance to approving every ACIP recommendation regardless of the scientific evidence. He also directed me to dismiss career officials responsible for vaccine policy, without cause. He said if I was unwilling to do both, I should resign.”
Once again, we have a complete refutation of the claim that Kennedy made.
Now, I know who I trust between the two of these individuals. But my opinion doesn’t mean all that much here. This requires investigation. Senator Bill Cassidy in particular, who was both pivotal in Kennedy’s confirmation to HHS and who has more recently expressed skepticism and reservation about Kennedy’s actions at the agency, ought to be furious. If Kennedy is lying directly to all of their faces, including his own, one would think the mere concept of professional pride would drive Cassidy to want to get to the bottom of this.
As was the case with Kennedy, it is important to note that Monarez was not sworn in for her testimony. It’s also important to note that the lack of swearing in doesn’t mean that lying to Congress by either party is not a felony under the False Statements statute, Obstruction of Congress, and Contempt of Congress.
Somebody is lying to Congress here. And somebody, whoever that may be, should be held accountable for doing so.
We’ve all become entirely too familiar with ACIP, the CDC panel that discusses and recommends vaccination schedules across a wide swath of vaccines. The method by which ACIP became part of the general American lexicon traces all the way back to June, when RFK Jr., as head of HHS, fired every single member of the ACIP panel he inherited. All 17 of them. In their place he unilaterally appointed 8 new members, all or nearly all of whom were deridedimmediately by the medical community for being unqualified, anti-medicine, anti-science, and anti-vaxx. It was so bad that Bill Cassidy wanted ACIP to simply not conduct its first meeting, but that desire was ignored. And when they did meet, the discussion predictably veered into conspiracy theories.
The proper response to this would be a movement building to oust Kennedy from his post. A slightly less proper response would be for Kennedy to re-staff ACIP with people who know what the fuck they’re talking about.
But this is 2025, so what actually happened was for Kennedy to instead add five more unqualified, anti-vaxx folks to ACIP instead. Apparently the echo chamber had more seating capacity than Kennedy first realized.
Health secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has appointed five more people to the federal advisory committee that sets national vaccination recommendations. Like the existing members, the new appointees have questionable qualifications for being on the panel, and many have expressed anti-vaccine views.
Now, it’s one thing to state that these people espouse views not compatible with good medicine. It’s another thing to show your work in doing so, pointing out exactly what you mean by that. Kirk Milhoan is a pediatric cardiologist who contributed to a group that pushed COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and advocated for alternative treatments. Evelyn Griffin was a doctor in Louisiana who lost her job over the COVID vaccine mandate she refused to comply with. Hillary Blackburn is relatively unnotable, a pharmacist, though she happens to be related by marriage to Senator Marsh Blackburn. Raymond Pollak is “a semi-retired transplant surgeon,” which means he has fuck-all specialization in vaccines.
And then there’s Catherine Stein.
Catherine Stein, a professor at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University in the Department of Population & Quantitative Health. As Ars previously reported, Stein has advocated against vaccine mandates and wrote a 2021 article arguing that people should not be afraid of contracting COVID-19 because: “Our Lord has given us a mission to share the gospel. If we live in fear of death, that weakens our testimony. Remember, the Lord Jesus did not fear lepers, and leprosy was (and continues to be) a highly contagious infectious disease.”
Based on that 2021 article, I have to wonder why Stein thinks we should be practicing medicine at all. At the very least, I would hope we can agree that the last people we should want advising the nation on immunization practices are those advocating for any flavor of “Pray the sick away.” Yet, here we are.
ACIP is meeting in a few days. They’ll be discussing every vaccine schedule from MMR to Hep B to COVID-19. And it’s quite clear that the collective medical community is holding its breath and waiting to see what comes next.
Well, that was certainly a thing. We mentioned yesterday that RFK Jr. was scheduled to go before the Senate Finance committee to answer all kinds of questions as to just what in the holy hell is happening at HHS. As we said, this was always going to be a contentious hearing, given that the Democrat Senators are aligned, and in fact demanded his resignation before the hearing, while even GOP members such as Bill Cassidy have begun signaling wavering support for Kennedy.
But this wasn’t just contentious; it was a disaster. USA Today has one of many live update pages where you can go back and relive the timeline, but the topline summary is that Kennedy shouted over the Senators questions, often asked them questions instead of answering the questions he was asked, dissembled all over the place when asked direct and honest questions, and otherwise spouted conspiracy theories without a scintilla of evidence to back them up. And while it’s certainly true that questions from Democracts were done in a more hostile tone than those from the GOP, the open disdain, or at least concern, about Kennedy’s actions as of recent was entirely bipartisan.
I’ll give you some highlights, for lack of a better term, along with a summary of the key thing we learned in each highlight.
Mark Warner (D):
Kennedy claims neither he, nor anyone else, has any idea how many Americans died from COVID-19
Kennedy is unwilling to state that COVID vaccines did “anything” to prevent deaths from COVID-19
Kennedy was unaware of some specific implications of the latest budget bill on American healthcare
John Barrasso (R):
Barrasso points out all the chaos and failure that has happened under Kennedy, including the largest measles outbreak in decades.
Kennedy claims that CDC vaccine guidance has never before, in the history of the agency, been “clear, evidence based, and trustworthy.” He claims his leadership is the first time this will ever have happened.
This, by the way, is precisely how you get situations like unhinged people shooting up the CDC’s Atlanta campus. The CDC was born in 1946, initially to combat malaria. But, according to Kennedy, it has never in its entire history been trustworthy on the topic of vaccines. It’s a lie, of course, but those that believe it would logically be very, very pissed off.
Thom Tillis (R):
Tillis starts off by saying he’s going to make a statement and essentially begs Kennedy to not respond in the moment, but to go and gather his answers after the hearing and present them. Kennedy repeatedly attempts to answer those questions anyway.
Tillis points out that based on the myriad of conflicting statements Kennedy made within the hearing, he has no idea whether Kennedy thinks Operation Warp Speed was a good thing or not. On the one hand, Kennedy agrees with Tillis and others that Trump should be a Nobel prize for the government’s efforts in creating the mRNA vaccines. On the other, Kennedy claims the vaccines were deadly and can’t account for them being effective at all.
Tillis asks how a CDC Director can be lauded a month ago and fired four weeks later.
Tillis asks for evidence that Kennedy has kept any of the promises he’s made to Congress in the past.
Tillis points out that all he can get out of Kennedy’s HHS to a question about the economic impact of the budget bill that was passed amount to “word salad.”
Kennedy affirms his position that the COVID vaccines cause “serious harm” and “death”.
Folks, that’s as polite a way for a GOP Senator to state publicly that they don’t trust Kennedy as is possible.
Bernie Sanders (I):
This one takes a brief bit of preamble. When Senator Warren was questioning Kennedy about his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as Director of CDC, she asked Kennedy about Monarez’s public claim in a WSJ editorial that he demanded she sign off on what ACIP would recommend prior to them even meeting and insisted she fire a slew of senior staffers at CDC for who knows what reason. Kennedy told Warren that was not true and, when she asked what was the reason he fired her, got this in response.
That is obviously not a believable story. I mean, to make light of it, why would an untrustworthy person tell their boss they were not trustworthy instead of lying?
In any case, with that context, we move on to the takeaways from the back and forth with Bernie Sanders.
Kennedy reiterates his claim that Monarez lied about why she was fired and that, again, he did so because she told him she was not trustworthy.
Kennedy calls a net -$100 million investment in rural healthcare “the largest infusion of public money” into rural healthcare.
Kennedy affirms the COVID vaccines are the deadliest vaccines in history and that Trump should get a Nobel prize for helping develop them.
Kennedy launches into a conspiracy theory in which the largest NGOs and others that disagree with him have all been corrupted by the pharma industry.
Bill Cassidy (R):
Cassidy is the one many of us were waiting to see in this hearing, for multiple reasons. He’s a doctor, for instance. He was a pivotal vote in Kennedy’s confirmation hearings and extracted several promises about vaccines and policy during those hearings. And, finally, several other Republican Senators have pointed to him as the one they trust on healthcare and medicine issues.
Kennedy again affirms that Trump deserves a Nobel prize for Operation Warp Speed, despite saying those vaccines killed people. Cassidy then points out that Kennedy sued to limit access to COVID vaccines before his time in government.
Cassidy points out that the ACIP conflicts of interests data that Kennedy has claimed was wildly inaccurate. Kennedy attempts to argue the point, but fails.
Cassidy points out that several current ACIP members, which Kennedy hand-picked, serve as paid witnesses in vaccine injury trials and asks Kennedy if that is a conflict of interests. Kennedy responds it may be a bias, but not a financial conflict of interest, which makes zero sense.
Stick around for the end in which Cassidy shares some personal interactions he’s had with constituents demonstrating precisely how Kennedy’s policy actions have introduced a limitation of vaccine access and chaos and confusion among doctors as to what they can prescribe or not, which is exactly what we indicated would happen.
There was much, much more. More dissembling. More conspiracy theories. More lies. By any honest viewing of the hearing, it was a bipartisan verbal indication of no confidence in Kennedy, with some Senators choosing to be more polite about it than others. This was a more pointed and thorough takedown of Kennedy from both sides of the aisle than even I had hoped for.
So of course the White House is pretending this is all a partisan hitjob because Kennedy is so awesome.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Kennedy after he faced tense questioning by both Democratic and Republican senators.
The Health secretary “is taking flak because he’s over the target,” she said on X several hours after the hearing concluded. “The Trump Administration is addressing root causes of chronic disease, embracing transparency in government, and championing gold-standard science.”
Although she blamed Democrats for attacking “that commonsense effort,” Republican senators such as Cassidy and Barrasso had also expressed disapproval during the hearing with some of Kennedy’s most recent actions concerning vaccines.
As I said in a previous post, this is by no means the end of Kennedy’s tenure at HHS. But it just might be the beginning of that end. No amount of White House gaslighting is going to be able to counter rising illnesses, full hospitals, or explosive growth in the casket manufacturing business.
I’m starting to think that American is suffering from some sort of collective amnesia. Look, whatever your opinions on how the government handled the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in its early days, I would hope we can all agree that it sucked. Think the government was far too restrictive, or lacked nuance in how it put forth restrictions, regarding lockdowns and the like? Hey, you know what, me too to some extent. On the other hand, you know, over a million Americans have died from the pandemic, so we need to be really careful with discussions about how to handle it.
I don’t think it will surprise anyone when I say I am not a fan of Donald Trump. That being said, if you were to ask me what his signature accomplishment was during his first term, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that it was Operation Warp Speed, which helped to bring us the COVID vaccines. But for his second term, Trump put RFK Jr. in charge of American health, which is why this signature accomplishment is being reduced to an approval for the fall COVID vaccines under the tightest restrictions yet.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved updated COVID-19 shots for the fall season on Aug. 27, implementing the tightest restrictions on who can access the vaccines since they became available.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the approval on social media platform X, saying emergency use authorizations for COVID-19 vaccines have been terminated and that the Moderna, Pfizer and Novavax immunizations are approved for “those at high risk.”
Under the updated approvals, only those over the age of 65 and people with existing health problems will be recommended the COVID-19 vaccine, according to federal guidelines.
Kennedy went on in a separate post to reiterate that he’d promised that vaccines would be available to everyone who still wanted them. But as is typical from Kennedy, the claim he’s keeping that promise is steeped in bullshit. With this new FDA approval with the included restrictions, there’s a lot we don’t know:
Will insurance cover the vaccines outside of those approved for groups?
Will doctors be willing to even prescribe them, a necessity now, if they fall outside of those groups?
Will there be punishments as a result of not adhering strictly to the FDA approval guidelines?
Depending on the answers to those questions, there indeed might be a great many people who suddenly can’t get COVID shots even if they want them, either due to an unwillingness to prescribe them by doctors fearful of reprisal, or because they simple can’t afford them if insurance doesn’t cover the shots.
We will begin to lose whatever benefits we’ve gained against COVID through widespread vaccination. And, yes, it’s certainly true that vaccination rates have waned as the disease has evolved to be less serious and deadly for most people.
But there’s nothing to say that it can’t roar back with a vengeance.
Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase in the condition and vowed to gather “the most credible scientists from all over the world” to solve the mystery.
Nothing like that has ever been done before, he told an interviewer.
McCanlies was stunned. The work had been done.
“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing!” she said to her husband, Fred.
As an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which Kennedy oversees, McCanlies had spent much of the past two decades studying how parents’ exposure to workplace chemicals affects the chance that they will have a child with autism. Just three weeks earlier, she’d been finalizing her fourth major paper on the topic when Kennedy eliminated her entire division. Kennedy has also overseen tens of millions of dollars in cuts to federal funding for research on autism, including its environmental causes.
For 20 years, Kennedy has espoused the debunked theory that autism is caused by vaccines, dismissing evidence to the contrary by arguing that vaccine manufacturers, researchers and regulators all have an interest in obscuring their harms.
He remains skeptical of the scientists who have been funded by his own agency to study the neurodevelopmental condition. “We need to stop trusting the experts,” he told right-wing host Tucker Carlson in a June interview, going on to suggest that previous studies that found no relationship between vaccines and autism were marred by “trickery” and researchers’ self-interest.
In contrast, Kennedy told Carlson that under his leadership, and with a new, federally funded $50 million autism research initiative, “We’re going to get real studies done for the first time.”
Some autism researchers fear that the effort will manipulate data to blame the condition on vaccines. “Kennedy has never expressed an open mind, an open attitude towards what are the fundamental causes of autism,” said Helen Tager-Flusberg, a Boston University psychologist who founded a coalition of scientists concerned about his approach to autism. In a June statement, the group said the initiative lacks transparency and that Kennedy “casually ignores decades of high quality research that preceded his oversight.”
As Kennedy promotes his new initiative, ProPublica has found that he has also taken aim at the traditional scientific approach to autism, shutting down McCanlies’ lab and stripping funding from more than 50 autism-related studies. Meanwhile, he has stood by as the Trump administration encourages the departure of hundreds of federal employees with experience studying the harm caused by environmental threats and rolls back protections from pollution and chemicals, including some linked to autism.
Kennedy did not respond to requests for an interview, and an HHS spokesperson did not answer specific questions from ProPublica, including those related to the concerns of the coalition of autism scientists. “Under the leadership of Secretary Kennedy, HHS is taking action on autism as the public health emergency it is,” the spokesperson wrote. “NIH is fully committed to leaving no stone unturned in confronting this catastrophic epidemic — employing only gold-standard, evidence-based science. The Department will follow the science, wherever it leads.”
Genetic factors account for a significant portion of autism cases. Research like the kind McCanlies and other government-funded scientists have conducted over the past two decades has established that environmental factors have a role, too, and can combine with genetics. Multiple factors can even converge within the same individual. Some of those environmental risks could be reduced by the very measures the Trump administration is rolling back.
Kennedy would have been well positioned to advocate for researchers looking into the environmental causes of autism while sitting on President Donald Trump’s cabinet.
The nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of his former attorney general, Bobby, Kennedy spent decades as an attorney battling some of the world’s most notorious corporate polluters. Once heralded by Time Magazine as one of the “heroes for the planet,” he railed against actions by the first Trump administration, complaining in his 2017 introduction to the book “Climate in Crisis” that 33 years’ worth of his work was “reduced to ruins as the president mounted his assault on science and environmental protection.”
But recently he has remained publicly silent as the Environmental Protection Agency halts research and weakens regulations on air pollution and chemicals, including some McCanlies and her colleagues have identified as possible factors in the development of autism.
“I don’t think he’s aware of my work,” McCanlies said, “or most of the literature that’s been published on what the causes of autism are.”
McCanlies was studying how a toxic chemical, beryllium, causes chronic lung inflammation in workers when she began to think seriously about autism.
It was 2005, and her college-age stepson had a job shadowing children with autism. As he described helping them navigate playground dynamics, reminding them to return a wave or a greeting, McCanlies wondered whether their behaviors might be tied to chemicals their parents had encountered on the job. Could the exposures have altered genes their parents passed down? Could they have infiltrated the kids’ developing brains through the womb or through breast milk?
The questions remained abstract until McCanlies met another researcher named Irva Hertz-Picciotto, who had a unique data set. She had collected detailed information on the occupations of two large groups of parents: those who had children with autism and those whose kids developed neurotypically. Comparing the groups’ chemical exposures before their children were born could help illuminate causes of the condition, McCanlies realized.
Hertz-Picciotto, an environmental epidemiologist based at the University of California, Davis, was a pioneer in the search for the causes of autism. In 2009, she published a much-cited paper highlighting a sevenfold increase in diagnoses in California. While others had asserted the rise was due to increased awareness and broadened diagnostic criteria, Hertz-Picciotto found those factors could only partially explain it. She and others went on to document additional contributors to autism risk, including parental age at the time of birth, a mother’s fever during pregnancy and more traditional environmental considerations, such as chemical exposures.
McCanlies hadn’t studied autism. But she offered Hertz-Picciotto her experience in genetics and epidemiology as well as the considerable resources of her agency. NIOSH was established in 1970 to investigate the dangers of the workplace, and its statisticians and industrial hygienists were among the world’s experts on the health impacts of chemical exposures.
Their first collaboration, published in 2012, used Hertz-Picciotto’s data to see if parents of children with autism were more likely to have been exposed to chemicals already thought to be dangerous to the developing brain. The work was technical and time-consuming, but the analysis showed a clear relationship: Mothers and fathers of children with autism were more likely than the parents of unaffected children to have been exposed to solvents such as lacquer, varnish and xylene on the job. These solvents evaporate quickly and can be easily inhaled or absorbed through the skin. Chemical plant workers, painters, electricians, plumbers, construction workers, cleaners and medical personnel are among those who may be exposed to these solvents.
The sample size was small — just 174 families. But the results lined up with recent findings showing possible links between autism and exposure to metals and certain solvents during pregnancy or early childhood, including a solvent called methylene chloride. They also tracked with studies linking the chemicals to miscarriage, reproductive problems, birth defects and developmental problems other than autism.
McCanlies and Hertz-Picciotto followed up with a 2019 study that looked at more than 950 families. It showed that women exposed to solvents at work during pregnancy and the three months leading up to it were 1.5 times more likely to have a child with autism than women not exposed to the chemicals. (The study did not find a link for chemically exposed men.)
Their third study, published in 2023, took the link between solvent exposure and autism as a starting point. Using blood samples to examine the genetic makeup of the parents of children with autism, McCanlies and Hertz-Picciotto found that when exposed to solvents on the job, people with specific variants of 31 genes had an especially elevated risk of having a child with autism. Their genetic makeup appeared to increase the risk that solvents by themselves posed. Some of those 31 genes help cells connect with one another; others play a role in helping cells migrate to different areas so they can grow into the various parts of the brain; still others ensure that cells clear away toxic substances.
Researchers were also making strides under the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a division of Health and Human Services, which has financed investigations into dozens of environmental contaminants. Several have been linked to autism, including air pollution, certainpesticides, a plastic additive known as BPA and diesel exhaust, which causes “autism-like behavioral changes” in mice. In 2021, Hertz-Picciotto co-published a study linking “forever chemicals” called PFOA and PFNA with the condition. (In 2023, a second paper also found an association with PFNA.) Other government-funded research has established a link between autism and another solvent, trichloroethylene, also known as TCE, which has been used for dry cleaning, manufacturing and degreasing machines.
Together, the results have shown that many exposures can increase the likelihood of autism, and that there can be multiple causes for any one person.
At least one exposure can have the opposite effect: A study by a researcher named Rebecca Schmidt — and funded by the NIEHS and NIH — found that a B vitamin called folic acid was associated with a significant decrease in the chances of an autism diagnosis. More than a dozen studies have since confirmed the association.
One problem hung over much of autism research. The sweeping diagnosis includes everyone from people who treasure their neurological differences to those with debilitating symptoms, including repetitive behaviors, excruciating sensitivity to touch and sounds, and difficulty responding to social situations. McCanlies and Hertz–Picciotto wondered whether certain chemicals were linked to the most severe cases or to specific symptoms.
In 2023, they set about finding out.
They were preparing to submit their study for publication when newly inaugurated Trump put Kennedy in charge of America’s health.
Despite having made chronic health conditions the focus of his agenda, Kennedy has quietly abided environmental policies that will exacerbate these problems, including autism.
The Environmental Protection Agency, under Administrator Lee Zeldin, is rolling back rules and regulations that will result in an increase in air pollution, which multiplestudies have linked toautism. The agency is in the process of reversing bans on several chemicals, including TCE, one of the solvents associated with the disorder, and has told a federal court it won’t legally defend certain aspects of a ban on methylene chloride, another of the solvents linked to autism. It also began dismantling its Office of Research and Development, which has funded research into the environmental conditionscontributing to autism. According to an EPA spokesperson, more than 2,300 workers have so far elected to leave the agency through Trump administration programs encouraging early retirement and resignation.
The EPA also began canceling grants, including one it had given to Schmidt, the researcher who studied the protective effect of folic acid. Schmidt had been awarded $1.3 million to determine whether air pollution from wildfires might increase the risk of various neurological conditions. Schmidt and her colleagues had just done preliminary analysis and found that there was a significant association between wildfire pollution exposure and autism when she received a letter saying that the grant was terminated because the project was “no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.” After a judge ruled in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of University of California researchers alleging their funding was unlawfully terminated, her grant was reinstated last month. But the EPA has appealed the judge’s ruling, leaving Schmidt unsure about the fate of the project.
Schmidt said there is an urgent need to finish the study and warn people about how to avoid the dangers from wildfire smoke by staying indoors and using air filters and N95 masks. “Millions of pregnant women are getting exposed as we speak,” she said.
Meanwhile, Kennedy has presided over his own gutting of research. Known for sharing videos of his bare-chested workouts, he likened his agency’s cuts to getting rid of “unhealthy fat,” but his plan to reduce the staff of HHS by 20,000 amounts to slashing the workforce by roughly a quarter, including veteran scientists. Among the divisions Kennedy eliminated was one that studied air quality and collected data on chemicals found in human blood. Some workers in the division were subsequently reinstated. After a lawsuit and pressure from Congress, HHS has also rehired some NIOSH workers, though none at the division where McCanlies worked. Those whose jobs have not been reinstated remain on administrative leave.
The reorganization plan for HHS involves consolidating the remnants of these parts of the agency, along with several others, into a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America. Asked about the transition, an HHS spokesperson told ProPublica in an email that the reorganization would save taxpayers $1.8 billion a year and that “critical programs will continue.”
Meanwhile, a ProPublica review of federal data found that more than $40 million in grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health for dozens of autism-related research projects were canceled under Kennedy’s watch. Some had been awarded to universities the administration is now targeting, while others ran afoul of Trump’s “anti-woke” priorities by mentioning gender and other verboten terms. Among them was a grant to Harvard University to use data on nearly half a million Israeli children to evaluate whether men’s exposure to air pollution affects the risk of having a child with autism. (A small number of grants have been recently reinstated.) A survey of researchers conducted by the Autism Science Foundation, which tallied cuts to training grants and the anticipated cuts to future grants over the next few years, estimated that the total loss of funding could be tens of millions more.
“We’re talking about probably decades of delays and setbacks,” said Alycia Halladay, chief science officer at the Autism Science Foundation. “To take money away from all these areas of need to focus on a question that the HHS director considers high priority seems not scientific and not the way that science is done.”
Housed under the National Institutes of Health, Kennedy’s new $50-million Autism Data Science Initiative is looking to fund two- to three-year research projects that plumb large public and private datasets to find “possible contributors to the causes of autism” as well as conduct research on existing treatments.
With the deadline for his promised discovery fast approaching, Kennedy recently acknowledged that his initial six-month timeline was overly optimistic. He told Carlson he should have “some initial indicator answers” about the causes of autism by September, his original deadline, and promised unqualified answers within another six months.
While the NIH typically releases the names of the scientists on the committees that review grant applications and the criteria they use to review them, it has not done so in this case. Nor has the agency clarified what role NIH staff will have in awarding the grants, who will make the final selection, or what terms and conditions researchers must agree to if they receive funds. HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about who will make the final grant selection and why the agency has not yet made this information public, but a video NIH created for applicants of the funding acknowledges that reviews of the proposals “do not follow the traditional NIH review process.” According to the video, the process was “designed to ensure integrity, fairness and transparency.”
Hertz-Picciotto, who laments the fact that Kennedy is “shutting down good studies,” is among the researchers in her field who have decided to apply for the funding. “Some of his agenda is really ridiculous and very counterproductive,” she said. “But if something good can be done with this money, I’d like to be part of that.”
If her project is approved, she plans to hire McCanlies to consult on it.
McCanlies said she agreed to work on the project because she has complete confidence in her longtime colleague, if not the health secretary. “I don’t trust him at all,” she said.
McCanlies had never paid much attention to Kennedy — or to politics. Throughout the seven presidential administrations that governed while she had been at NIOSH, her work had been utterly uncontroversial. But weeks after his confirmation, she knew her job was in peril. She had deleted the first email she received from Trump’s Office of Personnel Management. The tone was so strange and disrespectful, hinting that she might be punished if she didn’t respond by confirming her email address, that she assumed it was a phishing attempt. By the time she received a second, suggesting that she find a “higher productivity” job in the private sector, firings and budget cuts were rolling across federal agencies.
The 58-year-old, who has short, greying hair, hazel eyes and three graduate degrees, hadn’t been ready to leave NIOSH’s Health Effects Lab in Morgantown, West Virginia, a place where she had mentored young colleagues, taught a lunchtime meditation class and helped conduct several yearslong research projects. The lab is also where she met Fred, her husband, another Ph.D. scientist who studied workplace chemical hazards. She reluctantly put in for early retirement just days before the entire lab was dissolved.
McCanlies spent her final days at NIOSH finishing her last paper, which explores the association between workplace chemicals and the severity of autism. Normally, she would have her supervisor sign off on her submission to a journal, but he had already lost his job. The rest of her colleagues were gone, too, and the lab’s hallways were empty as she gave the manuscript a final edit.
She felt proud of the study, which answered some of the questions she and Hertz-Picciotto had posed years ago. There were indeed links between exposures and the severity of autism. Parents’ exposure to plastics was “consistently and significantly associated” with lower cognitive scores in their children who had autism, increases in “aberrant behaviors” and deficits in basic life skills, the study found. The exposure was also linked to particular symptoms of autism, including social withdrawal, hyperactivity and repetitive behaviors such as hand flapping and body rocking. Higher autism severity scores and weaker daily living skills were also linked with ethylene oxide. Last year, the EPA imposed stricter limits on the chemical, which is used as a sterilizer. But the agency is now reconsidering those restrictions, and, in July, Trump exempted some of the biggest polluters from them.
The paper, which is now available as a preprint, recommended that regulatory agencies “consider increasing awareness of these hazards and make clear recommendations for implementing protective measures at the worksite.”
Having just watched so many occupational health experts forced to leave their jobs, McCanlies suspected their advice was unlikely to be heeded anytime soon.
As you will recall, a single gunmen opened fire on a CDC campus in Atlanta earlier this month, claiming to have been injured by COVID vaccines. The rhetoric he had used prior to the shooting closely aligned with what RFK Jr. had been spouting for years. While Kennedy took nearly a day to even publicly comment on the shooting, more local CDC leadership was fielding questions from the Atlanta team that amounted to how the organization was going to ensure that misinformation stopped flowing from Kennedy’s mouth such that they had become targets for this gunman in the first place. They got their answer when Kennedy commented publicly the next week, reiterating all that same rhetoric that caused them to be targeted.
It’s perhaps not surprising then that hundreds of CDC staff signed an open letter essentially begging Kennedy to stop putting them in potential crosshairs.
More than 750 employees across the Department of Health and Human Services sent a signed letter to members of Congress and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday morning, calling on the secretary to stop spreading misinformation.
The letter states the deadly shooting that occurred at the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Aug. 8 was “not random” and was driven by “politicized rhetoric.”
The signatories are accusing Kennedy of endangering the lives of HHS employees by spreading misinformation.
It’s a cry for help coming from within the organization that Kennedy is responsible for. These are people worried that their lives are being put at risk by Kennedy and his ilk, all due to the irresponsible claims he’s made for years, and continues to make to this day.
But if you were expecting empathy from the leadership of HHS, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Instead of that empathy, a statement from HHS apparently accuses signatories to that letter of “politicizing” the mass shooting that targeted them.
In a statement to ABC News, HHS said, “Secretary Kennedy is standing firmly with CDC employees — both on the ground and across every center — ensuring their safety and well-being remain a top priority. In the wake of this heartbreaking shooting, he traveled to Atlanta to offer his support and reaffirm his deep respect, calling the CDC ‘a shining star among global health agencies.'”
“For the first time in its 70-year history, the mission of HHS is truly resonating with the American people — driven by President Trump and Secretary Kennedy’s bold commitment to Make America Healthy Again,” the statement continued. “Any attempt to conflate widely supported public health reforms with the violence of a suicidal mass shooter is an attempt to politicize a tragedy.”
This is bullshit. CDC staff are not politicizing the shooting; they’re begging to not be made targets. That statement is so far afield from the actual request in the letter that I don’t even know how to respond to it, other than to say that it’s quite obvious Kennedy is refusing to moderate or alter his rhetoric. Conspiracy theories appear to be more important to him than the lives of those under his employ.
This is governmental malpractice. It needs to stop. It won’t stop unless someone in a position of power does something about it.
If you’re tired of Techdirt posts about RFK Jr.’s inability to competently lead HHS, I’m tired of him leading that organization, so too bad. The problem is that RFK Jr. represents something of a national health emergency, one that is multi-faceted. The most obvious bucket of fuckery in which he is operating is, of course, when it comes to vaccines, as Kennedy has been a anti-vaxxer for decades now. You should recall that Kennedy fired every member of ACIP, the immunization advisory panel at the CDC, only to appoint a cadre of anti-vaxxers and those otherwise aligned with his views on healthcare. This new version of ACIP predictably changed stances on all kinds of vaccines, especially mRNA vaccines for COVID. Not long after, Kennedy personally pulled federal funding for mRNA vaccines over the objections of all kinds of doctors and scientists.
As all of this was going on, at least one state began crafting legislation to bypass the CDC’s recommendations on vaccines and look instead for guidance from NGOs, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The AAP had itself begun boycotting ACIP working sessions and vocally disagreeing with Kennedy on several healthcare issues, including vaccines. The problem, of course, is that the health insurance industry has largely looked to ACIP recommendations to determine what insurance will cover and what it won’t.
Well, AAP has just come out with its own vaccine schedule recommendations, differing greatly from the CDC’s, and has reportedly been working directly with insurance providers to push them to provide coverage.
The AAP’s vaccine schedule diverges from the CDC schedule under Kennedy on the recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines. After Kennedy’s unilateral change, the CDC no longer recommends routine COVID-19 vaccination for healthy children, but allows for the shots after a conversation with a child’s doctor. In contrast, the AAP—the largest pediatrics association in the country—recommends the shots for all children ages 6 months to 23 months, as well as high-risk children ages 2 to 18. Children not in these age or risk groups should also have access to the shots if desired, the AAP guidance says.
As the Ars post notes, school is starting and COVID infections are on the rise. Winter is coming, to borrow a phrase, and with it, other respiratory viruses. While insurance companies must cover vaccination schedules approved by the CDC, they are under no such obligation when it comes to AAP recommendations. Sean O’Leary of the AAP, however, has indicated that the insurance companies seem to be leaning toward accepting AAP’s recommendations and will provide coverage.
O’Leary told The Washington Post that insurers are “signaling that they are committed to covering our recommendations.” The Post also noted that AHIP, the major insurance lobby, released a statement in June saying its members are committed to “ongoing coverage of vaccines to ensure access and affordability for this respiratory virus season.”
Now, whether this is the insurance industry deciding to do the right thing on a rare occasion, or the companies have simply done the math that the vaccinations will cost less than covering the hospital visits for a truckload of unvaccinated children, is a matter ripe for debate. But it’s a good thing, nonetheless.
Kennedy responded in a post on social platform X, calling the group’s recommendations “corporate friendly” because the AAP receives donations to its Friends of Children Fund from vaccine companies like Pfizer and Moderna, among others.
The philanthropic fund backs projects supporting child health and equity.
The HHS secretary said the organization should disclose “its corporate entanglements … so that Americans may ask whether the AAP’s recommendations reflect public health interest, or are, perhaps, just a pay-to-play scheme to promote commercial ambitions of AAP’s Big Pharma benefactors.”
AAP is very transparent about its funding, including its corporate partnerships. They have a whole page for it on their website. And, yes, of course there are pharma companies that sponsor via their philanthropic funds. But unless Kennedy wants to allege any specific tie between that funding and AAP recommendations, this is all just conspiracy-mongering in response to a differing view.
And it’s pretty damned rich for Kennedy to prattle on about corporate entanglements when his drafted MAHA report for childhood healthcare managed to dodge all of Kennedy’s hobbyhorses if they would in any way effect industry.
Kennedy claimed long ago that he had no intention of taking vaccines away from anyone. It’s so strange to see him so angry that he isn’t able to take vaccines away from children.
