Bill Cassidy: Unaccountable & Tone Deaf On RFK Jr.

Failures

from the fingers-and-no-thumbs dept

It appears Bill Cassidy is going to make every effort to ignore his own culpability for RFK Jr. on his way out the door. In case you need to be reminded, Cassidy was a key, if not deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. to his current role as Secretary of HHS. Cassidy’s background is as an MD and many of his GOP colleagues reportedly looked to his vote as to whether to support Kennedy’s nomination, despite Kennedy being perhaps the loudest evangelist for anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories on the planet. He voted to confirm Kennedy, leading several others to follow suit. It’s probably not inaccurate to say that Kennedy has his position because Cassidy voted for him.

Despite his attempts to lick Trump’s boots so clean that he could perform surgery with them, Cassidy lost his primary because his love for Trump went unrequited. In the immediate aftermath of that loss, Cassidy rediscovered his own backbone and flipped his vote from no to yes on the war powers resolution that went before the Senate. While that was bad enough for Cassidy to get a big ol’ middle finger from me, listening to him now try to poke a finger in Kennedy’s eye is a bridge too far.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) directly blamed Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for a resurgence in vaccine-preventable illnesses Thursday.

On the social media platform X, Cassidy shared a New York Times article reporting on hospitals seeing a resurgence in vaccine-preventable illnesses, with doctors telling the outlet they’re frequently seeing illnesses they used to rarely encounter.

“A terrible outcome from RFK and others promoting vaccine skepticism,” wrote Cassidy.

This has to be one of the most tone-deaf things a sitting senator has ever uttered. And for several reasons. Chief among them is that Cassidy is the one who helped promote vaccine skepticism by literally promoting a brain-addled anti-vaxxer into a cabinet position in charge of Americans’ health. To crow about the consequences of the very HHS administration Cassidy helped to put in place is befuddling in the extreme. Cassidy has ownership of this, whether he wants to admit it or not.

And, again, Cassidy had every opportunity to try to do something to correct his own mistake before he fumbled his incumbency so badly. There were impeachment efforts around Kennedy that he could have helped bolster. He could have crafted legislation to try to mitigate Kennedy’s worst actions in his role. He could have done literally anything other than complain publicly that Kennedy lied to him during his confirmation hearings and then just leaving it at that.

Cassidy has a few months left in office and then he will disappear into the vapor. If he wants to do something, then he should do something. This very much isn’t that and the fact that it’s coming in the wake of his no longer having any stakes in electoral politics is pathetic.

Filed Under: bill cassidy, health & human services, rfk jr., vaccines

Trump Attempts To EO America Into Mimicking Denmark’s Vaccination Schedules

Failures

from the america-isn't-denmark dept

Back in January of this year, RFK Jr. clearly strong armed the CDC into changing the childhood vaccination schedules in America to mimic those of Denmark. The public messaging was crafted to sound as reasonable as possible and amounted to a claim that America was going to revise vaccination schedules to match those of another successful, industrialized, peer country. There were a couple of problems with the move.

For starters, Kennedy did his usual move of trying to make this change completely outside of the normal process for such things. There was no indication that any of this was done at the behest of his reformed ACIP panel. It didn’t go through the normal scientific checks and balances. And even if it had, the courts later put a stay on all such changes, because Kennedy didn’t follow the American Procedure Act in either those revised schedules or even the formation of ACIP itself. The Trump administration has appealed that decision.

The other main issue with the change was the obvious one: America is not Denmark. Calling Denmark a peer nation to America is laughable for many reasons. As one Danish official pointed out at the time: Denmark has a homogeneous population, universal free healthcare, lower serious outcomes from infectious diseases that they don’t vaccinate for, and a population that actually largely trusts government institutions. America doesn’t have any of that, in large part because the party of Trump doesn’t want us to have it.

Donald Trump doesn’t know how to take an “L”, though, so of course he simply picked up a pen recently and is attempting to executive order his way to trying to change those same vaccination schedules.

While the federal government is appealing that injunction, the new executive order on Friday reaffirms Kennedy’s plans to adopt Denmark’s strategy, calling for “realigning” US vaccine policy with “best practices from peer, developed countries.”It states that the scientific assessment written by Høeg and Kulldorff is a “guiding resource for the Federal Government” and that the CDC shall ” take any appropriate steps to update the United States childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule.”

As before, the AMA is strongly against the unilateral change made without backing from scientific evidence.

“Altering [the vaccine schedule] without clear, evidence-based justification risks continued confusion for parents and patients, undermining trust in vaccines, and ultimately lowering vaccination rates,” Mukkamala said. “That would put more children and communities at risk of preventable illness.”

The American Medical Association (AMA) wasn’t the only one to come out against this top-down edict. The American College of Physicians (ACP) likewise pushed back on the EO publicly, stating unequivocally that it must not be implemented or there would be severe negative health outcomes for American children.

As did, hilariously, scientists in Denmark itself.

Anders Hviid, who leads research on vaccine safety and effectiveness at the Statens Serum Institut, Denmark’s equivalent of the CDC, told The New York Times in December that it did not make sense to compare the US to Denmark. “It’s not at all fair to say look at Denmark unless you can match the other characteristics of Denmark,” he said.

Hviid also told the Times that the US public health policies under Kennedy “get crazier and crazier” by the month. “It is surreal, and it is difficult, from a Danish perspective, to understand what’s going on.”

Trust me, dear Anders, it’s difficult to understand from within the American borders, too.

Now, neither Trump nor Kennedy give a flying damn about Denmark, of course. That much is obvious to anyone with a working frontal cortex. The country’s vaccination schedules are merely being used as a prop to reduce the vaccination schedules for American children because that’s all Kennedy really wants. Over the objections, it turns out, of Danish scientists themselves.

I’m sure the AMA, ACP, or the American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP) will be filing lawsuits over this Executive Order. And I see no reason why the courts shouldn’t put a hold on its implementation, as it did to Kennedy.

But the real mystery is why the do-nothings in Congress just can’t be bothered to push back directly on all of this.

Filed Under: acip, cdc, denmark, donald trump, health & human services, rfk jr., vaccine schedules, vaccines

Study: RFK Jr., Joe Rogan’s Misinformation Campaigns Led To A 38% Increase In Vitamin A Poisoning Last Year

Failures

from the real-consequences dept

Early last year, when America’s measles outbreaks were still being counted in three-digit numbers, we talked about how RFK Jr. and his misinformation campaign were making things worse. A lot of focus has been on Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer views, and for good reason. If people would just get the MMR vaccine, and had done so in the last couple of decades while Kennedy has been on his anti-vaxxer crusade, none of this would have happened. We eliminated this disease more than two decades ago. It’s back because of vaccine skepticism and Kennedy, now Secretary of HHS, is perhaps more responsible for that skepticism than any other human being on the planet.

But his misinformation campaign didn’t focus solely on attempts at discrediting a good, effective vaccine against measles. He also spouted bullshit when it came to treatments for the disease. One such example was him touting, in March of last year, a combination of Vitamin A and cod liver oil as treatments for measles. It’s not the first time Kennedy advocated for this, either. He’s been at it since the beginning of the outbreak, and even before. In the wake of his public advocacy for those treatments, others picked up the story and ran with it, notably podcast-bruh Joe Rogan.

The result? According to one study, a massive uptick in Vitamin A poisoning.

The researchers detected two fascinating (albeit alarming) surges in interest. The first occurred in the wake of a March 4, 2025, Fox News interview with Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. During the interview, the infamous anti-vaxxer touted cod liver oil supplements and vitamin A as viable treatments for measles. A second series of spikes surrounded two late March podcast appearances by certified physician and noted vaccine skeptic Suzanne Humphries, who promoted the same two questionable remedies. Neither of Humphries’ interviews involved a government official, but one did occur on the chart-topping podcast of Joe Rogan.

“Between January [1] and March [31,] 2025, America’s Poison Centers reported a 38.7% increase in vitamin A exposures,” the new study noted, citing data published by the poison center about 12 days after Humphries’ appearance on Rogan.

Now, the Harvard study focused strongly on the correlation between media mentions of Vitamin A, online searches from the public indicating interest in such treatments, and the uptick in those diagnoses of Vitamin A poisoning. But, frankly, that misses much of the point. It’s been the public advocates like Kennedy who have fueled this fire, leading other charlatans to get spots on media outlets such as Rogan’s, where they get to further disseminate all of this terrible advice. The fish stinks from the head down and, right now, the head of American health is Kennedy.

The study’s authors did at least make mention of how this is all made worse by having untrustworthy clowns in charge of American healthcare, though not by name.

“Our findings underscore media’s influence on health-seeking behavior during public health emergencies like the measles outbreak,” the researchers noted, “which is particularly concerning when guidance from trusted sources is unclear and may encourage detrimental behaviors.”

We’re on pace to break last year’s measles case count by a long shot and it’s exactly because of misinformation peddlers like Kennedy and cavalier media like Rogan’s podcast being willing to signal boost it all that we’re in this mess.

As of this writing, America has had about 86% of the number of confirmed cases of measles this year as we had last year… and we’re only at the midway point of the year. Infectious diseases don’t spread linearly. They typically spread exponentially, which is exactly what happened last year. The public being actively misinformed, on purpose, is why.

Filed Under: health & human services, joe rogan, rfk jr., vaccines, vitamin a

Rubio, State Dept. Step In To Restore Funding For International Vaccines Amid Ebola Outbreak

Failures

from the about-face dept

While we’ve focused a great deal on RFK Jr.’s war on vaccines in America, it’s worth remembering that his ambitions for making people sicker extend beyond the American border. We’ve already discussed Kennedy’s 2019 trip to Samoa, where he used the unfortunate accidental mixing of vaccine doses with muscle relaxers that killed two young children, about which he appears to have lied to Congress during his confirmation hearing. Once in office, roughly a year ago, Kennedy also decided to pull all funding from Gavi, an international public/private partnership to get vaccines to underserved nations, claiming that there would be no American funding because it “ignored vaccine safety”. He followed that up in April of this year by withholding hundreds of millions of dollars that Congress had appropriated for international vaccination programs for the same reason.

Kennedy says the children are getting obsolete shots with dangerous ingredients that the U.S. has long since phased out. He is holding up $600 million Congress appropriated for the vaccines to pressure the international humanitarian group, Gavi, that distributes them.

“Gavi has refused to provide the United States with the specific data, studies, or detailed accounting of how U.S. funds are used,” Emily Hilliard, senior press secretary at the Health and Human Services Department, said in a statement to POLITICO.

That’s an excuse, of course. Kennedy doesn’t like vaccines, so he’s keeping poor people around the world from getting them. It’s as simple as that. Why he’s been allowed to veto the powers of the purse in Congress as the Secretary of HHS is a question that can be answered by pointing and laughing at our feckless Congress, but the result is the poorest human beings in the world being less protected from dangerous, infectious diseases.

It’s easy to be anti-vax when you aren’t confronted with the realities of these diseases. When, however, you get a vicious outbreak of a new strain of Ebola in Africa, and you start seeing pictures and hearing stories about the rashes, the uncontrollable bleeding, the piercing stomach pain, and the fountains of waste leaking out of people, well, that seems to have a way of clarifying the mind.

I can’t think of a better explanation as to why Marco Rubio informed Congress recently that the State Dept. was going to get involved to get us back to funding Gavi to combat this and other diseases.

U.S. Secretary of ​State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that the U.S. would re-engage with the global vaccine alliance Gavi amid the Ebola outbreak ‌in several African countries. Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the decision had been made a few weeks ago to re-engage, after the Trump administration pulled funding from Gavi last year.

Rubio said that Secretary Kennedy had taken a leading role in determining what was going to happen next with Gavi, but the State Department would now re-engage because “we need to drive this to an outcome”.

“The State Department a few weeks ago made the decision that we were going to re-engage on this issue of Gavi, respecting what ​HHS’ (Department of Health and Human Services) views are on it as well,” Rubio said. “We’d like to get this issue resolved in an outcome that’s ​acceptable both to Congress and also to our goals on global health.”

Rubio can massage the messaging on this all he likes, but it’s plain what is going on here. Craven as he may be in this current time, Rubio also isn’t an idiot. He damn well knows that outbreaks of infectious diseases, particularly those as horrifying as Ebola, will eventually impact his State Department and the homeland. This is him figuring out how to get an actual adult in the room to counteract Kennedy’s obstinate insanity.

And given that we don’t really know yet just how bad this Ebola outbreak is, it’s understandable that Gavi is sighing in relief at this news.

Gavi’s chief executive Sania Nishtar said she was “very encouraged” by Rubio’s remarks.

“Unlocking the funds that Congress has appropriated to Gavi would enable us to keep the world safe from infectious disease threats,” she said in a statement. Gavi’s work on Bundibugyo underlined the importance of this work, she said.

Between the courts and the Trump administration itself, there has been a great deal of blocking, tamping down, and walking back RFK Jr.’s activities.

So why not just get rid of him?

Filed Under: ebola, health & human services, marco rubio, rfk jr., state department, vaccines
Companies: gavi

Out Of Control RFK Jr. Fires Leaders Of Preventative Services Task Force

Failures

from the brain-drain dept

Alright, this is getting dire. In addition to all of the anti-vaxxer bullshit that has infected HHS thanks to RFK Jr.’s appointment to run the department, we have also made the point recently that an equally big problem is the talent drain occurring at HHS as well. Between the voluntary exits by smart people who don’t want to be part of something this stupid and the scores of smart people who have been fired by Kennedy and his hand-picked goon squad, HHS and its child agencies have significantly less talent within them today than they did a year and a half ago. And I haven’t even mentioned yet that we don’t currently have Senate-confirmed heads of the FDA, the CDC, or a Surgeon General. What’s the point of these positions if they mean so little that the Trump administration isn’t going to bother to fill them?

But Kennedy isn’t done, yet. Just recently, he fired the leadership of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a volunteer group that works with government to mandate what preventative care procedures are approved such that insurance services have to cover them without copay.

In letters dated May 11, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. notified the two doctors who chaired the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that he was terminating their appointments immediately, before the end of their multiyear terms.

The Department of Health and Human Services already had largely sidelined the task force, indefinitely postponing scheduled public meetings over the past year and thus leaving some long-expected updates on cervical cancer screenings and other topics in limbo.

Kennedy didn’t inform Drs. John Wong and Esa Davis as to why their positions were being terminated in his letter. But he did go before Congress recently and talked about wanting to reform the task force because he considered their approach and work lazy and not transparent enough. We’ve heard Kennedy make these noises about transparency in the past and we know that they are bullshit. He is almost certainly instead looking merely to install sycophants that will do whatever his bidding happens to be. Particularly as it appears that the task force was prevented from publishing some of its work.

Some health advocates had worried that Kennedy was preparing to replace the expert panel with less experienced political appointees, like he had done with a critical vaccine advisory committee. Over the past year, the task force wasn’t allowed to publish its final update to the cervical cancer screening guideline or take steps to update recommendations about maternal depression, said former task force chairman Dr. Michael Silverstein, a pediatrician.

“This is a level of government intrusion into scientific processes that I’ve not experienced in my 10 years on the task force,” he said.

What chaos comes out of this move remains to be seen, though there can be no doubt that chaos is on the menu. There are treatments out there that could benefit from approval from the task force, but insurance won’t cover them without that approval. We’re talking about screenings for cancer and other dangerous afflictions. Kennedy could also install people who will approve whatever crazy whim he comes up with next. Perhaps insurance will have to cover snorting cocaine off of toilets while supervised by a doctor.

You may laugh at that, but look around you. Does it really sound that crazy with all that has gone on at HHS the past 18 months?

Filed Under: esa davis, health, health & human services, john wong, preventive services task force, rfk jr.

The FDA Takes Its Turn Burying Studies Showing The Safety Of COVID, Shingles Vaccines

Failures

from the government-by-ostrich dept

The fuckery that is going on across HHS and vaccine programs is just plain incredible. As the Trump administration continues to provide whatever cover it can so that RFK Jr. can wreck shop on the health of Americans, the damage Kennedy is doing to our inoculation programs is going to take years, if not decades, to unwind. Led by a man who doesn’t believe in the foundational theory of modern medicine, America’s health agencies have begun to engage in direct misinformation campaigns via the censorship of real scientific information. Warnings about bogus autism treatments were removed from FDA websites. The CDC buried a report demonstrating how effective COVID vaccines are under dubious justifications.

And now it seems that it’s the FDA’s turn to likewise hide studies about the safety of COVID and shingles vaccines from the public.

The Food and Drug Administration blocked the publication of several studies supporting the safety of vaccines against Covid and shingles in recent months, a Health and Human Services Department spokesperson confirmed Tuesday. FDA scientists worked with data firms to analyze millions of patient records for the studies, which found side effects of the shots to be rare, The New York Times first reported on Tuesday. 

In October, the scientists were directed to withdraw two Covid shot studies that had been accepted for publication in medical journals, the Times reported. In February, top FDA officials did not sign off on submitting study abstracts on Shingrix, a shingles vaccine, to a drug safety conference, the paper added.

Now, spokespeople for HHS have stated that the studies were withdrawn because either they drew conclusions not supported by the data, or that the designs of the studies were done “outside of the agency’s purview.”

That’s bullshit. We all know it’s bullshit. And they know that we know it’s bullshit. And they simply don’t care, because this is not about medicine, or health, or even traditional politics. This is about the ego of one man, Kennedy, and his cohort of tinfoil hat wearing bumblefucks.

As the New York Times article itself quotes knowledgeable professors of medicine, this is censorship.

Dr. Aaron S. Kesselheim, a Harvard University medical professor who studies F.D.A. regulation, said he had worked with the agency on a number of research papers and found its work to meet “the highest standards of scientific investigation.” He suggested that the request to pull the papers was an act of “censorship.”

He added: “At any other time in history, this would be a major scandal that would lead to congressional hearings and resignations of leadership, and I hope that’s what happens next.”

These studies were seen by people who know what they’re talking about in the pre-publication stage. It’s not just Kesselheim who is pointing out that these studies seem both perfectly valid and very useful for evaluating the safety and efficacy of these vaccines. And the conclusions they draw are as full-throated as they are at odds with Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer nonsense.

Take one study, which worked to examine millions of health records for those who received a COVID shot at anywhere from 6 months old to 64 years old.

That study examined the records of 4.2 million Covid vaccine recipients and examined their later experience with 17 conditions, including swelling of the brain, major blood clots, stroke and heart attacks. The study found rare cases of fever-related seizures and myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, known to be associated with Covid vaccines.

“Given the available evidence, F.D.A. continues to conclude the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks,” the study said.

Angela Rasmussen, an editor in chief of the journal Vaccine, said the paper had been withdrawn by the authors.

Dr. Caleb Alexander, a drug safety and methodology expert at Johns Hopkins University, reviewed both studies at the request of The Times and said that “no study answers every question” but “there is nothing inherently problematic regarding these reports.”

The point earlier was a good one: this is god damned scandal. Or, rather, it should be, except the talking heads on our televisions are far too busy covering every other scandal or ginned up controversy the administration creates, and more than half of our elected officials can’t be bothered to do real political combat out of fear of who knows what. And so the health of Americans is put at risk instead, because our government is made up of an unholy combination of crackpots and cowards.

At this point, I could be convinced that Kennedy and some portion of the government is actually attempting to cause people to die. I can’t understand another coherent motivation for this kind of censorship of scientific information, other than pure ego.

And if one man’s ego really is standing in the way of getting us back on track on matters of life and death, then impeach Kennedy and let’s get back to sanity. This really isn’t that complicated.

Filed Under: covid vaccines, fda, health & human services, rfk jr., science, shingles, shingles vaccine, studies, vaccines

New Acting FDA Commissioner: Some Florida Lawyer That Shoots Animals With Don Jr.

Failures

from the pew-pew dept

I assume at one point America was a serious big boy country, but we are certainly not that any longer. You can get examples of the unserious nature of our government in spades, of course, but I’m just going to keep hammering on what is going on at HHS and its child agencies as the prime example. With the recent resignation of Marty Makary as FDA Commissioner, the country is left without Senate confirmed commissioners for the FDA, CDC, as well as Surgeon General. This is because of a combination of RFK Jr. being incapable of hiring any normies for those roles combined with the Trump administration’s general apathy towards doing the business of government. It’s a clown show, currently resting on the shoulders of acting commissioners in these roles.

Which isn’t to say that the clownery hasn’t infected those acting commissioner appointments as well. It absolutely has. And you need look no further than the new acting FDA Commissioner to see that.

Soon after Trump posted Makary’s resignation text to Truth Social, Kyle Diamantas, 38, an obscure Florida lawyer who first landed at the FDA in 2025 as director of the human foods program, following his previous role as Don Jr.’s hunting buddy, was named acting FDA commissioner.

In March 2021, Don Jr. and Diamantas posed holding dead Osceola wild turkeys, as I had first reported. Mike Tussey, the founder of the hunting outfit Osceola Outdoors, described the scene on X as: “Don Jr. With his good friend Kyle Diamantas! Kyle’s first Osceola!” A picture of Trump Jr., Diamantas, and Tussey, with a single turkey, is featured on Osceola Outdoors’s website.

While a great deal of attention has been paid to Diamantas’ brief role defending Planned Parenthood in one legal case, which he claims he eventually got out of over his moral objections to the organization, his more salient work history was his legal defense of Abbott Laboratories for selling harmful baby formula and the tobacco industry. He spent a decade doing his lawyerly work before being appointed acting deputy commissioner of human food at the FDA last year. There he dabbled in a little conflict of interest by being in charge of reviewing infant formula safety, given his past legal work defending the industry, and embraced the whole MAHA movement.

So what else qualifies Diamantas for that role, or his new role running the larger FDA? Nothing, that’s what. Nothing at all, other than being Don Jr.’s pal. The real government, it seems, was the friends we made along the way.

And so we have another nepo-appointment in the Trump administration, but this one is responsible for food and drug safety across the entire country. I’m sure there’s nothing that will go wrong as a result.

Filed Under: donald trump jr., fda, health & human services, kyle diamanatas, mark makary, rfk jr.

HHS Is A Chaos Engine: Marty Makary Out At FDA

Failures

from the rudderless-ship dept

We’ve complained a great deal about RFK Jr.’s stint running HHS and its effects on the health of Americans in the short and long term because, well, there’s a lot to complain about. His anti-vaxxer stances have begun infecting national vaccine policy, of course, and his stance of essentially ignoring an ongoing 17 month measles outbreak have generated national headlines. Regarding measles cases, by the way, the official case count in America is at roughly 80% of the total of last year already, which was itself the highest case count in several decades. I’ll take this moment to remind you that it’s May, not even half way through the year.

But there has also been an insane amount of chaos at HHS and its child agencies under Kennedy. And that chaos isn’t slowing down, it seems, with the announcement that FDA chief Marty Makary will be resigning his post. And, because this is the dumbest of timelines in which we live, the reason behind it appears to be Trump’s push to allow for flavored e-cigarettes to entice the nation’s youth.

Makary’s insiders said the former Johns Hopkins University cancer surgeon resigned after Trump forced his hand on authorizing fruit-flavored e-cigarettes. Makary had reportedly been resisting the sign-offs out of concern that the kid-friendly flavors could again entice youth use and addiction—something public health officials and experts have for years worked to combat. But Makary’s stance was in conflict with Trump’s “save vaping” campaign promise—and with the tobacco industry’s interests.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had called Makary over a weekend to scold him for not moving fast enough to authorize flavored vapes, particularly menthol, mango, and blueberry flavors from the Los Angeles manufacturer Glas. The FDA authorized those flavored products days later and issued a new policy that would make it easier to market flavored vapes.

The ArsTechnica post goes on to note that Makary had pissed off a bunch of lobbyists for tobacco, pharma, and biotech firms, all while health professionals have been complaining about his participation in Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer nonsense at the FDA as well. He essentially managed to piss off everyone, courting zero allies, which is a remarkable achievement itself.

But the larger story here is that HHS is suffering from a rather damning lack of leadership. Not by performance, but through vacancies of Senate-confirmed people to actually run things.

The firing or resignation of Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary is more intra-MAHA chaos at a beleaguered and battered Department of Health and Human Services. 

When you don’t have a CDC Director, an FDA Commissioner, or a Surgeon General, the obvious question is: Why do you have this HHS Secretary? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is the cause of much of the chaos that has resulted in these job vacancies. HHS is rotting from the head. 

It really is incredible to realize that those three positions, important as they are, are currently being helmed by acting leadership members at best. There’s a reason those positions exist. They’re not unimportant. But currently, we have essentially temp employees filling them.

Does anyone really believe that American health is a ship that can be successfully steered without a rudder? That’s what’s happening right now, because Trump and Kennedy can’t seem to get anyone across the finish line in the Senate for these roles. And if the ship crashes, we’re all going to pay for it.

Filed Under: e-cigarettes, fda, flavored vapes, health & human services, hhs, maha, marty makary, rfk jr.

The Secretary Of Health & Human Services Doesn’t Believe In The Foundation Of Modern Medicine

Failures

from the medicine-101 dept

We discussed RFK Jr.’s recent appearance before Congress, where he bravely declared that the current measles outbreak in America has absolutely nothing to do with him, despite that definitely not being true. But, unsurprisingly, that wasn’t the only craziness that Kennedy put on display in the hearing.

The Secretary of HHS doesn’t believe in the foundational theory that powers modern medicine.

Read that again. It’s an insane sentence, the sort that should be fiction. What we’re talking about here is the germ theory of disease, which is the accepted science when it comes to how many diseases infect and spread through pathogens. We mentioned in a post last year, which was chiefly about how Kennedy decided to take his grandkids swimming in a creek filled with poop, that he had also written in a 2021 book that he doesn’t believe in germ theory, and instead believes in what he incorrectly labels “miasma theory”.

It’s one thing to write something in a book as we were mired in a global pandemic. But Kennedy both admitted that he doesn’t believe in germ theory, and defended that belief, before Congress.

In the hearing on Wednesday, Sanders called attention to Kennedy’s denial of germ theory while raising one of Kennedy’s shaky arguments for debunking. In opening statements, Sanders warned Kennedy that he wanted to question the “things that you have written which call in doubt the very existence of the germ theory.”

Sanders pointed out a 2024 study led by the World Health Organization and published in The Lancet that found that since 1974, vaccines had saved an estimated 154 million lives, including 146 million children under the age of 5—or, as WHO put it, vaccines saved the equivalent of six lives every minute of every year over the past 50 years.

“My question is a simple one,” Sanders said, “do you still believe that one of the central tenets of the germ theory, that vaccines sharply reduce infant mortality, is quote-unquote simply untrue?”

Kennedy first did what he always does: try to tell you that the experts and studies have no idea what they’re talking about, or are hopelessly corrupted tools of industry. He does this so often that you can set your watch by it. If a study agrees with him, it’s a good study. If it doesn’t, it’s bad. He’s more like Trump than any of us realized.

Then he launched into his own justification and offered up a 2000 study that he claimed demonstrated that it was improved nutrition and sanitation that reduced childhood deaths this century, and explicitly not medicines like vaccines. Unfortunately for Kennedy, Bill Cassidy piped up with a, oh, let’s call it a minor correction.

The study by Guyer notes that sanitation, among other public health strategies introduced in the first half of the 20th century, drove major declines in mortality. But, as Cassidy noted during the hearing, it’s not all that the study found. Cassidy looked up the studies Kennedy raised and read through them during the hearing.

The Guyer study highlighted that vaccination did not become widely used until after the middle of the century, thus it cannot account for mortality declines prior to that. But it concluded, as Cassidy read out loud at the hearing:

The reductions in vaccine-preventable diseases, however, are impressive. In the early 1920s, diphtheria accounted for about 175,000 cases annually and pertussis for nearly 150,000 cases; measles accounted for about half a million annual cases before the introduction of vaccine in the 1960s. Deaths from these diseases have been virtually eliminated, as have deaths from Haemophilus influenzae, tetanus, and poliomyelitis.

Kennedy tried again, with another study, but Cassidy pointed out that it had the same issue as Kennedy’s first: it measured data from the beginning of the century to the early 1970s. Many of the vaccines Kennedy rails against had barely been out during the period the study analyzed, or in many cases hadn’t come out at all. Speaking specifically to the measles vaccine, released in 1963, Cassidy said:

“There’s 3.5 million cases of measles per year before the vaccine came along and about 550 deaths, and then the vaccine took those to less than 100 [cases] and like zero deaths,” Cassidy said. “So a tremendous impact of the vaccination.”

The problem with Cassidy is that he’s acting like he’s trying to convince Kennedy to change his mind on this. He’s not going to. Not ever. He’s made that clear.

So impeach him or convince Trump to make Kennedy his next cabinet firing. That’s all that’s left to do. Because we certainly cannot continue having someone run HHS who doesn’t believe in the very baseline theory for medicine.

Filed Under: bill cassidy, germ theory, health & human services, rfk jr.

RFK Jr. & White House Appear At Odds Over Attempts To Rein Him In

Surprises

from the fight-fight-fight dept

Amidst all the other chaos and damage RFK Jr. is doing in his current role as Secretary of Health and Human Services, we noted a few weeks back that he was also seemingly having a hard time finding someone to fill the opening for CDC Director. That opening, created when Kennedy fired Susan Monarez after only a few weeks on the job back in August of last year (!!!), has been vacant this entire time, with only temporary stand-ins filling the gap.

And then something truly remarkable happened. The Trump administration announced it was nominating Dr. Erica Schwartz for the position. And the notable thing about Schwartz is that… she’s a perfectly qualified, reasonable pick for the role. Many took this as yet another sign that the White House had begun attempting to rein in Kennedy so that his particular brand of nonsense didn’t get the GOP killed in the midterms. The nomination was so bizarrely reasonable that public health policy wonks immediately worried aloud that this couldn’t possibly work under Kennedy.

Outside public health experts have praised her nomination, highlighting her qualifications. But, they’re also wary of how an evidence-based health official will be able to function amid Kennedy’s anti-vaccine efforts and interference from the many like-minded allies he has installed at the CDC.

“As a well-trained and credentialed physician and former Deputy Surgeon General, Erica Schwartz possesses the medical background and public health knowledge to understand that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must be guided by evidence-based science,” Georges Benjamin, CEO of the American Public Health Association, said in a statement. “She will need to use sound managerial and negotiation skills to navigate the rebuilding of our nation’s public health system.”

Jerome Adams, who served as Trump’s surgeon general in his first administration, posted on social media that Schwartz is a “battle-tested leader with decades of distinguished public service,” and that he was “cautiously optimistic” of her selection. As the leader of the CDC, “she’ll excel,” he said, with the caveat, “if [she’s] allowed to follow the science without political interference.”

Unfortunately for anyone optimistic that this would force Kennedy to return to sanity in public health policy, his recent appearance before Congress indicates that he’s not interested in complying. In those hearings, Kennedy was asked several questions about whether he would stop screwing with vaccine policy to bend it to his personal whims, and whether he would support the work of and listen to Schwartz if confirmed as CDC Director.

In a Congressional hearing Tuesday, Kennedy refused to commit to supporting evidence-based vaccine policy from the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the same time, he refused to say that he wouldn’t interfere with the agency’s recommendations.

Kennedy’s response Tuesday suggested Schwartz could face an equally short tenure. His answer came amid an exchange with Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) in a hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Ruiz asked Kennedy: “If Dr. Schwartz is confirmed, will you commit on the record today to implement whatever vaccine guidance she issues without interference?”

Kennedy replied without hesitation: “I’m not going to make that kind of commitment.”

There is danger in this for Kennedy. This administration, and particularly its mad king leader, do not like having their power challenged. There is a reason that Schwartz was tapped for this role and sure as hell isn’t because the Trump team thinks all is well at HHS. Or, at least, it knows they have a problem with public perception of the work that Kennedy is doing there. To have the administration offer up the rare sane nomination, only to have Kennedy state before Congress that he’s not committed to taking her seriously, is a public slap in the face to Trump. And one that will be memorialized in congressional hearing notes.

In other words, this nomination of Schwartz is a no-lose situation for the American public, in my view. Either she’ll be allowed to do her work in a competent way, which is great for a country suffering through a measles outbreak, or she won’t and the Trump administration will have to do something about it. Firing her would, I would guess, amount to Kennedy firing himself.

Now we wait to see which route this goes.

Filed Under: cdc, donald trump, erica schwartz, health & human services, rfk jr., vaccines