Rinse, lather, repeat. That is supposed to be the self-serving message on the back of a shampoo bottle, but it can easily be applied to Senator Bill Cassidy’s response to all the bullshit RFK Jr. continues to pull when it comes to vaccines.
The last time we saw this was back in October of last year. In the wake of an absolutely insane press conference in which Kennedy and Trump decided to point the finger at Tylenol, of all things, as a major cause of autism spectrum disorder, Cassidy bravely took to social media and the radio to criticize the HHS Secretary for essentially not having a single fucking idea about which he was speaking… and then he did absolutely fuck all about it. And now, days after Kennedy’s CDC altered the agency’s childhood vaccine schedule recommendations, he’s once more out in public spilling all kinds of words in response.
Cassidy, a physician and longtime proponent of vaccinations, said this move will “make America sicker.”
“As a doctor who treated patients for decades, my top priority is protecting children and families. Multiple children have died or were hospitalized from measles, and South Carolina continues to face a growing outbreak. Two children have died in my state from whooping cough. All of this was preventable with safe and effective vaccines,” Cassidy wrote on the social media platform X.
“The vaccine schedule IS NOT A MANDATE. It’s a recommendation giving parents the power. Changing the pediatric vaccine schedule based on no scientific input on safety risks and little transparency will cause unnecessary fear for patients and doctors, and will make America sicker,” he added.
Well, gosh golly gee, Senator, if only there was someone in some kind of position of power that could actually do something about it. Maybe a respected figure in the Republican majority, one who is a doctor by background and who cast and whipped up critical votes to confirm Kennedy’s appointment, who could do more than offer stern warnings about how horrible this is all going to be. I’d like to find someone like that and implore them to take action. Like… any action. Do literally anything other than flap their lips, as though that were accomplishing anything.
The incredible part of all of this is the context in which Kennedy’s betrayal of Cassidy has occurred. According to Cassidy, Kennedy committed to the following, either in confirmation hearings or to him personally:
Not changing vaccine review processes or slowing down vaccine approvals
Leave the CDC’s ACIP committee unchanged
Not changing the CDC website’s language debunking misinformation about vaccines and autism
Basing vaccine approvals and schedule recommendations on established and peer-reviewed science
Lie, lie, lie, and lie! It’s a superfecta of broken promises made to a sitting senator that has the stature, standing, and ability to do something about it. He could back the effort to impeach Kennedy, as he absolutely should. He could hit him in funding. He could haul him before Congress and demand answers, using his bully pulpit to expose the dangers further than some ExTwitter posts.
“Senator Cassidy put his personal political preservation above all by casting the deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr., even after raising many valid concerns over Kennedy’s pursuit of a dangerous anti-vaccine agenda,” said Kayla Hancock, Director of Public Health Watch, a project of Protect Our Care. “It is obvious that Kennedy was always hellbent on pushing vaccine misinformation to AmericansAmericans no matter how much the data and science show them to be safe and effective. And now, with each new baseless attack on vaccine safety and efficacy that Secretary Kennedy carries out — like gutting the child vaccine schedule — more American lives are needlessly put in jeopardy. Dr. Cassidy knows this better than anyone, and it’s time he backs up his empty words of ‘concern’ with serious action.”
Instead, we have Cassidy’s mere words. Inaction is tacit endorsement, as far as I’m concerned. And every day that goes by in which Cassidy continues to not lift a single finger to protect his own constituents at a minimum, and all Americans more generally, is another violation of the Hippocratic Oath he once took.
Dr. Kirk Moore had been on trial for five days, accused of falsifying COVID-19 vaccination cards and throwing away the government-supplied doses.
The Utah plastic surgeon faced up to 35 years in prison if the jury found him guilty on charges that included conspiracy to defraud the United States. Testimony had paused for the weekend when Moore’s lawyer called him early one Saturday this July with what felt to him like unbelievable news.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi had ordered Utah prosecutors to drop all charges, abruptly ending his two-and-a-half year court battle.
“I just literally collapsed to the floor, and tears rolling down my face,” Moore recalled in a recent interview.
Bondi’s announcement marked a striking reversal of how the federal government handled the prosecution of COVID-19-related fraud under President Joe Biden. It has since emboldened other medical professionals who were similarly charged to consider seeking reexaminations of their cases. And it signaled the increasing clout of doctors and politicians who champion what they call “medical freedom,” which rejects modern public health interventions such as vaccine requirements in favor of individual choice.
Dismissed by the medical establishment, this movement has nevertheless built momentum as distrust in government and medical systems grew after the coronavirus pandemic. It has also gained new influence in Washington, where longtime vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. oversees the nation’s health agencies. As President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, Kennedy has replaced members of a federal vaccine advisory panel with his own picks and pushed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to restrict access to some vaccines, including the coronavirus shot. The Trump administration’s evisceration of long-standing federal vaccine guidelines and rejection of scientific evidence have alarmed the American Medical Association and other professional medical groups.
Just days before Bondi’s decision, a federal prosecutor from her department had stood before the jury in Moore’s case and accused him of enrolling in the federal government’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution program in order to “sabotage” it, according to a court transcript. She had asked jurors to convict him and to “find that no one is above the law, not even a plastic surgeon.”
Moore said he’d signed up for the program in May 2021 to receive more than 2,000 free vaccine doses and accompanying proof-of-vaccination cards after some businesses, nursing homes and the military began requiring such proof for visitors and employees. He said his plan was always to give vaccine cards without providing the shots because he wanted to offer patients a choice to circumvent vaccine mandates.
Bondi explained her decision to dismiss the charges on X later that morning, writing that “Dr. Moore gave his patients a choice when the federal government refused to do so. He did not deserve the years in prison he was facing. It ends today.”
A spokesperson for Bondi declined to comment beyond what the attorney general posted on social media. The Utah federal attorney’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Moore was one of at least 12 health care professionals charged after giving or selling fraudulent COVID-19 vaccine cards since 2021, according to cases identified by The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica through government news releases and media clips. Those charged include midwives, nurses, pharmacists and another surgeon. Eight were charged in federal court by the Biden administration; prosecutors from California, New York and New Jersey brought state charges against four others.
Other than Moore, only one of these health care workers went to trial: a Chicago pharmacist whom a jury found guilty of selling on eBay blank vaccine cards that he had stolen from the Walgreens where he worked. The rest pleaded guilty and were sentenced to a mix of probation, home arrest and, in a few cases, prison. Many also were professionally disciplined with fines or suspension of their medical licenses.
Of those 11, the Chicago pharmacist appealed his conviction but the U.S. Supreme Court in November declined to hear his petition; his attorney told The Tribune and ProPublica that they are exploring a presidential pardon. One other health care worker said she, too, would like to be pardoned by Trump.
Some of these health care workers, along with those in other professions who were also convicted of vaccine card fraud, started a group called Covicted Patriot following the dismissal of Moore’s case.
“There are more of us than Dr. Moore,” they declared in July through an X account that bills itself as representing “Justified Felons & Persecuted Patriots who were victimized by a politically weaponized justice system for providing covid cards.”
“We celebrate his vindication as we pray for our own,” they wrote.
Moore said he supports their efforts: “I think anybody who took the same stance that I did, in large measures, should be pardoned.”
Brian Dean Abramson, an immunization law expert in Virginia who serves on the board of directors for the National Vaccine Law Conference, said that medical workers falsifying vaccination cards is “absolutely horrifying” from a public health perspective. Their actions, he said, fuel distrust of the medical profession and create blind spots in disease surveillance and response, increasing the likelihood and severity of outbreaks. (A simulation model published in JAMA in April predicts a reemergence of diseases that had been eliminated in the United States, such as measles, and accompanying deaths as a result of declining childhood vaccination.)
“This undermines every layer of the system that protects us from infectious disease,” Abramson said. “Vaccination policy relies on accurate records and honest medical participation.”
“Everybody Got What They Wanted”
Moore met with The Tribune and ProPublica in his clinic in the Salt Lake City suburb of Midvale. A neat row of clogs, his preferred footwear, lined one wall of his cluttered office. The 60-year-old physician wore black scrubs and a “Trump 2024” rubber bracelet stacked atop a gold chain.
Moore, a licensed physician in Utah since 2005, doesn’t deny the government’s claims: that he gave falsified vaccine cards to patients, that his staff threw away doses, and that, in some cases, he gave children saline shots instead of the COVID-19 vaccine at their parents’ request.
“All of that stuff is true,” he said.
In an interview that lasted nearly two hours, Moore said choosing whether to get vaccinated is deeply personal and the decision should be made between patients and their doctors — not mandated by government or businesses. The Trump administration has similarly framed vaccination as a personal choice in its dismissal of established public health guidance.
Moore referred to COVID-19 vaccines as “bioweapons” a dozen times and said he distrusts how quickly the government facilitated the vaccines’ rapid development and distribution. He said he concluded the vaccines were unsafe after conducting his own online research that he said cast doubt on the medical technology used in their development and the amount of testing before the first doses became available under emergency use authorization in December 2020.
The COVID-19 vaccine was developed in record time during Trump’s first term, less than a year after federal authorities declared a public health emergency — a feat Trump touted at the time as a “monumental national achievement.” This was made possible by a federal effort known as Operation Warp Speed that reduced bureaucracy and invested in clinical trials and manufacturing, according to a 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office — not due to any shortcuts in testing. The technological backbone of the vaccines, known as mRNA, has been in development for decades by scientists who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine.
Moore said that the vaccines “failed in every animal test.” “All the animals died, and now all of a sudden, we’re going to use the human population as our guinea pigs,” he said. The Food and Drug Administration has previously told reporters that such claims, widely promoted among vaccine skeptics during the pandemic, are false.
The plastic surgeon said that he believes all vaccines are “poison” and that they have not been adequately tested — a view he says he has held for more than two decades.
Vaccines approved by the FDA and recommended by the CDC have been proven to protect public health by preventing disease, serious illness or death. Major health authorities like the World Health Organization have affirmed the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, which researchers estimate prevented more than 14 million deaths worldwide in their first year.
Prior to signing up for the CDC’s vaccine distribution program, Moore did not provide vaccines in his business, the Plastic Surgery Institute of Utah. The “bread and butter” of his practice, he said, is a method of “rapid recovery” breast augmentations that he says he developed, which allows patients to return to their routines with little downtime.
“They were looking for anybody and everybody to get these bioweapons out,” he said about joining the government program, which was open to all health care providers who agreed to comply with the CDC processes, such as storing the vaccines at a certain temperature and recording who had been vaccinated. “And so, it was a pretty simple process.”
In December 2021, a husband-and-wife couple who Moore had met through a mutual acquaintance came to his home for dinner, according to a prosecution trial brief. “While they were there, Dr. Moore personally handed them both pre-completed CDC COVID-19 vaccination record cards with their names and birth dates on them, falsely purporting to show that the couple had received COVID-19 vaccines from the Plastic Surgery Institute,” the brief said. “Dr. Moore did so knowing that neither of them had been vaccinated for COVID-19, and without administering a COVID-19 vaccine to either of them.”
Within weeks, prosecutors said, Moore had started handing out fake vaccine cards in his medical office to anyone who was referred to his business by people who had already received a falsified card.
As word spread, Moore’s employees suggested patients who wanted a card could donate $50 via Venmo to a local health freedom advocacy group called the Health Independence Alliance, according to Moore. The husband of the couple to whom Moore first gave the fake vaccine cards testified at the Utah Legislature in January on behalf of the Health Independence Alliance on a vaccine-related bill. Moore says that he supports the group but does not run it; the Health Independence Alliance declined to comment in response to a request sent to the email listed on its website. The couple, who were not charged, declined to comment.
When sending their donation, patients were told to include an emoji of an orange in the Venmo subject line, according to federal prosecutors, and they were also instructed to bring an orange with them to the waiting room of the clinic. “At one point, there was a large basket full of oranges” at Moore’s clinic, prosecutors said in their trial brief.
Moore confirmed this system in his interview with The Tribune and ProPublica, saying the piece of fruit was a quiet signal to his busy staff that the patient was there for a falsified vaccine card.
He said during this time he maintained his plastic surgery practice while distributing fake vaccine cards and treating COVID-19 patients with ivermectin and other methods. Ivermectin has not been authorized by the FDA or recommended by the CDC to treat COVID-19.
An undercover state licensor called Moore’s office in March 2022 and asked to make a vaccine appointment during the criminal investigation after someone complained to the state health department, according to the prosecutors. At his clinic, the licensor, posing as a patient, received a vaccine card attesting to her vaccination without ever being offered a shot, prosecutors said.
Federal prosecutors alleged in their trial brief that a portion of the donations for the advocacy group paid a part-time worker at the plastic surgery clinic $18 an hour to give out falsified vaccine cards and administer saline shots to children. The worker, who could not be reached for comment, testified against Moore as part of an agreement with prosecutors to dismiss her charges after the trial, according to prosecutors’ trial brief.
Moore said during an interview that he didn’t make any money himself and never directly charged patients for these cards. He added that every adult patient who got a fake card had wanted one.
“Nobody in my practice was ever tricked. Nobody came to me expecting a vaccine and didn’t get it,” he said. “Everybody got what they wanted.”
But some children who received saline shots at their parents’ request falsely believed they were being vaccinated against COVID-19, according to court filings and Moore. This was a breach of medical ethics because doctors have a duty to build trust between their community and the health care system, said Wendy Parmet, director of Northeastern University’s Center for Health Policy and Law.
Moore said he gave kids the saline shots so they wouldn’t be bullied if their peers found out they got a vaccine card without getting a shot. “I did have some parents that didn’t want their kid to know that they were getting something fake,” he said.
He didn’t question the parents’ deception, Moore said, because he didn’t want to “intervene in their family dynamic.”
“You have to stand up for what you feel is right,” he said. “That’s the reason why I did what I did. I had no intention of defrauding the federal government.”
Emboldening a Movement
On the first day of Moore’s trial in July, about 60 supporters — including state lawmakers like House Speaker Mike Schultz — gathered on the stairs outside the federal courthouse in Salt Lake City. They waved American flags and held signs protesting Moore’s charges at a busy intersection. The doctor tearfully thanked the crowd before walking into the courthouse where a jury would soon be selected.
The rally increased public and social media attention on Moore’s case, eventually reaching Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. She sent a letter to Bondi, urging the U.S. attorney general to drop Moore’s charges.
“Dr. Michael Kirk Moore deserves to be celebrated, not prosecuted, for his bravery in standing up to a system that prioritized control over public health,” Greene wrote in her July 12 letter. Her office did not respond to requests for comment. (Greene, an early supporter of Trump’s, recently announced her resignation from Congress after falling out of the president’s favor.)
That same day, Bondi ordered the charges be dropped and thanked Greene and Utah Sen. Mike Lee in posts on X for bringing the case to her attention. Lee’s office did not respond to questions about his role in the dismissal of Moore’s case.
Utah prosecutors then dismissed the charges against Moore, his business and a neighbor who prosecutors alleged had organized the donations to the health freedom advocacy group. Prosecutors also dropped charges against his office manager — who had pleaded guilty — and the part-time worker. Both of these employees testified against Moore and his neighbor the day before Bondi’s announcement. Neither the neighbor nor the office manager responded to requests for comment.
Less than a week after his charges were dropped, Moore and his fiancée flew to Washington, D.C., at Bondi’s invitation to meet with her and Greene; Moore said he asked if Lee could join them. Moore said the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank founded by former Trump administration officials, paid for his travel. (The group did not respond to a request for comment.)
Moore described the meeting as low-key and genuine: “It was a handshake and a hug to both M.T.G. and Attorney General Bondi.”
Moore estimates that he lost about two-thirds of his plastic surgery business after his 2023 indictment because he had used his marketing budget to cover his legal expenses. As he’s tried rebuilding his practice in recent months, he rebranded as Freedom Surgical & Aesthetics. He said he started thinking about a new name during the 22 days he spent in jail in November 2024 after a judge determined he had violated pretrial rules by communicating with other co-defendants.
The new name “stands for freedom and for people’s ability to choose,” he said. Images of the American flag and bald eagles appear on his clinic’s new website among photos of svelte women.
Moore’s medical license is in good standing. A state licensing division spokesperson would not say whether the agency is considering taking action against his license.
The lack of consequences for medical workers who falsify records could encourage others to undermine public health guidance, said Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Offit, who served on the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel from 1998 to 2003 and has clashed with Kennedy over vaccine policy, was kicked off a vaccine advisory committee for the FDA in August.
“The first two years of the pandemic turbocharged the medical freedom movement, which is a euphemism for basically saying that I don’t need experts. I will do my own Google searches and decide what’s right and what’s not,” Offit said. “Even if it goes against what is standard medical practice or medical wisdom, I’m going to decide for myself — and my neighbor be damned, in the case of vaccines.”
As Moore vows to “do everything I can to get COVID shots off the market,” others who faced similar legal battles say his turn of fortune has inspired them to fight their convictions.
Julie DeVuono, a former nurse in Long Island who also distributed fake vaccine cards to her patients, said she and two others created the CovictedPatriot X account after others who gave out fake cards reached out to her in response to her social media post celebrating Moore’s vindication.
New York state prosecutors had charged DeVuono with forgery and money laundering for using the proceeds from the fake vaccine cards to pay her mortgage. She pleaded guilty in 2023 and was sentenced to community service and probation. Her home was also seized as part of a $1.2 million forfeiture, and she lost her nursing license.
“Is there any chance for us to get some kind of restored justice?” she said in an interview.
DeVuono, 53, said she feels she and others who were convicted of similar crimes were treated unfairly, but she can’t ask for a presidential pardon because her charges were filed in state court. Instead, she’s advocating on behalf of others who can beseech Trump, such as Kathleen Breault, a recently retired midwife and nurse in New York.
Breault faced a possible five-year prison sentence after she and a co-defendant were indicted in federal court in 2023 for destroying thousands of vaccines and issuing falsified vaccine cards.
“I was terrified,” Breault, 68, told The Tribune and ProPublica. “But I also felt defiant, because I felt like what I did was right.”
She said if she had gone to trial, her defense would have been civil disobedience. But Breault has health issues and cares for her grandchildren. She said her children urged her to do whatever she needed to in order to avoid a prison sentence.
So she pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the United States — a felony — and was sentenced last December to three years probation. (Her co-defendant, who died in March, had also pleaded guilty.)
Breault said she was buoyed by news over the summer that similar charges against Moore were dropped at the behest of the Trump administration. The outcome of Moore’s case has motivated her to begin the process of asking for a presidential pardon.
A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about whether Trump has received any pardon requests from health care workers indicted in connection with the pandemic or if he would pardon them. He has not pardoned anyone in that situation, according to a review of the clemency grants in his second term listed on the Department of Justice’s website.
Breault said she’d like to have her conviction erased so she’s not limited by her felon status. She’d like to own a gun again, but those with felony convictions are prohibited from possessing firearms in New York. She’d also like more freedom, including not having to report to her probation officer when she travels or how much is in her bank account.
“After seeing what happened with Kirk,” she said about Moore, “maybe if I didn’t take the plea, I wouldn’t have a felony conviction now.”
The Trump administration’s war on vaccines continues, it seems. We’ve already written extensively about all the bullshit RFK Jr. is pulling when it comes to public health around vaccines. From his dismantling the CDC’s ACIP committee and rebuilding it full of anti-vaxxer allies, pulling public funding for research on new and better RNA vaccines, to rescinding the recommendation for vaccine schedules for diseases such as COVID and hepatitis B, it’s an absolute nightmare. And what is particularly cruel about the nightmare is how it will be chiefly visited upon the most vulnerable possible population: children.
I can’t say for sure that Kennedy is purposefully endangering children, but it’s difficult to think of what he’d do differently if that were his intention. The latest example is the CDC changing the childhood vaccination schedule recommendations out of the blue to mimic Denmark’s, for some reason.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday announced an unprecedented overhaul of the childhood vaccine schedule that recommends fewer shots to all children.
Under the change — effective immediately — the vaccine schedule will more closely resemble Denmark’s, recommending all children get vaccines for 11 diseases, compared with the 18 previously on the schedule.
From all the reporting, this wasn’t something that came out of the current iteration of ACIP. There was no meeting between the CDC and FDA to discuss changes to the schedule. There were no public hearings in which experts could weigh in and the public could get a glimpse into any reasoning for the changes. Instead, there was just the announcement, as though Kennedy himself wrote up the press release after finishing off some half pullups in his Levi’s.
The changes are significant and may have a downstream impact on what is covered by insurance and what is not. Vaccines that used to be universally recommended for children, but which will now be recommended only for “high risk” individuals and/or be recommended based on “shared clinical decision-making” are extensive.
Vaccines recommended for high-risk groups are shots for RSV, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, dengue and two types of bacterial meningitis.
The vaccines that are recommended based on shared clinical decision-making are for rotavirus, the flu, hepatitis A, hepatitis B and bacterial meningitis. The Covid vaccine was moved to shared decision-making last year.
So what is the problem Kennedy is ostensibly trying to solve for by reducing the total number of childhood vaccinations? It’s nothing new, as it turns out. Instead, this is all about reducing exposure to aluminum, which is a common ingredient in vaccines used to produce a better immune response to the shots themselves, thereby increasing the protective response to the vaccines. Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers have long blamed aluminum in vaccines for all sorts of ailments, autism being but one of them.
Interestingly, a recent study out of Denmark itself indicated there was no risk from exposure to the aluminum in vaccines.
A major study from Denmark, published in July, found that aluminum exposure from vaccines isn’t harmful. Kennedy demanded the journal retract the study, calling it “a deceitful propaganda stunt by the pharmaceutical industry”; the journal didn’t issue a retraction.
As per usual, Kennedy is absolutely all over the place with this sort of thing.
There is something else that everyone should keep in mind when you hear that we are modeling the vaccination schedule after Denmark, which has admittedly good health outcomes generally for its population: America isn’t Denmark. And while that may sound flippant, it isn’t and it really, really matters.
Anders Peter Hviid, the senior author of the Danish study on aluminum in vaccines and a professor in the department of epidemiology research at Statens Serum Institut in Denmark — that country’s equivalent of the CDC — wrote in an email in December that Denmark has a more homogeneous population than the U.S., with greater trust in public health institutions, universal and free health care and lower rates of serious outcomes from infectious diseases that it doesn’t vaccinate against but the U.S. does.
Denmark’s robust public health system, for example, makes it much easier for the country to test pregnant women for hepatitis B and ensure that babies born to women who test positive are vaccinated against it. A similar approach, now endorsed by the CDC, hadn’t been successful in the U.S. at cutting infection rates in children.
There’s a reason why public health experts are suggesting the changes Kennedy has made are dangerous. Context-free claims that we’re just modeling the vaccine schedule after another successful industrialized European nation entirely miss the point. The state of healthcare and the complexity of the population in each country are wildly different. And smart healthcare professionals understand the implications of those differences.
Kennedy understands none of this. Nor does he seem particularly interested in becoming educated on the matter. He’s an anti-vaxxer who has been given enormous power to foist his misguided personal conspiracy theories onto the American people.
There can be no doubt that there will be unhappy consequences to this.
As RFK Jr. continues to dismantle public health in this country policy brick by policy brick, there have fortunately been some consistent sources of sanity for the public to turn to. One of those sources has been the American Academy of Pediatrics, an important organization that provides guidance and dispenses funds to healthcare professionals and researchers to provide for the public health of American children writ large. Because the AAP is made up of medical professionals that are sane, it has been a vocal critic of many of Kennedy’s policy decisions, particularly when it comes to Kennedy’s war on childhood vaccines and his misinformation about autism.
While Kennedy used to fashion himself a liberal, he has become a remarkably quick learner when it comes to the finer points of facism from his boss. His latest move is downright Trumpian: HHS has yanked back millions in approved grants to the AAP.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has canceled millions of dollars in grants awarded to the American Academy of Pediatrics, it said on Wednesday, including ones the group said were aimed at reducing sudden infant death and early detection of autism.
The move comes as the AAP, a vocal critic of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., challenged vaccine policies enacted under his leadership in federal court. Kennedy, a longtime critic of vaccines, has accused the organization of accepting funding from drug and vaccine makers to further their interests.
“These grants, previously awarded to the American Academy of Pediatrics, were canceled along with a number of other grants to other organizations because they no longer align with the Department’s mission or priorities,” an HHS spokesperson said.
SID and autism detection are the headliners and for good reason. This is a cruel move that will likely result in some increase in the deaths of babies. It also takes away detection of Kennedy’s favorite hobbyhorse in autism spectrum diagnoses. Those are two things that Kennedy claims to very much care about, yet here we are.
But those aren’t the only things those grants funded. There are also things like mental health services and healthcare access in rural areas, the latter of which tend to be Trump territory. It seems that those who voted for Trump often times are his preferred victims.
CEO Mark Del Monte explains how bad this is and what they try to do about it.
“The sudden withdrawal of these funds will directly impact and potentially harm infants, children, youth, and their families in communities across the United States,” said Del Monte, adding that the group is assessing its options, including potential legal action.
No explanation I can find has been given for these clawbacks of previously approved grants. In lieu of such an explanation, we can but speculate, and the most reasonable speculation out there is that Kennedy is big mad that AAP has disagreed with him, and denounced him, at times. And so he punished American children and rural areas in desperate need of more access to healthcare.
He’s an egomaniac, in other words. And while that sure does make him fit in nice and comfy in the Trump administration, he remains likely the worst HHS Secretary in its nearly 50 years of existence.
I’m certain some people are getting tired of this refrain, but I’m going to keep repeating it to make the point: we shouldn’t have to talk about measles in this country in 2025. This is a disease that had been officially put in elimination status for America over two decades ago. We were done with this, thanks in large part to a dedicated campaign of MMR vaccinations and a government that advocated for those same vaccinations. It was after that when the anti-vaxxer campaigns really began to spring up. RFK Jr. was, of course, one of, if not the, leading voices in that movement.
Now that he is in charge of American health, I suppose it’s not surprising to see measles included in a number of diseases that are raging when they shouldn’t be. We recently talked about an outbreak currently going in South Carolina, which itself originated from the Texas outbreak earlier in the year. Well, that outbreak is getting worse, and health officials are suggesting it will continue getting even worse for some time.
A measles outbreak that began in South Carolina at the start of October is showing no signs of slowing as officials on Tuesday reported 27 new cases since Friday. Those cases bring the outbreak total to 111.
In an update on Tuesday, South Carolina’s health department suggested the spread is far from over. Of the state’s 27 new cases, 16 were linked to exposure at a church, the Way of Truth Church in Inman. And amid the new cases, new exposures were identified at Inman Intermediate School. That’s on top of exposures announced Friday at four other schools in the region, which led to well over 100 students being quarantined.
The end result is that there are, as of this writing, over 250 people quarantining. All of them reportedly are both unvaccinated for measles and have been recently exposed to the disease. If any appreciable percentage of those in quarantine end up ill, and I have no doubt that will happen, it could mean that there is a much larger pre-symptom spread that occurred, which itself will lead to even more infections. That how infectious diseases work, after all, and there are few if any diseases as infectious as measles.
And these are, of course, in counties and areas where there are both relatively low vaccination rates and a very high rate of those seeking religious exemptions from vaccination requirements.
The two counties’ low vaccination rates are coupled with high rates of religious exemptions. Spartanburg has the state’s highest rate, with 8.2 percent of students exempt from the school vaccination requirement based on religious beliefs. Neighboring Greenville has a religious vaccination exemption rate of 5.3 percent.
It’s very interesting just how much one god or another enjoys infecting their believers with measles.
This continues to be a problem nation wide. We’re quickly approaching 2,000 (!!!!!) confirmed cases of measles this year, blowing past total case counts for the last several decades. More undiagnosed cases certainly exist. We’re going to blow way past that 2,000 number as well, in no small part thanks to this outbreak in South Carolina.
Measles is a horrible disease. Just get your damned shots.
We talked yesterday about how newborn vaccinations for hepatitis B were on the agenda for this latest meeting at ACIP, the CDC’s immunization advisory panel. You likely know all this already, but RFK Jr. fired all ACIP panel members earlier this year, replacing them with hand-picked anti-vaxxer quack-jobs who are aligned with Kennedy’s anti-medicine, anti-science stances on vaccines. No matter the nonsense you hear out of Kennedy’s grumbly mouth, these are deeply unserious people that have been given an enormous responsibility that they are in no way qualified to have. ACIP recommendations are really important, with its guidance driving everything from what private insurers will or are mandated to cover, guiding medical professionals on how to advise their patients, and guiding the public on the types of immunization decisions they ought to be making.
ACIP just told all of those groups that whether or not newborns catch hep B and/or ultimately reach an untimely and painful death is a personal choice they should discuss with their doctors. Doctors that may now advise against vaccination within 24 hours of birth.
On Friday morning, the ACIP voted 8-3 to remove its previous recommendation that all children in the U.S. be vaccinated against hepatitis B starting at birth. In its place, the panel is endorsing “individual-based decision-making” for determining when most children should get their first hepatitis B shot. Many outside groups and experts have sharply criticized the ACIP’s about-face, noting that scant credible data was presented to justify such a dramatic reversal.
“If that recommendation goes forward, it will be without evidence and will ignore over 30 years of existing evidence and gambles with the safety of children,” James Campbell, vice chair of the Committee on Infectious Diseases at the American Academy of Pediatrics, told Gizmodo.
CDC staff and outside experts tried. They really did. They explained what this disease is, what is does, how infectious it is, and how the mass immunization program starting in the early 90s saved thousands of children from infection, from long term complications, and an ultimately early death for some. Here is one simple chart that CDC staff presented to ACIP earlier this year on the matter.
How in the actual hell do you look at that chart and decide vaccinations have to go? Like measles, this is another disease for which we were on the cusp of achieving elimination status. 90% of infections in children become chronic infections. Something like 25% of those infected as children will develop liver cancer or cirrhosis. The fatality rate for both is enormous, even as deaths during the acute phase of the disease are low. In other words, this is a disease that rips years of life away from those infected long after their initial symptoms disappear. Worse, most infections are asymptomatic during the acute infection stage, meaning many of the infected don’t even know it until they get cancer or cirrhosis.
And ACIP has decided we need more of this.
For children born to mothers who test negative for antibodies to hepatitis B, the ACIP is now pushing for an individualized approach, one where “parents should consult with health care providers and decide when or if their child will begin the HBV vaccine series.” And for families who choose not to start vaccination at birth, the ACIP recommended that vaccination not start any earlier than two months (the ACIP offered no clear rationale or evidence for this specific cut-off).
This is incredibly stupid. Even if the CDC adopts the recommendation, I am sure most doctors will still recommend vaccination at birth, since they can read the damned chart above as well or better than I can. But it won’t be all doctors. What insurance companies do as a result of this change is anyone’s guess. Some states are already stating that they’ll go against ACIP’s change and follow the old guidance.
But again, it won’t be all of them. I am confident that a non-zero number of children will get infected with hepatitis B and die an early death as a result of this. I’m confident that some newborns will suffer chronically from the disease as a result of this.
RFK Jr. is harming the health of American newborns. Full stop. Period, paragraph. Hey, Bill Cassidy: anytime you want to do something about this, feel free.
ACIP is meeting this week, which means we all get to clench our sphincters as we await whatever small, medium, or large sized horrors will come out of this panel of clowns.
It wasn’t always this way. ACIP, and the larger CDC, used to be the world standard when it came to government bodies dedicated to fighting infectious diseases. RFK Jr. did away with that earlier this year, when he disbanded every member of ACIP and installed a group mostly comprised of Dr. Nicks from the Simpsons in their place.
The focus of the agenda this week will be the vaccination schedule for hepatitis B, particularly the CDC’s long-held guidance for vaccinations to begin within 24 hours of birth. It’s really, really important to note that CDC guidance on this doesn’t take the form of a mandate. Parents have a choice on the timing of the vaccination. Instead, the CDC guidance does two primary things: it mandates coverage of the vaccine by insurance companies and it informs medical professionals on what to recommend to parents that understandably largely follow their doctors’ advice on the matter.
Because Kennedy has commented in the past that he believes this vaccine is responsible for autism disorder diagnoses, and because ACIP is staffed with his handpicked clowns, the medical community is holding its breath to see what decisions are made this week. Since CDC’s vaccination guidance in 1995, hep B infections among infants have dropped by a great deal and the resulting liver cancer in children has essentially gone away. Despite this, and despite just how brutal hep B is as a disease, Kennedy has been coming out against immunization, wielding misinformation as per usual.
On Tucker Carlson’s podcast in June, Kennedy falsely claimed that the hepatitis B birth dose is a “likely culprit” of autism.
He also said the hepatitis B virus is not “casually contagious.” But decades of research shows the virus can be transmitted through indirect contact, when traces of infected fluids like blood enter the body when people share personal items like razors or toothbrushes.
Hepatitis B causes incredible pain, cancer, and death. In children. And Kennedy is wildly wrong; it is incredibly contagious and particularly resilient on surfaces. And, again, this is a vaccine that is still voluntary by parents at birth. There is no government mandate for vaccination, only the recommended vaccination schedule.
Now, ACIP may be discussing the use of combo shots, as it has done in the recent past. That’s still fairly dumb, but it would be a far cry better than altering the recommendations for the first-24 hours immunization, which is a single vaccine, unpaired with any other. But ACIP is no longer trustworthy.
And that’s not me saying it. Take it from Republican Senator and do-nothing coward Bill Cassidy, who both had a heavy hand in getting Kennedy confirmed to DHS and who can’t be bothered to do more than say words about all the harm that confirmation is causing.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) on Thursday called a federal vaccine advisory committee “totally discredited” ahead of a vote on whether to change hepatitis B vaccine guidelines, an issue very close to the Louisiana physician. Writing Thursday on the social platform X, Cassidy specifically decried Aaron Siri, a prominent anti-vaccine lawyer who is presenting before the committee this week.
“Aaron Siri is a trial attorney who makes his living suing vaccine manufacturers. He is presenting as if an expert on childhood vaccines. The ACIP is totally discredited. They are not protecting children,” Cassidy wrote.
Neither are you, Senator. If you are interested in doing so, you can introduce articles of impeachment on RFK Jr. today. You’ll have plenty of support from the other side of the aisle, and likely a decent amount from your own.
I write this on Thursday and ACIP has already met. Because everything Kennedy touches is chaos, however, the panel moved its hep B vote to tomorrow, Friday, due to the panel not actually knowing what the fuck it was voting on.
At one point in Thursday’s session, committee member Dr. Joseph Hibbeln said that the group had seen three different versions of questions to vote on in the past 72 hours. A technical issue prevented the new voting language from being put up on slides. The presentation was later moved to the end of the agenda, to be displayed just before the vote. There were questions of how many questions members would be asked to vote on. There were no hard copies of the language available.
“We’re trying to evaluate a moving target,” Hibbeln said.
Panel members presented information on the prevalence of acute and chronic hepatitis B, and discussed transmission and safety data. Former board members and liaisons to medical organizations sharply criticized the presentations and said some data was mischaracterized.
Dr. Jason Goldman, liaison to the ACIP for the American College of Physicians, called the meeting “completely inappropriate” and accused the panel of “wasting taxpayer dollars by not having scientific, rigorous discussion on issues that truly matter.” Goldman also highlighted that the hepatitis B birth dose is not mandated and that parents are encouraged to make decisions in consultation with their doctor.
Chaos, confusion, misinformation, and so on. This is American health in RFK Jr.’s America. MAHA has become how it sounds phoenetically: a laugh track. A joke. And a deeply unfunny joke at that.
So now we wait for tomorrow to see just what horrors this gravel-voiced Cthulu of healthcare has in store for us. It seems the best we can hope for is probably advocacy for individual vaccines versus combo-shots. But I fear it’s going to be much, much worse than that. I’ve never seen a child writhing in pain as he or she dies from liver complications due to hepatitis B.
Part of what makes it difficult for the importance of so much of what is happening in the Trump administration to break through to the public mind is that it’s all chaos, all the time. Moving layers deeper to get at specifics can actually make the problem worse, in fact. Take all of our coverage of RFK Jr., for instance. Recall all the topics on him alone that we’ve covered: his anti-vaxxer stances, his failures to advocate for his staff at HHS and its child agencies, his war on Tylenol, his swimming in a creek rife with human waste, his thoughts on sperm counts, his thoughts on circumcision, his hiring and firing practices at HHS, measles, ACIP, and goddamned chemtrails. How are you supposed to focus on anything meaningful in that cornucopia of chaos?
The problem is that it’s all interrelated. The overarching theme is that Kennedy is an anti-science ignoramus who espouses eugenic tendencies and puts his beliefs into practice as a matter of public policy and/or guidance, all of which leads to adverse impacts on the American public.
Let’s put some examples to that theme. We talked recently about how the CDC changed its webpage advising the public on concerns about vaccines and autism such that it now informs the public that there may indeed be a link. Its stated reason for doing this is, essentially, because a link between the two has not been “disproven”. As I mentioned in my post, that isn’t how science works. You don’t have to prove a negative in science. The onus of evidence is on the party making a claim. If there is no valid evidence to support a claim, the default is null, or to behave as if the claim is not true.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. personally directed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to update its website to contradict its longtime guidance that vaccines don’t cause autism, he told The New York Times in an interview published Friday.
“The whole thing about ‘vaccines have been tested and there’s been this determination made,’ is just a lie,” Kennedy said in the interview, which was conducted Thursday.
Again, this isn’t how science works. It’s not a “determination” that’s been made. It’s that the claim that autism and vaccines are linked has not been demonstrated through evidence and science and therefore is not considered a valid claim. If researchers want to do more peer-reviewed research, following good scientific methodology, have at it. More good data is always good. But we no more have to make a “determination” that vaccines don’t cause autism currently than we would need to make a “determination” that chocolate milk causes autism. A link has simply not been established, so we behave as though there is no link. That’s how this works.
Couple that with the even more recent news that Kennedy’s new Deputy Director of the CDC is Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham. Abraham himself has espoused many of the anti-vaxxer views that he shares with Kennedy.
Under Abraham’s leadership, the Louisiana health department waited months to inform residents about a deadly whooping cough (pertussis) outbreak. He also has a clear record of anti-vaccine views. Earlier this year, he told a Louisiana news outlet he doesn’t recommend COVID-19 vaccines because “I prefer natural immunity.” In February, he ordered the health department to stop promoting mass vaccinations, including flu shots, and barred staff from running seasonal vaccine campaigns.
While he doesn’t support lifesaving vaccines, he is a big fan of using the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and the de-worming drug ivermectin to treat COVID-19, despite studies finding both ineffective against the viral infection. In his newsletter, Faust notes that in 2021, Abraham was the seventh-highest prescriber of ivermectin out of 12,000 practicing physicians in the state. This fits with his longer record of troubling prescriptions. In 2013, he was one of the top opioid prescribers.
So, Kennedy publicly puts anti-vaxxer talking points on display as public guidance via the CDC website, not to mention all the words that manage to tumble from his mouth, and continues to put anti-vaxxer and anti-medicine officials to lead HHS and its child agencies. What’s the result? Pertussis is on the rise. America is about to lose its elimination status of measles.
And, if you want to put a local lens on all of this, communities in South Carolina, that have essentially behaved as Kennedy would wish, are suffering from outbreaks of measles and still people won’t get vaccinated.
South Carolina’s measles outbreak isn’t yet as large as those in other states, such as New Mexico, Arizona, and Kansas. But it shows how a confluence of larger national trends — including historically low vaccination rates, skepticism fueled by the pandemic, misinformation, and “health freedom” ideologies proliferated by conservative politicians — have put some communities at risk for the reemergence of a preventable, potentially deadly virus.
“Everyone talks about it being the canary in the coal mine because it’s the most contagious infectious disease out there,” said Josh Michaud, associate director for global and public health policy at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. “The logic is indisputable that we’re likely to see more outbreaks.”
10% of children enrolled in Spartanburg County do not meet the vaccination requirements, including for the MMR vaccine. Many have religious exemptions, which are laughably easy to obtain and don’t require any affirmative description of what religion we’re even talking about. And the drop from 95% vaccinated status, the percentage in which a community will obtain herd immunity, happened in the last five or so years. Right when Kennedy became a nationally public figure. Go back a decade and its even worse.
The number of students in South Carolina who have been granted religious exemptions has increased dramatically over the past decade. That’s particularly true in the Upstate region, where religious exemptions have increased sixfold from a decade ago. During the 2013-14 school year, 2,044 students in the Upstate were granted a religious exemption to the vaccine requirements, according to data published by The Post and Courier. By fall 2024, that number had jumped to more than 13,000.
Public health officials are putting on mobile vaccination clinics in the area, but very few people are showing up. Misinformation, it seems, is more powerful than watching your fellow neighbors get infected with measles.
This all looks like chaos. And to a large degree it is chaos. But you can draw a straight line between the national bullshit that Kennedy and his cadre of sycophants are engaging in and the illness that is taking hold in places like Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Do not mistake one as being separate from the other. They are in direct relation.
Unlike the many causes Kennedy has claimed for autism.
We’ve talked a lot about measles throughout this year, which is particularly frustrating given that America officially eliminated this disease from its endemic state back in 2000. How we got here is a very simple story: too many people refused to vaccinate themselves and/or their children, giving the virus a foothold which it had been deprived for nearly a quarter of a century. And how that happened is also a frustratingly simple story: a combination of granola-munching liberals and the religious right in America got together in an unholy alliance to make up conspiracy theories about vaccines, claiming they cause autism and other complications.
If there is a singular face for this idiotic movement, it is, of course, RFK Jr., who now heads up the Department of Health & Human Services. There should be no preamble necessary to explain just how bad RFK Jr. has been in his current role, nor how directly responsible he is for the anti-vaxxer movement going back long before this current administration had the audacity to place American healthcare in his hands. We’ve been talking about how this administration’s inaction has put America’s measles elimination status at risk going all the way back to April.
We’re nearly there. To lose that status, a country must have endured continuous spread of a common strain of the disease over the course of 12 months. The CDC recently linked several outbreaks in America together via a singular strain, putting us at just over 10 months of continuous spread.
The Times obtained a recording of a call during which officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed to state health departments that the ongoing measles outbreak at the border of Arizona and Utah is a continuation of the explosive outbreak in West Texas that began in mid- to late-January. That is, the two massive outbreaks are being caused by the same subtype of measles virus.
The massive outbreak in Texas began in mid- to late-January and was declared over on August 18. In all, there were 762 cases of measles confirmed in the outbreak. Utah and Arizona started seeing some measles cases in June, but those outbreaks appeared to take off in August. To date, Utah and Arizona have reported 212 cases.
As ArsTechnica notes, America is not alone in this embarrassing failure, nor first. Canada just a few weeks ago lost its own elimination status for measles, having also endured 12 months of continuous spread of a singular strain. The cause for that is the same as in the States: non-participation in vaccination. And, frankly, the same people are responsible. Ignorance knows no borders, it turns out.
Canada achieved elimination in 1998. The US did the same in 2000. Elimination was achieved through hard-fought vaccination campaigns, as two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine is 97 percent protective against the virus, and that protection is considered lifelong. But, since that time, vaccine misinformation and potent rhetoric from anti-vaccine activists—including current US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—have taken hold, driving vaccination rates down on a population level. While the vast majority of American and Canadian parents continue to vaccinate their children, certain pockets and close-knit communities have become dramatically undervaccinated, providing potential footholds for the virus.
The CDC is, right now, touting its plan to combat measles. On its website, it talks about how it is ramping up its vaccination programs, trying to vaccinate more people, build out surveillance programs to monitor the disease’s spread, and respond quickly to outbreaks.
I’ve reported on measles this year on a continual basis. I’m here to tell you one thing: if the CDC is doing literally any of the above, then it must be doing it in secret because I can’t square a single one of those claims with the reality we’re seeing across the country. RFK Jr. heads up HHS, under which CDC operates, and his messaging has been in direct opposition to what his child agency says it’s doing. He has questioned vaccines at every turn. He tore apart ACIP, the CDC advisory panel on immunization programs, and rebuilt it with anti-vaxxers that have already weakened our vaccination programs.
And it shows in the numbers. Perhaps you thought that the two outbreaks had waned and the rate of spread was in decline. It absolutely is not.
Sure, we’re at half the weekly new case rate compared with February and March. But those were the cold months, when viruses like this tend to spread more regularly due to more time being spent indoors without open windows for ventilation. Late winter and early spring are considered measles season and the fact that we’re already seeing a gradually rising spread rate, larger than before this past February and March, is extremely worrying.
The worst part of all of this is to be reminded that, while America did eliminate endemic measles in 2000, that came after focused vaccination campaigns kicked off in 1991. Nearly a decade of work, completely down the drain. All because RFK Jr., a bunch of Hollywood celebrities, and pockets of the ultra-religious couldn’t be bothered to listen to actual scientists and doctors.
In 1991, America endured 9,643 cases of measles. We’re on pace to achieve something like at least 2,000 cases in 2025. If it takes a couple of years to get back to elimination status at that number, it represents both needless suffering by the American people and a complete embarrassment to those in charge of America’s health.
I knew this was coming but this still is absolutely maddening. In all of our coverage of RFK Jr., particularly since his vile appointment and confirmation as head of Health and Human Services, it’s been abundantly clear that he’s an anti-vaxxer. While that may seem obvious to most of our readers, it’s important to note that there are a great many Kennedy fans out there who will tell you he’s not that and that he instead is merely seeking more science on the effects of vaccines. Some say this in genuine fashion, while most say it knowing precisely how full of shit they are. The man’s time at DHS has made any debate over this point academic, of course. Every action he’s taking is the action an anti-vaxxer would make, no matter what he may admit to or otherwise. Still, there was enough nuance and subtlety in all of this to give some folks the cover needed to claim that Kennedy isn’t what he plainly is.
Well, that time is now past. The CDC recently updated its webpage meant to educate the public on the lack of a link between autism and vaccines to indicate that, hey, there might just be a link after all.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its website to promote the widely debunked claim that vaccines may cause autism. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly linked vaccines to autism, and now the public health agency he oversees is publicly reversing its position to reflect that belief.
The CDC site previously said studies showed there was no connection between receiving vaccines and developing autism. HHS communications director Andrew Nixon said the agency updated the site to reflect “gold standard, evidence-based science.”
Okay, I’m not going to mince words on this: this change to this publicly facing webpage is unscientific, dangerous, and fucking evil. It’s one man and his cadre of handpicked anti-vaxxer cronies foisting upon the public guidance that is not built on science or medicine. And it’s patently obvious that the approach here is an unscientific one.
There is going to be some nuance here, but this is really important. Here is the banner at the top of the page after the changes:
Let’s go one by one. The first bullet point is by far the stupidest. Scientists simply don’t talk like this. If the CDC would like to have a webpage for every single potential cause of autism that studies haven’t “ruled out”, well, that is going to require a hell of a lot of webpages. Has science ruled out that ghosts don’t cause autism? Or that the hand of god isn’t directly involved? How about, oh I don’t know… turtles? Have there been enough studies done, peer reviewed of course, that specifically rule out the possibility that proximity to turtles doesn’t have some causative link to autism? I can promise you there hasn’t, because that would be insane.
In science, the burden of proof is on those who make a claim. In absence of that proof, the proper course of belief is in the null. In other words, scientifically, making a scientific claim puts the onus to prove it on the claimant and puts zero onus on anyone else. If I want to argue that turtles cause autism, I have to prove it. Otherwise, you assume no link exists. And that’s what the CDC’s page used to do. It used to say that there is no link, which is shorthand for the fact that no link has been proven to exist, which is precisely the right way to describe this.
As for the claim that studies proving a link have been ignored, they very much have not. They’ve either been exposed for their poor methodology or they’ve been debunked. That’s it. And the rest of the research out there indicates, again, there is no link between autism and vaccines.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website has been changed to promote false information suggesting vaccines cause autism,” said Dr. Susan J. Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, in a statement. “Since 1998, independent researchers across seven countries have conducted more than 40 high-quality studies involving over 5.6 million people. The conclusion is clear and unambiguous: There’s no link between vaccines and autism.”
She went on to say, “Anyone repeating this harmful myth is misinformed or intentionally trying to mislead parents. We call on the CDC to stop wasting government resources to amplify false claims that sow doubt in one of the best tools we have to keep children healthy and thriving: routine immunizations.”
As for CDC’s new assessment of causes of autism, who the actual fuck knows what that means. So far, out of Kennedy at least, we’ve heard that the causes of autism are maybe vaccines, definitely Tylenol (except maybe not), and male circumcision. They’re all over the damned place and there is zero trust from anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together that any new analysis coming out of this bullshit iteration of the CDC is at all trustworthy.
And, people, this matters. We are, right now, on the verge of losing our measles elimination status and it’s because of exactly this kind of bullshit from exactly these assclowns. That has happened because vaccination rates have been steadily falling for two decades and this is going to make it much, much worse. Kennedy should be dragged before Congress for hearings to explain why this change was made, on what scientific basis the change was made, and why in the world impeachment efforts to oust him ought not to begin immediately.
Anything less is Congress abdicating its responsibility.
