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Tag: RFK Jr.

  • What RFK Jr.’s Unproven Autism Treatment Could Mean for Autistic Patients and Their Families

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    Last September, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Donald Trump made a big announcement: The federal government had supposedly uncovered a clear link between autism and mothers taking acetaminophen (Tylenol) during their pregnancy. The proclamation was swiftly lambasted by scientists outside the administration, yet it’s only one facet of the Trump administration’s concerning new approach to autism.

    That same day, RFK Jr. stated the Food and Drug Administration would soon approve a new treatment for autism, a form of folate (vitamin B9) known as leucovorin. As with the acetaminophen link, however, the evidence supporting the use of leucovorin for autism rests on shaky ground, to say the least. And many experts worry about what could happen to people with autism and their families if the drug starts to become widely taken.

    “The idea of doing this for everyone—we’re going to see side effects, we’re going to see negative outcomes,” Audrey Brumback, a pediatric neurologist specializing in autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions at UT Health Austin, told Gizmodo.

    A shaky case

    Leucovorin (folinic acid) is a form of the vitamin folate, also known as vitamin B9. Folate has many functions, from helping the body make red blood cells to supporting the healthy development of a fetus. The latter is why doctors now advise pregnant women to take folic acid (a synthetic form of folate) supplements, since low folate levels raise the risk of children being born with neural tube birth defects. Leucovorin has historically been used to counteract the toxic side effects of certain chemotherapy drugs. But it’s also effective at treating a rare condition known as cerebral folate deficiency, or CFD.

    CFD is characterized by having low folate levels in the brain but normal levels in blood (this distinction also makes it harder to detect). The low brain levels can then lead to neurological symptoms like seizures and intellectual disability, as well as trouble with speech and coordination; these symptoms usually begin to appear around the age of two.

    The condition is commonly caused by defective antibodies that attack a protein called folate receptor alpha (important for transporting folate across the blood-brain barrier) but can also be tied to rare inherited genetic mutations in the FOLR1 gene, which encodes folate receptor alpha. Leucovorin can be transported through a different delivery method than folate receptor alpha, however, meaning it can raise folate levels in the brains of people with CFD. The earlier children with CFD are treated with leucovorin, the greater the chance they can avoid the developmental delays it causes, though the therapy can still help older patients.

    Some of the symptoms of CFD are similar to those found in severe cases of autism, and some research has suggested people with autism are more likely to have CFD or antibodies to folate receptor alpha. Based on this early research, some scientists are genuinely hopeful about the potential of leucovorin to help children with both autism and CFD.

    During the September announcement, RFK Jr. claimed leucovorin was an exciting therapy that might benefit “large numbers of children” with autism. Marty Makary, current FDA commissioner, went further, stating that leucovorin could possibly help “hundreds of thousands of kids,” which would represent a substantial portion of U.S. children diagnosed with autism (a 2016 study estimated that at least 1.5 million children in the U.S. had diagnosed autism, though it’s a figure that’s certainly risen since). And in its own announcement, HHS stated that leucovorin would become the first “FDA-recognized therapeutic for children with cerebral folate deficiency and autistic symptoms.”

    Yet the actual language of the FDA decision only extends the labeling of leucovorin to treat CFD, with barely a mention of autism. And plenty of scientists and doctors in the field aren’t so optimistic about the drug’s future as an autism treatment.

    “The idea of having a medicine be used off-label is not new, and that in itself is not a problem. It’s just, what are we basing this recommendation on?” Brumback said. “This is not a strong evidence base. We’re basically still at the anecdote phase.”

    The research supporting leucovorin for treating autism is remarkably thin, and it’s gotten even thinner lately. Last week, the European Journal of Pediatrics retracted a trial testing leucovorin supplements in children with autism after outside scientists discovered statistical inconsistencies that cast doubt on the study’s results and conclusions (the authors stated they intended to revise and resubmit their study). The trial was one of only five such trials conducted so far, and the largest one to date, with 77 children.

    These studies aside, there isn’t much substantial data supporting the basic premises underlying the therapy. Scientists aren’t certain if children with autism really are more likely to have CFD, or if CFD or its causes (antibodies to folate receptor alpha or FOLR1 mutations) can be a driver of autism. We’re also not sure whether CFD can be reliably detected through screening for antibody levels, a method used in some studies.

    Autism is a complex condition that can be caused by many different things that happen early on in development, though genetic factors play a major role. So it’s possible that some children’s autism could be closely tied to CFD or its causes. But that subset, even if it exists, isn’t likely to reach into the hundreds of thousands, according to Shafali Jeste, a behavioral child neurologist.

    “Autism is extremely heterogeneous, and it’s a behavioral diagnosis that’s based on thousands of different causes and profiles and brain pathways. So it’s very unlikely we’re going to have one pill that just ubiquitously addresses a core symptom,” said Jeste, who is chair of pediatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles. “And so that’s why I think when medications like leucovorin get touted as this cure or treatment for the core symptoms of autism that works in all kids, it’s problematic.”

    Citing the lack of robust evidence, organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics have recommended against the routine use of leucovorin for autism. But both Jeste and Brumback have encountered families who have asked about the treatment or who are currently using it for their children. Jeste doesn’t prescribe leucovorin herself, while Brumback has stopped issuing new prescriptions since the Trump announcement. But they’re willing to talk to families about the treatment and to support those who decide to use it.

    “I will never judge because I think that parents are trying to do right by their children. So it’s very appropriate to wonder about leucovorin and ask,” Jeste said. “I am very open to answering questions and being honest that we just don’t have that evidence right now.”

    While leucovorin is generally well-tolerated when used for chemotherapy, it isn’t risk-free either. The AAP notes that it can cause symptoms like vomiting, diarrhea, and alopecia. And there’s at least the possibility that it could have more serious complications when used long-term for autism.

    “This is a very specific population of people who are undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. And so there are side effects of taking the vitamins in high doses that we probably wouldn’t notice in that population,” Brumback said, noting that some other forms of vitamin B can cause nerve damage when taken in large doses. “For me, that’s enough to say primum non nocere [Latin for “First, do no harm”]. That’s especially true for the kids who are most severe, who can’t communicate if they’re in pain or in discomfort; having something that could potentially cause neuropathy is a nonstarter for me.”

    Brumback and Jeste are also both specialists who tend to see patients with more profound autism. And they worry families prescribed leucovorin by general practitioners might be less likely to get proper follow-up and care. Some people could also turn to leucovorin supplements that are far less regulated and could be less safe to consume than the prescription version.

    The future of autism treatment

    One probable reason leucovorin is getting the spotlight from the Trump administration is the lack of other easily adoptable treatments for autism, particularly in the most severe cases. Since taking over HHS, RFK Jr. has promised to deliver new insights into autism while claiming that researchers haven’t done enough to find concrete answers.

    Yet there actually have been genuine strides lately in developing effective behavioral interventions for autism that can improve people’s quality of life, Jeste says. Within the next 10 years, she’s even hopeful we will start to develop treatments for severe cases of autism strongly linked to specific genetic mutations.

    “The one upside of this whole leucovorin conversation has been that it’s forced us as a medical and scientific community to be more rigorous in how we talk about science, how we talk about what we know, and why we may have skepticism about certain studies,” she said.

    In the most likely scenario, leucovorin will follow the example of secretin, a hormone that similarly showed early promise in the 1990s but crashed to the ground when multiple clinical trials failed to validate that promise. If that’s true, then the drug could just end up being a curious footnote in the history of autism research.

    That said, RFK Jr. and his allies are already setting the stage for the government to officially endorse his worst pet theories about autism. He’s refused to accept the mainstream consensus that rising rates of reported autism are largely caused by expanded diagnostic criteria and greater awareness, for instance. Last year, he ordered HHS to launch a new study examining the supposed link between vaccines and autism—a link debunked by piles of research conducted over the past several decades.

    So even if the hype behind leucovorin isn’t validated and it never becomes widely used, Kennedy may still succeed in further stoking his anti-science agenda.

    “I think it’s put parents in a very difficult position because they don’t know who to trust and who to listen to. We have a government saying that we as a medical community are not essentially doing right by our patients. I mean, that is a really hard message to hear,” Jeste said. “So I’m very sympathetic to the uncertainty and confusion that this has created.”

    While RFK might profess to have the best interests in mind of people with autism, he seems to have antiquated ideas about the lives they lead. In April 2025, he stated that autism “destroy families” and that children with autism “will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date.”

    Of course, plenty of people with autism have and will go on to do all those things. And even for the most severe cases of autism, it’s more often the lack of support, resources, and societal understanding that causes people and their families to suffer greatly than the condition itself. People with autism deserve recognition, respect, and quality care, which includes interventions and treatments strongly supported by evidence. That’s something that Brumback hopes isn’t forgotten in all of this mess.

    “To have autism is not to be pitied; it’s not to be seen as something that a family should be embarrassed about—it’s part of life,” she said. “I want that to be the message of positivity; to help people where they’re at and to just have an appreciation for human life.”

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    Ed Cara

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  • Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is redefining the ‘healthy’ American diet—and food companies are making 5 major changes to keep up | Fortune

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    Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vision for a healthy America has triggered the most significant shift in federal nutrition policy in decades. Leading the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, Kennedy, as head of Health and Human Services, has enacted dramatic changes that have started to trickle down to the grocery aisle. Central to this shift is a fundamental change in how the government views nutrition. 

    “The philosophy here is that if you eat whole foods and don’t eat ultra-processed foods, you’ll be eating much more healthfully,” Marion Nestle, a nutrition policy expert, told Fortune.

    What the MAHA movement entails is a push against the “industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” President Donald Trump said in his post on Truth Social announcing Kennedy as his pick for head of HHS. And that movement has gained steam, with nearly four in 10 parents saying they support it. 

    In the past year, Kennedy and the Trump administration have dramatically transformed American food policy. Here are five ways the MAHA movement is already reshaping supermarket shelves.

    1. Dairy’s revival 

    The Department of Agriculture on Jan. 7 overhauled dietary guidelines, flipping the food pyramid on its head. This included an emphasis on full-fat dairy and all types of fat, including both healthy and saturated fats. The guidelines recommend three servings of full-fat dairy per day as Kennedy declared the USDA was “ending the war on saturated fats.” The guidelines de-emphasized whole grains, which were previously considered the most important part of diets. “It was actually upside down before,” RFK Jr. argued when unveiling the guidelines.

    Yet the dairy trend has been hot long before the food pyramid flip. Americans consumed 650 pounds of dairy per person in 2024, with butter consumption at an all-time high. Yogurt and cottage cheese consumption also rose dramatically, according to USDA data. On the flipside, plant-based milk sales have declined, with brands like Oatly, known for its oat milk, reporting a U.S. sales slump.

    2. Beef tallow and seed oil backlash

    Kennedy has pushed seed oils from a fringe concern to a policy and cultural target, using his position as HHS secretary to repeatedly question the health and safety of canola, corn, and similar oils. While he hasn’t banned seed oils, federal nutrition messaging now emphasizes “healthy fats,” touting animal fats like beef tallow as an alternative. But other nutrition experts aren’t as convinced.

    “The philosophy behind it is that if you eat natural, whole foods, that you’ll reach satiety sooner and won’t eat other things,” Nestle told Fortune. “I think that remains to be seen.” 

    Nestle says consuming high amounts of animal fats could be linked to health complications like heart disease: “People who eat diets that are high in animal fats have higher blood cholesterol and higher risk for heart disease.”

    Food and beverage companies like PepsiCo have announced they will remove canola and soybean oil from Lay’s and Tostitos chips, with smaller companies like Real Good Foods following suit with “seed oil-free” frozen products.

    3. Saying bye to artificial dye

    Last April, Kennedy announced the U.S. would phase out synthetic dyes, claiming they were “petroleum-based chemicals,” poisonous, and a danger to children’s health. Since then, the health secretary has launched a coordinated effort with regulators to remove the most common synthetic dyes, substituting them with natural alternatives, including galdieria extract blue, a colorant derived from algae.

    Several companies—including PepsiCo and Tyson Foods—have already removed synthetic dyes from their products, meaning some Doritos and Cheetos will appear colorless or paler on store shelves. Other companies—including Hershey, Utz, and Campbell’s—have committed to removing dyes within the next several years. Mars Wrigley also announced Skittles, M&Ms, and Extra Gum will be available without artificial colors.

    As a result, grocery stores are likely to feature fewer neon and fluorescent-colored products, more “no artificial colors” callouts on packaging, and a growing share of naturally-colored food and beverages in the snack aisle.

    4. ‘Protein maxxing’

    From Starbucks’ protein lattes and matcha drinks, to Sweetgreen’s 106-gram protein bowl, the macronutrient  seems to be the ubiquitous selling point for brands. This trend is aligned with Kennedy’s push to recast protein as the central macronutrient of his nutrition reset. Kennedy’s new federal guidelines announced earlier this month recommended about 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day and urged Americans to “prioritize protein at every meal.” 

    “That’s what people are already eating,” Nestle told Fortune. “So that doesn’t require a change in anybody’s protein intake. Most people are already eating twice the protein they need.”

    Still, grocery aisles have transformed amid Americans’ protein craze, with shelves housing everything from protein Cheerio’s to protein in ice cream from brands like Protein Pints, which witnessed significant revenue growth in 2025, raking in more than $10 million.

    5. Swapping out high-fructose corn syrup

      Kennedy has also launched a crusade against high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), casting the sugar alternative as an emblematic ingredient of disease-driving food supply. Some brands, including Tyson and Kraft Heinz, have committed to removing HFCS from its products.

      Despite federal changes and rhetoric shifts toward natural foods and high-protein diets, Nestle says Americans still food shop less with their appetites than with their wallets.

      “Nobody follows dietary guidelines,” she said. “As long as ultra-processed foods are less expensive than real foods, that’s what people are going to be eating because they don’t have any other choice.”

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    Jake Angelo

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  • RFK Jr. Embraces the Science on Trans Kids | RealClearPolitics

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    Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. isn’t always very careful about evidence – but when it comes to gender affirmation treatments, the most painstaking research is on his side.

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    Rich Lowry, New York Post

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  • So, why are people talking about RFK and butts? | The Mary Sue

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    A wild couple of weeks for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. keeps escalating and social media would like off the ride. RFK is trending in conjunction with the word “felching” today. Needless to say, a lot of people out there are trying to digest this information that they did not ask for. Writer/former journalist Ryan Lizza has been talking about Olivia Nuzzi’s continuing scandal with RFK. He decided to effectively slow the Internet to a halt with that felching story.

    Lizza’s newsletter drops some really graphic details of alleged poems RFK wrote Nuzzi.  For context, The 51 year old used to be engaged to her, and their engagement was quickly broken off when allegations of infidelity surfaced. All of this is messy, pun not intended, and social media at large is living for every sorted detail that hits the timeline. It’s important to emphasize that these allegations are not confirmed yet. But the discourse machine is up and running.

    In the newsletter, Lizza says that RFK wrote, “Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest. … I mean to squeeze your cheeks to force open your mouth. I’ll hold your nose as you look up at me to encourage you to swallow. ‘Dont spill a drop’. I am a river You are my canyon, I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love.” 

    Now, the entire political social media landscape has a juicy new rumor to ruminate on and other users just trying to find recipes or Wordle solutions have to live with that information taking up space in their brains. It’s a no-win scenario for everyone involved.

    Why was RFK sending Olivia Nuzzi perverted poetry?

    olivia nuzzi and rfk together
    (Jason Mendez/Paul Morigi/Getty Images)

    RFK has demonstrated brazenness at every point of his political career. To be honest, he probably never thought these poems wouldn’t ever see the light of day. In that regard he’s the same as Nuzzi because her dirty laundry has been airing on social media for the better part of a year and a half now. Check out her MySpace single that is still somehow live on the Internet for more on just how long forever is on the web.

    In a better political climate, this would all be just tabloid fodder. But, multiple key stakeholders in this poetry situation have their hands in all kinds of government regulation. So, these little oddities become even more alluring for the average person to rubberneck at. 

    Over at The Handbasket, Marisa Kabas does amazing political writing on things that matter. She had to address all the Nuzzi/RFK nonsesnse in a recent newsletter. The writer is probably thrilled to have penned this before the word “Felching” came into the conversation. Her piece about Moral Rot in journalism is a must-read. 

    “There are some stories where there are no winners–only losers,” she says. “This is one of those stories.” That’s a feeling a lot of people have this year. Numerous stories manifest in ways that make you ask why a journalist withheld information for a book or deliberately covered for a colleague’s wrongdoing. But, our hunger for more juicy details ends up doing more damage than good.

    (Photo Credit: Getty Images)

    Have a tip we should know? [email protected]

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    Teresia Gray

    Teresia Gray (She/Her) is a writer here at the Mary Sue. She’s been writing professionally since 2016, but felt the allure of a TV screen for her entire upbringing. As a sponge for Cable Television debate shows and a survivor of “Peak Thinkpiece,” she has interests across the entire geek spectrum. Want to know why that politician you saw on TV said that thing, and why it matters? She’s got it for you. Yes, mainlining that much news probably isn’t healthy. Her work at the Mary Sue often includes political news, breaking stories, and general analysis of current events.

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    Teresia Gray

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  • RFK Jr. Is Now Blaming Vaccines for Peanut Allergies, Despite the Evidence

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    In recent years, peanut allergies have become a much less common feature of childhood, thanks to a major change in the advice doctors now give to parents. Despite this significant progress, however, RFK Jr. is now looking to another culprit—one consistent with his twisted ideology.

    It might be harder to come up with a list of health problems that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t blame on vaccines. In the latest development, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services argued that children’s peanut allergies are being caused by the dreaded jab.

    Kennedy made the remarks during an event held on Monday by the Food Allergy Fund. After dismissing the leading theory for the recent rise in peanut allergies—a lack of exposure to the food in our youngest years—he speculated about the aluminum included in some vaccines as well as pesticides. He then pledged to conduct research that would uncover the supposed real culprits behind the condition.

    “Those studies have never been done. We’re going to do them now and we will identify what is causing these allergies,” he said.

    Ironically enough, however, food allergy rates in the U.S. have already plunged as of late.

    The aluminum misdirect

    RFK Jr. relied on personal anecdotes to rebut scientific evidence. He stated that the link between food allergies and a lack of early exposure made no sense to him because of his experiences with his own children, five of whom had allergies. One child reportedly had a peanut allergy so severe that they had to visit the emergency room 22 times by the age of two.

    “My house was so filled with peanut butter and I was eating peanut butter for two meals a day and my wife was eating peanut butter when pregnant,” he said, adding that we should instead be focusing on environmental factors like the aluminum in vaccines and pesticides.

    Aluminum is sometimes added to a vaccine to boost its ability to provoke a proper immune response from our body. And its inclusion can cause local reactions from a vaccination, such as redness or injection site pain (this is usually a sign of the immune response developing as hoped). Scientists have studied this potential link at depth—to see whether this ingredient can have any long-term health risks—and most of this research has failed to find anything concerning.

    A study published just this past June, for example, found no link between the total aluminum exposure from vaccination during the first two years of life and a higher risk of 50 different conditions, including allergic disorders. Meanwhile, some research has suggested that pesticide exposure might raise the risk of asthma, though not other types of allergies.

    It’s also worth noting that people are exposed to small doses of aluminum from all sorts of things, and the amount used in vaccines is far smaller than we typically get from our food or drink.

    This is hardly the first time that Kennedy and his anti-vaccination allies have tried to point the finger at aluminum in vaccines as a grave threat. And unsurprisingly, plenty of health experts and groups aren’t on board.

    Earlier this October, the American Academy of Pediatrics blankly stated: “Evidence shows that vaccines with aluminum are safe and beneficial for children’s health and wellbeing. Research has not found evidence that aluminum in vaccines cause autoimmune conditions, neurodevelopmental disorders, or serious adverse events.”

    A solution in need of a problem

    What makes this latest bit of drivel from Kennedy all the more baffling is its timing. Allergies are a complex condition, and there often can be more than one cause behind them, such as our genetics. But real-world results have strongly validated the hypothesis of early exposure preventing food allergies.

    For many years, doctors told parents to avoid introducing peanuts to their children too early in life (before age three), based on some studies that suggested a potential risk of allergy. But a landmark study in 2015 failed to support that risk and instead pointed to a preventative effect from early exposure. Eventually, this evidence convinced enough experts to change tack.

    Starting in 2015, various medical groups changed their guidelines on peanut allergies, with more following in 2017. They now advised parents to introduce foods with peanuts to their kids as early as four months old. In the years after that change, food allergies in the U.S. have sharply dropped. A study earlier this October found that diagnosed peanut allergy cases had declined 43% following the 2017 change, while food allergies in general had declined 36%.

    Some kids can and will still get allergies, even if they are exposed to peanuts early in life. And as exemplified by this recent shift in guidelines, sometimes the medical consensus gets things wrong at first. But at the end of the day, I’d much rather trust the scientific process than the decision-making prowess of RFK Jr.

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    Ed Cara

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  • Pfizer’s mRNA Flu Vaccine Works Great, but RFK Jr. Might Ruin It for Everyone

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    Next-generation vaccines could make the flu season less of a snot-filled nightmare—if they ever reach the public, that is. Trial data out this week shows that Pfizer’s mRNA-based flu vaccine performed markedly better than a traditional shot.

    On Wednesday, researchers published the results of a Phase III trial on the vaccine, funded by Pfizer, in the New England Journal of Medicine. The experimental vaccine was significantly more effective at preventing flu than a standard vaccine, the researchers found. The vaccine appears to cause slightly more side effects than others, but there’s a bigger concern: It’s uncertain whether it will be approved in the U.S., given the government’s current skepticism and fearmongering around mRNA vaccine technology.

    Better but with a catch

    The trial involved more than 18,000 healthy adult volunteers in the U.S., South Africa, and the Philippines. It took place over the course of the 2022 to 2023 flu season. People were randomly assigned to receive a single dose of the experimental vaccine, dubbed modRNA, or Fluzone, a widely used inactivated flu vaccine made by Sanofi Pasteur. Both vaccines covered the four most common types of flu predicted to be circulating that season: two influenza A viruses and two influenza B viruses.

    There were noticeably fewer confirmed cases of influenza in the modRNA group compared to the control vaccine group (57 vs 87), the study showed. Overall, the modRNA vaccine was 34.5% more effective at preventing flu-like illness. The experimental vaccine also appeared to generate a higher antibody response to the influenza A strains and a similar response to the influenza B strains (nearly every confirmed flu case in the study was caused by influenza A).

    “This randomized trial showed that the modRNA vaccine provided both similar and improved prevention of a first episode of laboratory-confirmed influenza in adults between the ages of 18 and 64 years,” the study researchers wrote.

    That added protection may come with some tradeoffs, however. People given modRNA reported more local reactions (70.1% vs. 43.1%) after their shot, such as injection site pain. They were also more likely to report systematic adverse events in general, such as fever (5.6% vs 1.7%).

    This finding makes sense, since a vaccine’s adverse events are often linked to the immune response it generates. So a stronger immune response tends to cause more side effects. But while adverse events were more common in those who took modRNA, these events were still usually mild or moderate in severity. In the end, the study researchers concluded that the adverse event profiles of the two vaccines were similar.

    The RFK Jr. wrinkle

    All that said, the most serious hurdle to modRNA’s approval isn’t its potential side effects.

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, and his allies have systemically undermined vaccines during the second Trump administration. Just this week, for instance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its website to boost the debunked myth that they cause autism. But as much as Kennedy and his buddies may mistrust vaccines in general, they have an especially strong hatred for mRNA vaccines, the newest type of vaccine that first saw wide use during the covid-19 pandemic.

    RFK Jr. has (wrongly) stated that the mRNA covid-19 shots developed by Pfizer and Moderna were the “deadliest” vaccines ever created, for instance. Anti-vaccination advocates have also falsely claimed that mRNA vaccines are gene therapies, that they make people magnetic, and that they’re causing an explosion in cases of “turbo cancer.”

    These unsupported fears of mRNA vaccines have had real-world consequences. In May, Moderna delayed the approval application for its combination flu/covid-19 vaccine (which also seemed to show greater protection against flu) after the FDA asked for more data. In August, RFK Jr. also pulled $500 million in federal funding for mRNA vaccine research and development.

    Contrary to claims from the anti-vaccination movement that mRNA vaccines are worse or more dangerous than other vaccines, this technology could actually strengthen our defenses against seasonal flu, and not just in terms of improved effectiveness. Since these vaccines typically take less time to tweak and produce than older types of vaccines, countries could wait longer to select the strains predicted to circulate during the season. That shortened lag could then prevent unexpected strains from causing a mismatch with the vaccine (a disastrous situation that’s now happening this winter).

    Moderna has said that it will seek approval for its stand-alone flu shot next year. And given these latest results, Pfizer will undoubtedly apply for approval of its modRNA vaccine, too. Typically, both vaccines would seem to have an excellent chance of approval. But nothing is typical these days.

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    Ed Cara

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  • RFK Jr. said ‘we’re not cutting research.’ That’s wrong

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    President Donald Trump and other administration officials have touted drastic reductions in government spending and size, including at the Department of Health and Human Services. Under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s purview, the department moved earlier this year to lay off about 10,000 employees and end millions in grant funding.

    In front of a George Washington University audience, however, Kennedy downplayed the budget slashing. His thesis: The administration cut bureaucracy, not research.

    “We’re not cutting science,” Kennedy said Nov. 17. “We’re not cutting research.” 

    Some studies were “paused” as the agency cut its workforce earlier in the year, but the studies were renewed, so it would be a mistake to say they were cut, he said. And, he added, clinical trials weren’t abandoned — they all continue to be funded. 

    “We’re cutting bureaucrats,” Kennedy said. 

    News reports, HHS communications and Kennedy’s past statements don’t bear this out.

    (C-SPAN)

    Kennedy’s agency terminated millions of dollars worth of federal grants, including hundreds of National Institutes of Health research grants. 

    “NIH is taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities,” HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard told KFF Health News in April. We contacted HHS to ask what Kennedy meant when he said the agency hadn’t cut research and received no response. 

    More than 70 researchers told ProPublica they were unable to continue their projects because of the grant terminations. At least 30 researchers said the grant terminations forced abrupt ends to clinical research and trials, leaving patients in limbo, ProPublica reported. 

    In practice, the cuts meant abandoning more than $800 million worth of research into cancers and viruses that often affect LGBTQ minority groups, setting back efforts to fight sexually transmitted infections, The New York Times reported in May. 

    The cuts also halted a yearslong University of California San Francisco clinical trial aiming to assess the financial, emotional and physical impacts of providing guaranteed income to young, Black adults. NIH cut the clinical trial’s funding in March. The research team was unable to conduct its final interviews, analyze the data or share findings with participants and policymakers, Sheri Lippman told the San Francisco Chronicle. Lippman was the project’s principal investigator and is a UCSF medicine professor. 

    The Trump administration cut messenger RNA research, too. Kennedy in August said the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority would cancel almost $500 million in investments, affecting 22 projects. HHS promoted the cuts as winding down “mRNA vaccine development.”

    That cut undermined research — including non-vaccine research. One of the canceled grants, for example, had been awarded to Emory University for nearly $750,000. It would have supported developing a dry powder mRNA antiviral therapy that could be inhaled as a way to treat patients with influenza and COVID-19. 

    Grant Witness, a group tracking Trump administration action against scientific research grants in 2025, found that more than 4,400 of NIH grants were stopped. The administration also froze about 1,000 grants, effectively terminating them, said Scott Delaney, one of the scientists who started Grant Witness. 

    Before Kennedy’s Nov. 17 remarks, he had acknowledged cutting research, in some cases saying the cuts had been made incorrectly. “About $750,000 of a University of Michigan grant into adolescent diabetes was cut,” CBS News’ chief medical correspondent told Kennedy in April. “Did you know that?” 

    Kennedy said he didn’t but would look into it. 

    “There’s a number of studies that were cut that came to our attention and that did not deserve to be cut and we reinstated them,” Kennedy said. “Our purpose is not to reduce any level of scientific research that’s important.”

    The Trump administration has restored about 52% of terminated NIH grants and 122 frozen grants as of Nov. 19, Grant Witness reported. But about 2,500 grants remain terminated or frozen.

    Even cuts that were ultimately reversed harmed research, scientists say

    The cuts disrupted hundreds of clinical trials, research shows. 

    A JAMA Internal Medicine research letter published in November found that 383 NIH-supported clinical trials lost funding from Feb. 28 to Aug. 15. The grant funding disruptions impacted approximately 1 in 30 clinical trials and more than 74,000 trial participants, researchers said. Those trials were disproportionately based in the Northeastern U.S. or in other countries and mostly studied infectious diseases, prevention or behavioral interventions. 

    It wasn’t clear exactly how funding disruptions affected each clinical trial. Ending a grant might not kill research outright. Researchers could potentially secure alternative funding and continue their work. In some cases, research could resume once the government restored its funding. 

    Scientists told PolitiFact that funding disruptions harm research, even if it is restored.

    “Grant terminations force researchers to stop their studies,” Delaney said. 

    Researchers might lose contact with study participants, stop data collection or be forced to lay off scientists and other staff.  

    “When grants are reinstated, scientists can’t go back in time to collect data that they missed,” Delaney said. “You can’t go back and get a blood sample from six weeks ago.”

    Although a federal judge ordered the NIH to restore hundreds of biomedical research grants, researchers told The Boston Globe that uncertainty and delays marred efforts to restart their work.

    Grant funds support scientists, supplies and clinical trials, so merely reinstating a grant cannot undo the harm of a cut, said Joshua Weitz, a University of Maryland biology professor who co-founded the Science and Community Impacts Mapping Project. 

    “Research is not a spigot that can be turned on then off then on again without impact,” he said. 

    Our ruling

    Kennedy said administration officials were not cutting science or research. 

    Reports of halted research and clinical trials demonstrate otherwise. Although some previously terminated or frozen grants were reinstated, about 2,500 grants remain terminated or frozen. And scientists said the cuts harmed research, even when funding was restored.

    We rate Kennedy’s statement Pants on Fire!

    PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

    RELATED: Donald Trump’s cuts to medical research would be steep, but Hakeem Jeffries exaggerates them   

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  • CDC Promotes Unproven Vaccine–Autism Link in Website Reversal

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    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has made a significant revision to a section of its website regarding the relationship between vaccines and autism. Previously, the CDC maintained that vaccines do not cause autism based on extensive research and population studies. The updated statement now suggests that studies have not definitively ruled out a potential link between infant vaccines and autism, marking a shift in the agency’s stance.

     

    This change reflects claims often associated with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has publicly advocated the view that vaccines may be linked to autism, despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that discredits such connections.

     

    In the revised wording, the CDC states that the assertion “vaccines do not cause autism” is “not an evidence-based claim,” suggesting that previous studies showing no link may not have been fully acknowledged by health authorities. The revision has raised concerns among public health experts regarding the potential implications for vaccine confidence and public health messaging.

     

    Reports from Axios and the Washington Post highlight that many CDC career scientists were not consulted or informed before the revision and learned of it only after the update was made public. This change follows an announcement by HHS regarding a research partnership with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to explore possible connections between vaccines and autism, which has added to the unease among health professionals.

     

    An HHS spokesperson defended the revised language, stating that it reflects “gold-standard, evidence-based science.” However, there are still questions concerning the motivations behind the review and its timing, as well as how it may influence public perception of vaccine safety. 

     

    MBFC Rating Update:
    Due to this shift, Media Bias/Fact Check has recently downgraded the CDC to Questionable, citing alignment with a Right-Biased government agenda and increasing promotion of anti-science propaganda, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience under current leadership. While the CDC still hosts valuable historical data and disease tracking resources, its factual reporting is now considered Mixed as political influence continues to erode scientific independence.

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  • RFK Jr.’s Buddies Are Back to Undermine Vaccines

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    The federal government is officially back to work, and unfortunately, so is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s influence over the country’s public health. Early next month, a panel of outside advisors assembled by Kennedy will meet once again and probably take a sledgehammer to more vaccines.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently posted the draft agenda for the next meeting of its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, scheduled for December 4 and 5. Among other things, ACIP plans to discuss the childhood vaccination schedule as well as “contaminants” in vaccines. Though it’s not exactly clear what ACIP will vote on during this meeting, some of its members will likely try to remove the decades-old recommendation that children be vaccinated against hepatitis B starting at birth—a decision that even some GOP lawmakers are trying to prevent.

    “I want to make America healthy, and you don’t start by stopping recommendations that have made us substantially healthier,” Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) told CBS News’ Face the Nation in an interview released Sunday.

    The hijacked ACIP

    Earlier this year, Kennedy unilaterally dismissed all 17 members of the ACIP, the panel of outside experts that helps guide the CDC’s vaccine policies. He then quickly added new advisors, many of whom—like Kennedy himself—have a history of spreading misinformation about vaccines.

    In its two meetings to date, the rejiggered ACIP has issued several recommendations welcomed by the anti-vaccination movement. It moved to ban the few remaining vaccines that contained thimerosal, for instance, an ingredient that antivaxxers have long accused of causing autism with dubious evidence. Though thimerosal was removed from most vaccines as a precaution in the early 2000s, studies since have failed to find any link to autism, and autism rates have only continued to rise. The ACIP also called for children under four to no longer receive the combination measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella vaccine (MMRV), a decision that the previous CDC had left up to parents.

    These decisions, and the ACIP’s general shift away from science-backed evaluation, have helped fuel the internal collapse of the CDC. In late August, RFK Jr. fired former CDC director Susan Monarez just four weeks into her role, reportedly because she refused to sign off on the ACIP’s recommendations without conducting her own review; soon after, much of the CDC’s senior leadership resigned in protest.

    So far, the ACIP’s worst decisions have been limited in their scope. Few vaccines today include thimerosal, and most families weren’t vaccinating their very young children with the MMRV shot. But the potential removal of universal at-birth hepatitis B vaccination threatens to be its most sweeping and damaging change yet.

    Unscientific fears

    Hepatitis B is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids. In adults, it’s usually transmitted via sex or by sharing contaminated needles. But the virus can also be passed from an infected mother to the child during childbirth.

    Though a hepatitis B infection can be managed with antivirals if it becomes chronic, there is no curative treatment currently. Most children with hepatitis B will have it for the rest of their lives, and about a quarter will experience serious health problems, including cirrhosis and liver cancer.

    Thirty years ago, ACIP and the CDC began to recommend that everyone receive the hepatitis B vaccine when young, eventually moving towards at-birth dosing for the first shot. This strategy was only adopted after previous attempts to just vaccinate the highest-risk groups failed to significantly lower cases. And since its implementation, rates of hepatitis B, especially in children, have steadily fallen in the U.S. The vaccine is also safe, with its most serious side effects, like anaphylaxis, being exceptionally rare and manageable with proper monitoring.

    At the last ACIP meeting in September, CDC staff argued in support of at-birth vaccination and warned that more children would almost certainly develop hepatitis B if the policy was removed. Both sessions of the ACIP ran long, and at the very last minute—amidst lots of confusion about what the members were actually voting on—the ACIP unexpectedly chose to table its planned vote on hepatitis B. Given the inclusion of hepatitis B on Friday’s agenda, however, it appears that reprieve was short-lived.

    The inclusion of the childhood vaccine schedule on Thursday’s agenda is also plenty concerning. Antivaxxers have made no secret about their desire to tear the schedule to shreds if they could. The Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccination group founded by RFK Jr., hosted its “Moment of Truth” conference earlier this month. During the conference, Mark Gorton, president of the MAHA Institute—a group founded to bolster Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy” movement—called for the “childhood vaccination schedule to be eliminated.”

    As before, the reformed ACIP has not revealed the contents of its votes scheduled for this next meeting. So it’s still up in the air just how far its members will go in trying to change the schedule. But there’s certainly no reason to be optimistic about what lies ahead for the country’s public health under the reign of RFK Jr.

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    Ed Cara

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  • RFK Jr. Wants to Link Antidepressants Like SSRIs to Mass Shootings. Experts Aren’t Buying It

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    It seems Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has set his sights on a new wild goose to chase. The U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services has made clear his intention to probe whether antidepressant drugs like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, can be blamed for causing mass shootings.

    Last week, Kennedy announced via a post on X that he would task the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study “the long-taboo question of whether SSRIs and other psychoactive drugs contribute to mass violence.” But while more research into this topic might be worthwhile, the data so far doesn’t support a causative link, many experts say.

    “SSRIs are generally safe and effective medications, and there is no overwhelming evidence that these drugs alone would cause patients who are taking them to commit acts of violence,” Gregory Brown, Chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Communications, told Gizmodo.

    SSRIs and mass violence

    This isn’t the first time that RFK Jr. has brought up SSRIs as a possible factor causing mass violence.

    In late August, following a school shooting in Minnesota that left two students dead and dozens injured, Kennedy went on Fox News and stated that he would launch studies looking into the role that SSRIs and other drugs used to treat mental illness might play in causing such incidents. In early September, during a conference announcing his “Make America Healthy Again” report on children, he made a similar promise, though he claimed the National Institutes of Health would be in charge of this planned research.

    The idea that psychiatric medications can set off mass shooters certainly isn’t new. Nearly a decade ago, for instance, speculation arose that anti-anxiety drugs fueled Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock’s killing spree in 2017.

    Contrary to Kennedy’s insinuation that scientists are afraid to study the topic, however, several studies have tried to look for a possible association between the use of these drugs and mass violence.

    In a 2019 study, for instance, researchers combed through reports of school shootings recorded by the FBI between 2000 and 2017 (49 in total). They found that most school shooters had no documented history of taking psychotropic medications. And even in cases when they did, the researchers failed to find a “direct or causal association” with these medications.

    In another 2019 report, which examined data from 167 mass shootings collected by The Violence Project, researchers found that about 20% of shooters had used psychotropic medications, comparable to the rate of use among the general public (around 17%, per a 2017 study).

    And this September, a team of researchers led by Ragy Girgis, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, studied data from over 800 mass shootings in the U.S. They found that just 4% of shooters had any lifetime history of using antidepressants, well below the typical rate of use in the general public (12%), and that 6.6% had used any psychotropic drug at all.

    The California State Association of Psychiatrists (CSAP) also issued an explicit rebuttal of RFK Jr.’s attempt to link SSRIs to mass shootings, following his comments in September.

    “This is simply not true. What worries us most is that such statements can scare people away from getting the care they need and deserve,” the CSAP stated.

    The role of suicidal intent

    Mass shootings are a complex phenomenon, and for many who carry out these acts, there are likely to be several explanations why.

    One of these explanations can be severe mental illness, such as psychosis, though probably not to the extent that many would assume. A 2022 study by the same Columbia team found that only about 5% of mass shootings might be linked to severe mental illness, such as psychosis.

    What does seem to be a substantial mental health factor in mass shootings is suicidality. Roughly half of mass shooters will either kill themselves or try to provoke a lethal confrontation with law enforcement (“suicide by cop”), and perhaps around two-thirds express suicidal ideation before or during the shooting.

    That factor could help explain why some research has found a potential relationship between antidepressant use and violence in general, according to Girgis.

    “They find a close relationship because people who are suicidal or violent also have much worse depression. And people with worse depression are more likely to be treated with antidepressant medications. So that’s why we see this relationship,” Girgis told Gizmodo. “But it’s not causative.”

    While SSRIs do carry a warning label claiming they might raise the risk of suicidal ideation and behaviors in people under 25, it’s a controversial one. Many researchers, including Girgis, now argue otherwise (or at least that the warning has done more harm than good), and some studies have actually found SSRIs can reduce suicide risk in younger people. Notably, Girgis’ study this September found no difference in the rate of mass shooters dying by suicide whether they were taking an antidepressant or not.

    During the Fox News interview in August, RFK Jr. also appeared to claim SSRIs carry a black box warning that they can increase the risk of homicidal intent. Whether he misspoke or deliberately peddled a falsehood, that’s just flatly not true.

    The search for a scapegoat

    At least some of the reason why people might latch onto SSRIs as a factor behind mass shootings is sensationalism, Girgis argues.

    “I think these sorts of events, when there are reports of a mass shooter taking a psychiatric medication or having a psychiatric condition, tend to make the event more of a headline and more attention grabbing. That’s one reason there’s this attention bias to it,” he said.

    Still others might want to blame mental health or the drugs used to treat it for these incidents because it’ll deflect attention from more relevant factors, such as the wide proliferation of firearms in the U.S. or the ease with which someone can obtain them.

    All that said, the experts I spoke to still welcome more research into this topic, provided that it’s done well.

    “While I cannot predict results of any future research studies, ongoing research efforts—especially unbiased peer-reviewed research—can often provide useful information about the safety and efficacy of psychotropic medications,” Brown said.

    The trouble is, we’re talking about RFK Jr. here. Since taking over HHS, Kennedy has repeatedly steamrolled over the scientific process to get his agenda across. He’s unilaterally dismissed outside experts on vaccine safety, installed allies sympathetic to the anti-vaccination movement, and allegedly fired former CDC chief Susan Monarez when she refused to rubberstamp policy changes recommended by the latter group.

    More recently, he and President Donald Trump have tried to officially blame autism on the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy—an explanation that many experts and health authorities do not support. The FDA is trying to initiate a labeling change to acetaminophen products that would warn pregnant women about the supposed autism risk, even as Kennedy has admitted that they don’t yet have proof of a causative link.

    The above could be the most illustrative example of what may happen if RFK Jr. gets his SSRI study off the ground. The overall evidence to date doesn’t point to these drugs being a major culprit in mass shootings. But that alone might not stop Kennedy and the Trump White House from claiming otherwise.

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    Ed Cara

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  • Gordon Findlay didn’t faint Nov. 6 in the Oval Office

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    Video clips of a man collapsing Nov. 6 at President Donald Trump’s drug pricing announcement quickly spiraled into misleading narratives. 

    Dave Ricks, chair and chief executive officer of Eli Lilly and Co., was speaking in the Oval Office when a man standing behind him fainted. Television cameras captured Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leaving the room as other people, including federal health official Dr. Mehmet Oz, treated the man who collapsed. 

    After White House officials paused the event, social media users misleadingly jumped to conclusions about the man’s identity and Kennedy’s response.

    “BREAKING: RFK Jr. flees the scene after Novo Nordisk Executive Gordon Findlay collapsed in the Oval Office,” says the caption of a Nov. 6 X post that had more than 3 million views as of Nov. 7.

    Other social media posts on TikTok and X shared similar claims, including X’s artificial intelligence-powered chatbot Grok, who responded to users that Gordon Findlay was the person who fainted in the Oval Office.

    These posts named the wrong person, and the White House disputes the explanation for Kennedy’s exit.

    Here’s what we know about the incident at Trump’s event with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk executives to lower prices for popular pharmaceutical drugs such as GLP-1 weight loss medications.

    Gordon Findlay is not the man who fainted in the Oval Office

    In the clip, Ricks pauses his remarks and says, “Gordon, are you okay?”

    This likely made people think the person who collapsed was Gordon Findlay, Novo Nordisk’s global brand director based in Basel, Switzerland. 

    Multiple media outlets also identified the man as Findlay before later correcting their stories.

    But Findlay didn’t attend the White House event.

    Newsweek reported that Novo Nordisk said in a statement, “CEO Mike Doustdar and Executive Vice President of U.S. Operations, Dave Moore were the only two Novo Nordisk representatives in the Oval Office.”

    White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters who were rushed out of the room that the man who fainted was a “representative” of one of the companies at the event. 

    “During the Most Favored Nations Oval Office Announcement, a representative with one of the companies fainted. The White House Medical Unit quickly jumped into action, and the gentleman is okay. The Press Conference will resume shortly,” Leavitt said, according to an email to the press pool.

    When the press conference resumed, Trump said the man was fine, without naming him. 

    Ricks identified him as a guest of Eli Lilly in a press briefing after the event, The Hill reported. 

    Dan Diamond, a Washington Post White House reporter, wrote on his Substack that after talking to people with direct knowledge of the White House event, he learned that the man who fainted was an Eli Lilly patient who had been invited to the White House because of his experience of taking a GLP-1 drug.

    The claim that Kennedy fled from the scene is also misleading

    Social media users mocked Kennedy as fleeing the scene, but White House officials said that wasn’t what happened. 

    Kush Desai, White House deputy press secretary, responded to an X post from independent journalist and social media video clipper Aaron Rupar, saying that Kennedy rushed out of the event to seek medical assistance for the man who fainted.

    Our ruling

    An X post says, “RFK Jr. flees the scene after Novo Nordisk Executive Gordon Findlay collapsed in the Oval Office.”

    Findlay didn’t attend the White House event. The man who fainted doesn’t work for Novo Nordisk or Eli Lilly; he was an Eli Lilly GLP-1 patient and guest.

    Social media users said Kennedy fled the scene; a White House spokesperson wrote on X that Kennedy was seeking medical attention for the man.

    We rate this claim False.

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  • RFK Jr. Is Going After Trump’s Mortal Enemy: Wind Farms

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    Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Trump-appointed health czar and MAHA figurehead, has promised to shake up American healthcare. And boy is he shaking it up. So far, Kennedy has flouted all sorts of longstanding precedents, changed critical health protocols (often for the worse), and fired a lot of people that seem to have been doing really important work. Most perturbing to many longtime health professionals, Kennedy seems to be ignoring many of the most pressing threats to Americans’ health (you know, stuff like Covid-19 and the cost of health insurance) and, instead, is going after a slew of purported enemies that, in some cases, may not be that big of a concern and, in other cases, are things widely believed to be beneficial to millions of Americans. Kennedy’s enemies list has included stuff like 5G, vaccines, Tylenol and, now, offshore wind farms.

    It appears that the HHS head has a new preoccupation. He may not be tilting at windmills but he does appear to be scowling at wind farms (did you see what I did there?). Bloomberg reports that Kennedy’s agency is now investigating whether wind farms do…something bad…to stuff…or something. The outlet writes:

    In late summer, HHS instructed CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to prepare research about wind farms’ impact on fishing businesses, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations…Among the offshore wind health impacts that HHS staff have investigated is the electric magnetic frequency generated from undersea cables used to connect power from the machines to the electric grid, one of the people said. Wind proponents say they aren’t harmful.

    Yes, a resurgence of measles cases in America is, apparently, not that big of a deal but, according to our new health leader, artificial islands full of turbines that are located in the middle of the ocean may in fact be a significant threat to our collective well being. Snark aside, there is some scientific interest in whether wind farms may cause health problems for those who live in their proximity, but those investigations haven’t revealed anything particularly shocking. One study says that people who live or work next to wind turbines may report “decreased quality of life, annoyance, stress, sleep disturbance, headache, anxiety, depression, and cognitive dysfunction”—a takeaway that most of us probably could have assumed without any sort of outside corroboration.

    It’s worth noting—as Bloomberg does—that President Trump hates wind farms. He has often verbally excoriated them, calling them “so pathetic and so bad” and accusing them of “driving the whales crazy.” During his most recent term in office, his administration has made substantial efforts to quell offshore wind industry projects. Is there a correlation here between the President’s animosity and Kennedy’s new probe? Who can really say?

    Gizmodo reached out to the HHS and the White House for comment, and will update this post if we get a response.

     

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    Lucas Ropek

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  • Canada Will Soon Lose Its Hard-Won Measles-Free Status. America Is Next

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    A highly contagious disease once vanquished by vaccination is now on the brink of officially returning to North America. Canada is expected to lose its measles elimination status, and the U.S. might possibly soon follow.

    This week, Canada reported new cases of measles tied to an ongoing outbreak—one that began 12 months ago. The year of continuous transmission means that Canada will almost certainly lose its measles-free designation, experts say. And though the largest outbreaks of measles in the U.S. this year have officially ended, the country could potentially still lose its status in 2026, too.

    “As of today, it seems very, very likely that Canada will lose its measles elimination status, while the United States is also at substantial risk in the next 3 months,” Sten Vermund, chief medical officer at the Global Virus Network, a coalition of medical virologists focused on viral threats, told Gizmodo.

    A resurgent enemy

    Despite a highly effective vaccine for it, measles remains a serious public health threat across much of the globe. In 2023, it’s estimated to have sickened roughly 10 million people and killed over 100,000 worldwide, with most deaths occurring in unvaccinated children under five.

    Some countries, through widespread vaccination programs, have kept measles largely at bay by stopping its local transmission. The U.S. officially eliminated endemic measles in 2000, while the Americas as a whole first achieved elimination in 2016. Canada earned its measles-free status in 1998.

    But so long as measles is endemic somewhere, the disease can hitch a ride on infected travelers and threaten to regain a foothold in locally eliminated countries, especially when vaccination rates start to decline. It’s a threat that’s now hitting close to home in the U.S.

    Canada’s latest outbreak first began in October 2024 in the province of New Brunswick. Since then, the country has reported over 5,000 cases, nearly all of which are linked to the initial New Brunswick cluster. And though the flow of cases has significantly slowed down over time, it hasn’t stopped. On Monday, Canadian health officials reported 19 new cases during the week of October 18 (the most current data) and 136 recent cases across five jurisdictions.

    The World Health Organization regularly evaluates whether countries can be deemed locally free of measles. Travel-related outbreaks can and do still occur in these countries, but it takes more than a year of ongoing transmission for the WHO to even consider revoking a country’s measles-free card. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), a subset of the WHO, will meet next month for its annual assessment of the region’s status. And given the current situation, Canada will probably lose its measles-free mantle.

    What about the U.S.?

    The immediate outlook is a bit less grim for the U.S., though still far from great.

    Earlier this January, a large outbreak of measles began in Western Texas. More than 700 cases were ultimately documented before officials formally declared the outbreak over in mid-August. Another large outbreak occurred around the same time nearby in New Mexico, which saw roughly 100 cases before it appeared to die down in late September.

    The trouble is, there have been many other measles clusters happening across the U.S. this year, and some are ongoing. All told, there have been roughly 1,650 cases reported—the largest tally seen since 1992—and dozens of outbreaks reported nationwide in 2025. At least three people died of measles in the U.S. this year as well, the first deaths recorded in a decade. There are current outbreaks in South Carolina, Illinois, Minnesota, Arizona, and Utah, with the latter two states sharing a cluster that’s now over 120 cases and counting.

    Though the outbreak in Texas is over, it remains possible that health officials will link some of the current cases to it. This can occur if people in these states are found to be infected with the same or closely related strain of measles that sickened residents in Texas. If so, and if these cases last until January, the PAHO could very well decide to revoke the measles-free status of the U.S. early next year, too.

    But even if this scenario doesn’t happen, experts are still worried about measles becoming endemic in America soon enough, given the sheer amount of transmission we’ve seen this year.

    “I expect the US will lose its measles elimination status next year, as the U.S. in 2025 has already experienced almost 4 cases per 10 million, 87% of cases were related to an outbreak, i.e., not imported, and there have already been 43 outbreaks in less than one year,” Jessica Justman, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told Gizmodo.

    The country’s federal public health system isn’t exactly in steady hands either. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a man with a long history of misleading the public about the safety of vaccines, including the combined measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. And during the height of the Texas outbreak, both he and his allies downplayed its impact and touted unsupported treatments for the viral disease.

    How to stop the return of measles

    Formidable as measles is, we’ve long known how to best curtail its danger: vaccination.

    It might be too late to stop the official return of measles in Canada or even the U.S. But that doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. Notably, Canada wouldn’t even be the first country in the Americas to have lost this status in the last few years, as both Brazil and Venezuela did recently. However, these countries have since regained their designation.

    Though America certainly has a growing anti-vaccination problem, measles vaccination rates in the U.S. and Canada remain generally high (for now). The current outbreaks have occurred in regions where rates are much lower than average, such as Mennonite communities in Canada. In at least some of these communities, officials have said, residents aren’t necessarily opposed to vaccination but simply have less regular contact with doctors. And unlike the U.S., there are no major public health figureheads in Canada with a track record of anti-vaccination sentiment.

    All of which is to say that a dedicated public health response can still convince people to get their measles shots. And Vermund expects that Canadian health officials will lay out a detailed plan to the PAHO to get things back on course.

    According to Vermund, this plan should ideally include, among other things, stronger vaccination campaigns that target under-vaccinated regions like Alberta and Ontario; mobile clinics and school-based immunization drives; community engagement and public education to counter vaccine misinformation; and improved surveillance.

    That same framework should also work to boost flagging vaccination rates in the U.S., too. But under the reign of RFK Jr., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been turned into a shadow of its former self, and the ongoing shutdown of the federal government might further hamper any assistance that the CDC can provide to local and state agencies.

    “A course correction for the U.S. will require an intensive vaccination campaign and funding to support the public health surveillance systems across all 50 states,” Justman said. “Neither of these seems likely in the current context.”

    Though Canada will lose its status first, measles might have an easier time getting reestablished in its downstairs neighbor. If so, plenty more children and their families will suffer as a result.

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    Ed Cara

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  • What a Diabetes Diagnosis Taught Me About MAHA

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    Photo: Andrew Burke-Stevenson/Boston Globe/Getty Images

    One morning in late September, I drank a cup of coffee without sugar and ate half an English muffin for breakfast. Boring choices, but I like routines; I always drink coffee in the morning, and I always drink it with some milk. If I eat breakfast, I don’t eat much. I didn’t think it mattered — I still wouldn’t, if I had any choice, but two hours later, a medical assistant pricked my fingertip and told me that my blood glucose was 330 milligrams per deciliter. That seems bad, I thought. A few minutes later, I learned my A1C was also much too high, which supported one undesirable conclusion: I have type 2 diabetes, like my mother and millions of other people in the United States, and I’ve likely had it for a while. The doctor sent me home with a sample continuous glucose monitor along with prescriptions for metformin and Mounjaro, a popular GIP and GLP-1 receptor agonist. The following morning, I checked the data from my CGM and saw that my fasting glucose had reached 400 milligrams per deciliter. I did not eat an English muffin.

    Still, there is good news: Mounjaro and metformin are effective medications. I know that from my doctor, the scientific literature, and my CGM. A month after getting diagnosed, my blood glucose has declined to safer levels, and the disease frightens me less than it initially did. Pragmatism has taken over. I already have mild neuropathy in my feet, and I’d rather it didn’t get worse. If I want to feel all my toes again, the solution is medication, a better diet, and exercise. There isn’t an easy way to reverse the symptoms of type 2 diabetes, and I knew that the day I found out I had it. I also knew that my illness wasn’t my fault — or I thought I did. People develop type 2 diabetes for a combination of reasons, like a sedentary lifestyle and an unhealthy diet, but genetics matter, too, and I have a family history of the disease. Also, so what? Nobody deserves a life-threatening illness, and a medical diagnosis is not a moral failure. I’ve never thought I should blame my mother for getting sick.

    Still, I began to berate myself. I thought about my meals — the small ones, the big ones, the occasional snack — and wondered when I’d crossed the line. Was it the Coke I drank for my headaches? Those English muffins? I told my husband that I felt stupid. I should’ve taken more Pilates classes, eaten fewer carbs, ordered more salads. My husband, an ex-Catholic, told me to be less of a Protestant. Shame has its place in the world, but not here, in this conversation or this illness. He’s right, but in the Make America Healthy Again era, I find it difficult to silence that angry voice in my head. Every time I scroll through Instagram, I see ads and videos that promote dubious supplements and fad diets — and then there is the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of it all. Diabetes is a fixation for our Health and Human Services secretary, who believes America suffers from a “chronic-disease epidemic” that can be resolved through better nutrition. “Sugar is poison,” he said this year, and it is “giving us a diabetes crisis.” Conditions like diabetes deserve more attention than measles, he claimed amid a deadly outbreak of the infectious disease. Pharma companies want to sell GLP-1s like Mounjaro because “we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs,” Kennedy told Fox News last year, adding, “If we just gave good food, three meals a day, to every man, woman, and child in our country, we could solve the obesity and diabetes epidemic overnight.”

    The MAHA ethos contains an element of truth, which makes it even more insidious. Our choices do influence our physical condition, whether we’re at risk for type 2 diabetes or not, but we are also more complicated than MAHA admits. A woman who lives in a food desert needs more from her government than nutrition education; she can’t simply bootstrap her way out of medical danger. Neither can I despite my relative security. By the time I found out I was diabetic, I was too sick to manage my blood sugar through diet and exercise alone, and I may need medication for the rest of my life. My health depends on my salary and my health insurance, not my choices alone, and that’s the reality most of us live with. Instead, MAHA prefers a commonplace American myth, and so does my inner scold: Fix your mind, make better choices, and health will follow. Self-mastery is free-market logic in another guise, and it won’t make Americans healthy at all.

    If the key to health lies in the mind, our “chronic disease” crisis is more spiritual than material. We are making ourselves sick, so we must heal ourselves. When MAHA attempts any structural diagnosis, it complains of big pharma and big agriculture, but individual choices are still the principal focus. Industry is bad because it encourages bad decision-making; it provides shortcuts, like antidepressants or GLP-1s, so we can avoid the hard work of good health. The underlying theme is “mind-power,” as scholar Kate Bowler wrote in Blessed, her 2018 history of the prosperity gospel. Mind-power and “its discourse of control and efficacy” is “centered on the role of thought and speech,” according to Bowler, who traced it back to a Victorian-age religious awakening in American life. “Self-mastery became an art and occupation, as people sought to consolidate the era’s advances with improvements to their own lives,” she wrote. Faith healers promised miraculous cures to believers who paid their tithes and said the right prayers to the right version of God.

    In an extreme case, Mary Baker Eddy “discovered” Christian Science and taught her followers that all matter “is infinitely malleable through the power of mind,” as the journalist and ex–Church of Christ, Scientist member Caroline Fraser explained in God’s Perfect Child. Disease was a mental error that should be rectified by good thoughts. Christian Scientists reject most medical interventions and rely, often, on Church practitioners, who say they guide physical healing through the pursuit of spiritual truth. The results can be deadly, as Fraser showed in her book. Children have died because of their parents’ religious convictions. “The history of the United States of America is a history of religious sects that have sanctified the power of self,” Fraser argued, which is hard to dispute.

    Now, mind-power as a concept is more powerful than Christian Science or even organized religion, and it is embedded deeply in our national bedrock. Though MAHA is an eclectic perspective, and most who fall under its umbrella accept some medical intervention, its rejection of expertise and reliance on the self are familiar enough. When Kennedy conflates type 2 diabetes with its type 1 counterpart, as he has done in the past, he makes a scientific error that is shaped by his ideology. When he says in the same interview that “juvenile diabetes and prediabetes” can “be reversed completely by changing diet,” he makes a different mistake for the same reasons. Kennedy isn’t asking us to pray, but he is telling us to purify ourselves, and, like Eddy, he takes that moralism and calls it science.

    MAHA shifts responsibility for health and well-being onto the individual, and that too is an old trick. Mind-power may emphasize thought, but it still requires some labor from believers, who may depend on objects and ritualized behavior to attract health and wealth or dispel spiritual and mental attacks. Bowler wrote that Creflo Dollar, the prosperity-gospel preacher, once “advised the saints to cure poverty with dollar bills hidden in their shoes.” Kennedy and Martin Makary, the FDA commissioner, recommend wearable health technologies, like my CGM. Unlike a dollar bill inside a shoe, a CGM can have a real purpose, but that also depends on who’s wearing it. Right now, I use a sample Dexcom G7. A sensor in my left arm takes a reading every five minutes and feeds that information into an app on my phone. If my blood sugar gets too low or too high, an alarm sounds and I can take action. Most people don’t need a CGM, but Makary assigns the device a near-talismanic power: Make it widely available and users can ward off a dreadful fate. “Why are we holding these tools to help people empower them with knowledge about their health until after they’re sick?” he said during his Senate confirmation hearing.

    Donald Trump’s surgeon-general nominee, Casey Means, founded the Levels app, which connects to a CGM and warns users if they’re experiencing a glucose “spike.” This is not as helpful as it sounds. Blood sugar always rises after a meal and returns to baseline sometime later, and there’s no evidence that spikes lead to health problems in most people, according to a recent story from The Cut. Levels may promise a path to well-being, but that’s marketing, not science. The app merely creates busywork for whoever is using it, and it relies on mind-power. Levels bombards the average person with information they don’t need so they can adjust habits that may not require correction. Once they’re convinced of their own inner failures, an “expert” steps in with a fix. The app’s backers include Mark Hyman, a celebrity in the pseudoscientific field of functional medicine. Hyman’s views on GLP-1 drugs are mixed at best; for blood-sugar control, he once recommended Himalayan Tartary-buckwheat-sprout powder, an unproven supplement.

    MAHA sells a seductive idea: Take this powder, wear this device, or use this app and you’ll become the captain of your own body and the master of your own future. The implications are grim — if you get sick anyway, you’ve failed, and you are rightly on your own. “By tying health outcomes to individual choices and digital self-surveillance, MAHA policies risk making healthcare less equitable and overall, less effective,” the writer Scott Gavura observed at Science-Based Medicine. “Unproven technologies” can feel empowering, he added, but in practice they divert “attention away from public health interventions that actually work, like vaccinations, nutrition assistance, and access to primary care.” Mind-power and self-mastery are useful concepts to the White House and the rapacious capitalism it worships. Why should anyone care about type 2 diabetes or what it does to the people who have it? Just eat less pizza.

    Here’s a little secret about type 2 diabetes (it’s not really a secret): The disease is expensive. I’ve already spent hundreds of dollars on co-pays, prescriptions, and supplies, and I still don’t know if my insurance plan will cover the Dexcom G7 that I’ve been sampling. If it doesn’t and I want to keep using the device, I’ll likely pay hundreds more out of pocket every month. My insurance does cover a different CGM, the FreeStyle Libre 3, but a month’s supply still costs me $77. A lot of people with diabetes forgo a CGM and track their blood sugar with a blood-glucose meter and finger sticks, but I need both thanks to a genetic quirk. I was born with a hereditary red-blood-cell disorder, which makes my case more complicated to manage; thank you, God, for your intelligent design. At least I have insurance, a decent salary, and a reliable work schedule, so I can keep up with my doctor’s appointments. I’m a union member, which provides a level of security that I would otherwise lack. And I live in a neighborhood where I can walk to the nearest grocery store and choose from a variety of fresh vegetables.

    My prognosis is good because I have material advantages that many people lack. According to one analysis from GoodRx, people pay an average of $2,712 per year to self-manage their blood glucose, whether they have insurance or not. That figure includes a blood-glucose monitor, lancets, and test strips but not a CGM. Costs may be higher or lower depending on the specifics of a person’s treatment and their socioeconomic circumstances. For uninsured and underinsured Americans, test strips alone “could add up to thousands of dollars a year,” the New York Times reported in 2019. Out-of-pocket costs are higher for Americans with type 1 diabetes, one study found, but as I’ve learned, type 2 is not exactly affordable, either, and the expense can make it more difficult to manage the condition while preventing future complications. Self-mastery only gets us so far. The choices we make depend in part on the decisions of others, including policy-makers who allow inequality to flourish owing to inaction or malice. Research cited by the CDC says that “adults who experience food insecurity are 2 to 3 times more likely to have type 2 diabetes.” If you’re poor and can’t afford healthy food and a safe place to live, your health tends to suffer. I’ve seen that at home in southwest Virginia, a rural and predominantly white area, but the crisis is widespread and pronounced among members of some racial minority groups. Inequality helps explain why Black Americans develop type 2 diabetes at much higher rates, as do Latinos, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans. In MAHA logic, people of color are more likely to get type 2 diabetes because something’s wrong with their character, their minds, and it’s DEI to say otherwise.

    The MAHA prescription mostly ignores reality because it must. Universal health care would violate its deepest conviction, which is that people who get sick deserve to be punished for it. When Senator Bernie Sanders asked Kennedy if he thought health care is a human right, he demurred. Health care is not a right like free speech is a right, he said, because “if you smoke cigarettes for 20 years and you get cancer, you … you are now taking from the pool,” draining valuable resources. Now that he’s in power, he and the Trump administration have done nothing to make America healthier than usual. Nutrition experts say that MAHA’s favorite solutions, like the removal of high-fructose corn syrup, synthetic dyes, and seed oils from our food, ignore riskier ingredients in ultraprocessed items. Kennedy will soon release new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat foods high in saturated fat, but as MedPage Today has reported, there’s no real evidence to support the recommendation. Trump has said he wants to lower the cost of GLP-1 agonists, but he also lies, and Mehmet Oz of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has only uttered vague assurances that Medicare will negotiate better prices for the drugs. On Friday, the Washington Post said the average Obamacare premium will rise by 30 percent next year, based on rates set by Oz’s agency and the probable “expiration of pandemic-era subsidies.”

    My inner scold is quieter now, and in its place, there is rage — not just for myself but for my mother, who has struggled sometimes to afford diabetes care, and for people I do not know. A society can become so obsessed with the self that an individual life no longer matters.

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    Sarah Jones

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  • ‘Irreparably Damaged’: Former Senior Official Details the Darkest Days of the CDC Under RFK Jr.

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    To put it bluntly, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is in a complete freefall.

    Under the reign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the longtime crank turned U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary, thousands of people have lost their jobs, the organization’s policies have been hijacked by allies of the anti-vaccination movement, and workers there have endured a deadly shooting committed by a man whose motives were likely influenced by misinformation about the covid-19 vaccines.

    The most dramatic upheaval occurred in late August, when former CDC director Susan Monarez was fired just four weeks into taking the role. Monarez has since publicly testified that she was let go for refusing to sign off, without review, on the vaccine-related recommendations of RFK’s handpicked advisors, many of whom—like Kennedy himself—have a history of spreading misinformation about vaccines.

    Immediately after Monarez’s reported firing, in a coordinated act of protest, three senior staff members at the CDC turned in their resignation notice: Debra Houry, CDC’s former chief medical officer, Daniel Jernigan, former director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, and Demetre Daskalakis, former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (a fourth senior official, Jennifer Layden, former director of the CDC’s Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology, also resigned).

    Gizmodo reached out to Daskalakis to discuss the events within the CDC leading up to the resignation, the fallout since, and what the path forward might look like in a world where trust in the CDC has eroded. The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

    Ed Cara, Gizmodo: Can you take us through the first days and weeks of the second Trump administration for you and others at the CDC? What was the general mood?

    Demetre Daskalakis: Soon after the election, when President Donald Trump announced that RFK Jr. was going to be his candidate for the Secretary of Health and Human Services—that was obviously the beginning red flag.

    Prior to the CDC, I had worked in New York City for many years in the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. While there, I had been involved as the incident commander over the measles outbreak from 2018 to 2019. And that’s the first time that I had any awareness of the sort of anti-vaccine strategies of RFK Jr. and the organizations he participated in.

    So while we were running the measles response, one of his organizations, Children’s Health Defense, was working to undermine the work we were doing. It supported anti-vaccine messaging, and RFK Jr. would go on to sue the health department while we were in the middle of our response, trying to destabilize what we were doing. At that point, I was like, “There’s this kooky guy who’s a Kennedy who is really trying to interfere with this important work to prevent kids from getting sick.” So when they said his name as the candidate, I was like, “Oh boy.”

    Author’s note: Kennedy founded Children’s Health Defense and served as its chairman and chief litigation counsel before resigning ahead of his failed presidential run.

    But then I did research on it, and not just me, all the doctors at CDC who were in leadership. We all read books, we looked at papers, to figure out what we were up for. And also to see where there were opportunities for us to integrate our sort of science and strategy in public health with what will be the vision of the new secretary. It’s what you do as a civil servant: How do I work with the new leadership and still make sure that we’re protecting the health of the country?

    Before he was appointed, though, there were the confirmation hearings. Ahead of those hearings, his cousin [Carolyn Kennedy] came out, called him a predator and said that he was dangerous for American health. So that was something. And watching the hearings, I was not particularly impressed. He seemed not very well prepared, but that’s probably less his problem and more his teams. But we made it through that and then he got confirmed.

    The next thing that I did was, when he gave his big talk at HHS after he was sworn in, I made my whole team stop doing work so they could hear what he had to say. And honestly, it was good. He said gold standard science and radical transparency are things that he was going to uphold. And he made it seem like he was going to engage with the scientists and the experts across HHS to make sure that we’re going down the right scientific path. So we took copious notes, and we felt like we could do it—we’re going to figure out how to work with this guy. We prepared all these transition documents, all these plans, all these things to be ready to talk to him.

    Gizmodo: Then what happened?

    Daskalakis: Then he landed and we never, ever heard from him. We reached out to try to brief him. He never said yes. We talked to his teams. They never said yes. And the communications we were getting were some combination of dismantling CDC and doing really unhinged policy things. Around February 14th, we had our first CDC massacre where they fired a bunch of people who were newly hired staff. April 1st, we had our next CDC massacre where they literally deleted thousands of positions from CDC. And then just now, we had our third CDC massacre. We’re now about a quarter down of the staff that we had in CDC.

    And then there’s all the policy things.

    He changed the covid-19 vaccine recommendations for kids and pregnant women via a tweet [in late May]. We had heard nothing about it before that. He had never conferred with any scientists. When we asked him if we could get the documents underlying the data that support your decision, his staff said no. So CDC was directed to make changes and no one had ever seen the data underneath it. So we made it; we tried to mitigate that and made it a little bit not as bad.

    He then fired all of the experts on the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP), which is the body responsible for guiding CDC on what they should do for vaccine policy. And he replaced them mostly with people who were, frankly, political appointees who were ideologically aligned to his desire to dismantle and destroy vaccines. They’ve changed the way that the committee works. The entire agenda, the entire membership, all of the conversations are only driven by these people that he put in who are his ideological clones and the scientists are completely sidelined, only being able to provide data as requested rather than really engaging in the conversations.

    And then, of course, Susan Monarez was fired. There was this brief shining moment when we had a scientific leader who was going to help be a diplomat to build the bridge between us and the secretary. And then he basically told her that he didn’t want her science here; he just wanted her to sign off on these recommendations. And they fired her.

    Gizmodo: So the Monarez firing was the breaking point that led you and your senior colleagues to resign in protest?

    Daskalakis: That’s what led all of us to get together, and for me to say that it was time to go, because I can’t support something that’s not going to use good science, something that will potentially end up making terrible decisions for the country that could impact the health of people.

    But we had all been writing our resignation letters. I started my resignation letter when he fired ACIP because I was like, “I just need to have all this documentation for the moment when I have to get out of here, because I can’t do any good anymore.”

    RFK Jr. was dictating things in a way that wouldn’t let science get done or be reviewed adequately. But then I was very excited when Susan came aboard, when she had this moment of like, let’s try to work with this and make it better. She had a vision for how to do it. And he just threw it aside. She was like a trusted expert two months before, and now she’s absolutely a demon. So when we lost that scientific leadership, it was the end.

    Bottom line, their office of the director at CDC only had one person other than Susan who was a scientist, and that was Debra Houry. So when that conversation began and she said she was also going to leave, that was the end of that. It’s like having a head and body but with no neck.

    Gizmodo: What do you say to the critiques made by RFK Jr. and his allies that all this chaos is needed? That the only way to “Make America Healthy Again,” as his saying goes, is to dismantle the status quo of the CDC and the country’s public health systems in general?

    Daskalakis: I call bullshit on it. It’s garbage.

    There’s no need to destroy public health to rebuild it. There is a rational way to do it. The CDC, especially since covid, has changed a lot. Could it change more? Yes, but do you do it by destroying CDC? That’s like flying a plane holding hundreds of people, thinking that the engine’s not so great, and trying to rebuild the engine while it’s flying. Even worse, it’s like blowing up a plane while it’s flying and hoping all the parts will land somewhere safe and the people will be fine. It’s beyond irrational.

    Tearing the CDC apart while saying that you’re going to make it better also means that we’re completely not prepared in the event that something disastrous happens. And frankly, we’re not really prepared for the routine work either, because it’s like an interconnected organism. We had already made proposals on how to make the CDC more efficient and how to do it quickly. But they wouldn’t take them. Instead, they’re taking this tech bro strategy of, “Let’s break it and then see how it goes.” And you don’t want your public health done that way.

    Gizmodo: How has the CDC been doing since your resignation, in your opinion?

    Daskalakis: It’s just getting worse, and they still don’t have any scientific leadership. The guy who they claim is the acting director of CDC, Jim O’Neill, has never met with the senior leadership at CDC—it’s now been about five weeks since he was appointed. And yet he feels comfortable, as a non-scientist, tweeting out things about separating the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine and congratulating themselves for taking down websites that are important for people’s health because they have the word “equity” or talk about gender.

    And this latest reduction in force, it’s disastrous, even if some of those firings have been reversed. Right now, the CDC doesn’t have an ethics office; they don’t have an institutional review board; and they don’t have the organization that looks after the advisory committees.

    Author’s note: Some of the employees fired in this latest round were responsible for overseeing conflicts of interests in these committees, while the Trump administration has previously terminated several advisory committees.

    It’s supposed to be radical transparency, but they can’t communicate because they got rid of all their communicators. They can’t run a advisory committee because they got rid of the advisory committee groups. And they can’t review science to be able to go forward.

    Gizmodo: What about those still left behind at the CDC? How have they been faring through all this?

    Daskalakis: The staff is horribly traumatized. Two months ago, that place was shot with 500 bullets. My office has a giant hole in the window because of a bullet. And RFK Jr. came down, said thoughts and prayers, and then immediately went to an interview and said not to trust experts.

    Author’s note: During an August 11 interview three days after the shooting, RFK stated, “Trusting the experts is not a feature of either science or democracy.”

    No one seems to cares. When an ICE facility got shot up last month, the president ten minutes later had a statement about it. He has never said one word about the shooting at CDC; not one word about the police officer who died to protect us. So they do not value the workers, they do not value the work. For them, dismantling the CDC is no big deal and, frankly, it’s because they don’t understand the value that public health gives to the country and the world. Because these are a bunch of rookies that don’t know even how to run a medium-sized organization, much less one that’s complex like CDC.

    Gizmodo: Circling back a bit, it seems like breaking up the MMR vaccine—something that both acting CDC director O’Neill and President Trump have called for—would be the most dramatic change in vaccine policy seen yet. Just how realistic are the odds of that happening?

    Daskalakis: A year ago, I would have said it’s totally not possible. First of all, there’s no separate measles vaccine that’s produced and available in the U.S., and there’s no such thing as a separate mumps and rubella vaccine, either.

    But these people don’t follow any sort of political norms. And as we’ve seen with leucovorin, the drug that they approved for autism, they also don’t follow any sort of standard regulatory pathways. So I can’t predict if they’re going to do it. I don’t put anything past this administration’s ability to circumvent science and process.

    Gizmodo: Remarkably, we’re not even a full year into this second term. Given how dire the CDC’s situation is right now, what’s to be done, in your opinion? Is there a way to navigate ourselves out of this catastrophe in the making?

    Daskalakis: It’s a complicated question, but I have a simple answer.

    Right now, looking at CDC, it is pretty irreparably damaged. We can criticize the pandemic response, but CDC did a lot of important functions and did actually function very well for most of what it was doing. Post-pandemic, there were many changes to CDC, related to what the experience was during the pandemic. But now, with a quarter of the staff gone, with no strategic plan around why they’re gone, it’s all just patchwork. What CDC is like now is a smartphone with all of its apps but no operating system.

    So my simple answer is that federal public health has now been compromised—it has been taken over by ideology, it’s been weaponized. If you look at the CDC website, the “About” webpage is literally propaganda around extremely partisan views. My advice to the world is that we should practice detachment from the organizations and focus on the mission. And the mission is the health of the public. And so I think that focusing a lot of energy in trying to repair CDC is actually the wrong direction, because that damage has been done. And for me, the bottom line isn’t just that there’s no political will to fix it, it’s the opposite—there’s a strong political will to break it.

    There’s nothing that we’re going to be able to do at this moment to resist the breaking of CDC. But what we can do is turn to local jurisdictions, states, and other professional organizations outside the federal government. They’re going to have to be the renaissance that will follow after the dark ages. I don’t know what that renaissance will look like, but I know it’s not going to come from the feds down. It’s going to come from the states, the jurisdictions, the organizations, and the people on the ground. Because there will be something that can be rebuilt or built up, but it’s not going to be out of the minds of the people who are literally trying to destroy public health.

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    Ed Cara

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  • Americans Are Already Sick of RFK Jr., Poll Finds

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    While U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be trying to “Make America Healthy Again,” it turns out plenty of Americans are already sick of him. A new poll finds that only one-third of people actually approve of how RFK Jr. is handling his job.

    The findings come from the most recent Quinnipiac University poll released this month, which surveyed around 1,200 registered voters across the country. Exactly 33% of respondents said they currently approved of Kennedy’s stint as HHS secretary, while 54% disapproved. The numbers are a noticeable drop from a similar poll conducted earlier this year, prior to the internal collapse of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set off by RFK Jr.’s antivaccine agenda.

    RFK’s waning popularity

    Kennedy has never enjoyed immense popularity among Americans, but it certainly looks like he’s lost more ground as of late.

    In both a March and June poll from Quinnipiac, RFK Jr. had a 38% approval rating, though a slightly higher disapproval rating (53%) in June. Other recent polls have highlighted RFK Jr.’s flagging perception among Americans, too, such as a Washington Post-Ipsos poll this September that documented a 42% approval rating.

    Since taking over HHS, Kennedy has pledged to drive down rates of chronic disease in the U.S., particularly in children. But more often than not, his decisions and policy changes have garnered widespread criticism from public health experts, including within the federal government.

    In late August, former CDC director Susan Monarez was fired for reportedly refusing to rubberstamp the recommendations of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), all of whom had been handpicked by Kennedy after he unilaterally terminated the existing members. Some of these new ACIP members already had a documented history of misrepresenting the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, while others had financially benefited from attacking vaccines. In just two meetings so far, the new ACIP has successfully pushed for the removal of several vaccines from either the market or the childhood vaccine schedule with little scientific backing.

    Kennedy has also promised to tackle the entirely made-up threat of chemtrails, diagnosed everyone’s kids with massive mitochondria problems, and endorsed the widely unsupported idea that acetaminophen use during pregnancy is causing autism.

    Vaccines remain on top, for now

    Though some Americans have started to buy more into the false propaganda of the anti-vaccination movement lately, vaccines overall remain more popular than RFK Jr.

    The latest Quinnipiac poll found that 67% of Americans supported having “vaccine requirements for children attending public schools,” with even a slight majority of Republican-identifying respondents (46%) saying yes.

    “Keep mandatory vaccines in place for public school kids, say a large majority of voters. That sentiment is expressed as voters give a clear thumbs down to the overall recommendations by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” said Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy in a statement.

    Unfortunately, these waning numbers for RFK may not mean all that much. According to the Quinnipiac poll, 71% of Republicans still approve of Kennedy as HHS chief. And while some members of the GOP have become more critical of RFK Jr.’s performance, especially following the CDC defection, many are still roundly in his corner—most notably President Donald Trump himself.

    Last week, RFK Jr. stood shoulder to shoulder with Trump during the latter’s big autism announcement, and both men eagerly took time to go off-script and promote antivaccination talking points, such as the idea that children today are taking too many shots at once.

    Americans might not like Kennedy all that much, but Trump sure seems to still have his back.

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    Ed Cara

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  • Trump and RFK Jr. Blame Tylenol For Autism in New Report, but Experts Push Back

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    President Donald Trump and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have officially found scapegoats to blame for rising rates of reported autism cases. In a report published today by HHS, the government has linked the use of acetaminophen (better known as Tylenol) during pregnancy to the neurodevelopmental condition.

    Trump made the announcement at a news conference Tuesday afternoon, though the Wall Street Journal was the first to break the news on the expected findings earlier this month. The report singles out acetaminophen use and folate deficiency as possible autism causes and even suggests a specific drug used to improve the latter—leucovorin—as a potential autism treatment.

    “Taking Tylenol is not good—I’ll say it, it’s not good,” Trump stated decidedly during the conference, though he went on to admit that there are no safer alternative over-the-counter painkillers for pregnant women to take. RFK Jr., meanwhile, stated that the FDA will be taking formal steps to add a safety label to acetaminophen products warning of its supposed autism risk, while HHS will be conducting a public health campaign to highlight the link.

    Outside experts are dubious about the report, however, arguing that its findings are based on weak and mixed evidence, at best.

    Why Tylenol is a red herring

    Perhaps the biggest red flag surrounding this report is Trump and RFK Jr.’s grandiose language advertising it. Both men have crowed about finding the singular cause or answer to autism spectrum disorder.

    “I’ve been waiting for this meeting for 20 years.” Trump said during the news conference. “And it’s not that everything is 100% understood or known. But I think we’ve made a lot of strides.”

    Actual scientists, however, have long known that autism is generally triggered by a mix of genetic and environmental influences—influences that aren’t easily untangled.

    The rate of reported autism cases in children has gone up over time. Many experts have argued that a greater awareness of autism symptoms and broader criteria in how autism is diagnosed are largely responsible for this increase. But Trump, RFK Jr., and others have refused to accept this conclusion, and have instead looked to point a finger at some external culprit in the environment.

    Some environmental factors could be contributing slightly to more autism cases, such as people having children at an older age than before, but there are good reasons why Tylenol is unlikely to be a good villain for the Trump administration to blame.

    “There’s nothing new here. They are reviewing existing literature, and they’re doing it badly,” David Mandell, an autism researcher and psychiatric epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told Gizmodo. Mandell is also an executive committee member of the Coalition of Autism Scientists, an organization that formed in response to RFK Jr.’s initial announcement earlier this April that he would supposedly uncover the causes of autism.

    Some studies, including a review published last month, have suggested that prenatal exposure to acetaminophen could increase the risk of several neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Importantly, though, many other studies haven’t, including studies that have tried to account for the weaknesses in the data being analyzed.

    In a 2024 study, researchers in Sweden and the U.S. looked at the health outcomes of all children born in Sweden between 1995 and 2019. At first, they did find a small signal of potential autism risk in kids whose mothers reported using acetaminophen during pregnancy. This signal disappeared entirely when they only focused on comparing siblings to each other, however. Since siblings share many of these influences, this type of study can better isolate and cut down on potential noise in the data that could lead researchers down the wrong path.

    Indeed, based on their results, the researchers concluded that the link between Tylenol and disorders like autism was probably a “noncausal association.”

    Some research has also suggested that acetaminophen use among pregnant women in the U.S. and Canada has actually declined slightly since the early 2000s, Mandell notes, the opposite trend you’d expect to see if the drug was truly driving higher autism rates.

    Notably, other countries have already tried to distance themselves from the U.S.’s new stance on Tylenol. The UK’s health regulators issued a statement today reassuring its residents that the use of acetaminophen (called paracetamol in Europe) during pregnancy is safe and that there is no evidence of it causing autism.

    The tenuous case for leucovorin

    The link between folate deficiency/leucovorin and autism in the new report is built on less shaky, but still tenuous, ground.

    Folate is also known as vitamin B9, and expectant mothers need adequate levels of it to support their child’s health during pregnancy and prevent certain birth defects. That’s why women are recommended to regularly take folic acid (another form of vitamin B9 that breaks down into folate in the body) supplements while pregnant.

    Research has suggested that some children with autism also tend to have trouble moving folate into their brains (usually due to an autoimmune issue), which then causes a condition called cerebral folate deficiency (CFD). Importantly, people can have CFD but still have normal folate levels in their blood. Leucovorin is a different form of vitamin B9 (folinic acid) that’s most commonly used to counteract the toxic effects of some chemotherapy treatments. But the drug can also bypass the typical method for folate delivery, meaning it can raise folate levels in the brain and treat CFD.

    Based on this early research, some scientists have been excited about the potential of leucovorin to help children with both autism and CFD. Some clinical trials have yielded promising results, while some parents have claimed that leucovorin dramatically improved their children’s communication and developmental skills. All that said, the trials have been small to date, with the largest so far involving 80 children (a similar trial of 80 children is expected to be completed next year) and the smallest only having 19 children.

    Leucovorin could absolutely turn out to be an effective treatment for the subset of children who seem to have both conditions, but Mandell is worried about the Trump administration rushing through the scientific process in hopes of securing good publicity. When I asked if the administration is putting the cart ahead of the horse with leucovorin, Mandell replied, “We don’t even know if there is a cart yet.”

    Mandell also cautions that both researchers and the autism community have had their hopes raised—only to be dashed—by early, promising studies in the past. Over 20 years ago, he notes, much was made about the potential of secretin, a neurotransmitter that helps regulate digestion, to treat autism symptoms. Case reports and small trials appeared to show a positive effect from secretin, only for multiple larger trials to later find nothing of the sort.

    This cautionary tale has not stopped Trump and Kennedy from quickly moving to promote and even approve leucovorin for autism via the FDA. The FDA is publishing a Federal Register notice outlining a label update for leucovorin, according to HHS, which will formally authorize a prescription version of the drug for treating autism.

    “If folinic acid gets an FDA indication for autism, it would be the drug with the weakest evidence to support its FDA indication of any drug that I can think of,” Mandell said.

    Mandell and others have also noted some groups close to Trump world could potentially profit handsomely if leucovorin becomes popularized as an autism treatment. Mehmet Oz, the current administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, was previously an advisor to the supplement company iHerb, for instance, which has several listings for folinic acid supplements on its website. Oz himself pledged to resign from the company and divest his restricted stock units from iHerb upon becoming CMS chief.

    The future of autism research

    The government’s approach to autism and research is now taking shape. That said, under the Trump administration, the National Institutes of Health has actually cut funding this year from its existing autism-related efforts, either due to negligence or as part of a larger crusade to tear down anything in the government that even acknowledges racial and other disparities for being too “woke.”

    Mandell and other experts worry that the administration’s new focus on acetaminophen and leucovorin will only lead to more wasted resources and fearmongering about an important intervention. Compared to aspirin and NSAIDs, Tylenol is considered a safer OTC pain and fever reliever for pregnant women, and it’s estimated more than half of women worldwide take the drug at least once during pregnancy.

    Unfortunately, the scapegoating may not be over yet.

    The HHS report notably doesn’t focus on vaccination, which Kennedy, other antivaccination proponents, and even Trump have long tried to blame for rising autism rates. Extensive scientific research over the years has and continues to find no such link between vaccines or their ingredients and autism. But HHS has reportedly hired well-known antivaxxer David Geier to conduct a new study reexamining this debunked connection.

    During the news conference, Trump tried to relitigate the case for separating out the measles, mumps, and rubella combination vaccine (a common goal of the anti-vaccination movement), arguing that taking too many vaccines at once is dangerous to people’s health, a claim with little backing. RFK Jr. also made it clear during the conference that HHS will be investigating the purported link between vaccines and autism, somehow framing it as a matter of “believing all women”—referring to the mothers who believe vaccines cause autism.

    Acetaminophen may be the first fake bogeyman that Trump and Kennedy will formally blame for autism, but it seems unlikely that it will be the last.

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    Ed Cara

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  • RFK Jr.’s vaccine advisers declined to recommend COVID-19 shots, but here’s how you can still get them and not pay | Fortune

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    Drugstores are ready to deliver updated COVID-19 vaccines this fall and insurers plan to pay for them, even though the shots no longer come recommended by an important government committee.

    On Friday, vaccine advisers picked by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declined to specifically recommend the shots but said people could make individual decisions on whether to get them.

    The recommendations from the advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention require sign-off by the agency’s director, but they are almost always adopted.

    Those recommendations normally trigger several layers of insurance coverage and allow drugstores in many states to deliver the shots. But insurers and government officials have said coverage will continue, and several states have allowed for vaccine access through pharmacies, the most common place to get shots.

    Many people start seeking vaccinations in the late summer or early fall to get protection against any winter surges in cases.

    Here’s a closer look at the issue.

    Will insurers cover these shots?

    Many are expected to do so, but you still may want to check with yours.

    The Department of Health and Human Services said Friday that the committee vote “provides for immunization coverage through all payment mechanisms.” An HHS spokesperson said that includes Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, commercial coverage sold through health insurance marketplaces and the federal Vaccines for Children program, which pays for roughly half of childhood vaccinations in the U.S. each year.

    The VFC program normally automatically covers any vaccines recommended by the CDC committee.

    The trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans said earlier this week that its members will continue to cover the shots at no cost to patients through 2026.

    That group includes every major insurer except UnitedHealthcare. And that insurer has said it will continue covering the vaccine at no cost for its standard commercial coverage, which includes plans offered for individuals and through small businesses.

    One caveat: Large employers that offer coverage will make their own decisions on the vaccines.

    They may be motivated to continue coverage: The vaccines can help ward off expensive hospital bills from people who develop a bad case of COVID-19.

    Where people can get vaccinations

    About two-thirds of adults get COVID-19 shots at pharmacies, and around 30% receive them at doctors’ offices, according to CDC data.

    Access to the shots has grown after a clunky start to vaccine season that saw some people travel to nearby states when they couldn’t make appointments at pharmacies closer to home.

    Drugstore chains like CVS say their locations are stocked with the latest vaccines, and they now are able to deliver vaccinations in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Prescriptions are required in D.C. and a handful of states, including Florida and Georgia, CVS Health spokeswoman Amy Thibault said.

    Walgreens also requires prescriptions in a few states, a company spokesperson said.

    Who can get the shot

    Until now, the U.S. has recommended yearly COVID-19 shots for everyone age 6 months and older.

    The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved the shots for all people age 65 and older, and for younger adults and children with conditions that put them at high risk for catching a bad case of COVID-19.

    The CDC maintains a long list of conditions that would put someone at high risk, including asthma, cancer, heart or lung problems, obesity, depression and a history of smoking. It also includes those who are physically inactive, and the agency notes that this list is not conclusive.

    Patients can consult with their doctor or care provider to decide whether they are high risk if they don’t have a condition on that list.

    Both CVS and Walgreens representatives say their companies will ask patients under age 65 if they have any of these factors. They won’t require proof.

    “In simplest terms, if a patient says they’re eligible, they will get the vaccine,” said Thibault, the CVS Health spokeswoman.

    Fortune Global Forum returns Oct. 26–27, 2025 in Riyadh. CEOs and global leaders will gather for a dynamic, invitation-only event shaping the future of business. Apply for an invitation.

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    Tom Murphy, The Associated Press

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  • CDC Panel Votes to Nix Current Covid Vaccine Recommendations

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    On Friday, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted to drop its recommendation that U.S. adults should generally receive the covid-19 vaccine, instead endorsing an individualized approach.

    In a unanimous decision, the ACIP members agreed that adults 65 and older should decide on their own or with their doctor whether to get vaccinated for covid-19. The ACIP also recommended that people between the ages of 6 months and 64 years make an individual decision about covid-19 vaccination (yes, you read that correctly), while being informed that the benefits of vaccination are most apparent in those at higher risk of severe illness.

    A screencap of ACIP blurbage articulating the new recommendations. © ACIP

    The ACIP narrowly avoided recommending that Americans should require a prescription to get the covid-19 shot, however, though only barely.

    A chaotic ACIP meeting

    The votes capped off a chaotic and disorganized discussion held Friday over the safety and effectiveness of the covid-19 mRNA vaccines.

    Retsef Levi, a longtime skeptic of the covid-19 vaccines and a professor of operations management at MIT Sloan School of Management, led the ACIP discussion, as well as the working group on covid-19 vaccines. Levi is one of several ACIP members handpicked by Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. who has a long history of misrepresenting vaccine research.

    CDC staff presented reams of evidence that covid-19 vaccines, even today, still reliably prevent serious outcomes like hospitalization and death, including in very young children. Many outside experts also testified in support of maintaining widespread access to these vaccines for every American who wants them. But ACIP members often questioned the findings or made their own poorly evidenced attempts to attack the safety of the vaccines.

    At one point, for instance, ACIP members argued in support of a paper claiming to show extensive DNA contamination of the vaccines—a study that outside experts have criticized for glaring flaws and that is now being reviewed over potential concerns by its publisher. At another point, members argued that the covid-19 vaccines could possibly raise the risk of cancer, a claim widely refuted by most experts (mRNA vaccine technology is actively being studied as a way to prevent and treat certain cancers).

    What this vote means for covid vaccine access

    The language of the ACIP votes today was not disclosed until the very last minute, and it’s not entirely clear how they will impact vaccine access.

    Late last month, the Food and Drug Administration limited its explicit approval of the updated covid-19 boosters to people over 65 or those with a higher risk of severe illness. The ACIP’s recommendation to move to an individualized approach, assuming it’s adopted by the CDC, may further delay or prevent people from obtaining a covid-19 booster if they so choose.

    That said, several states like New York have already taken steps to ensure continued vaccine access and public coverage of the vaccine to all their residents. This week, the country’s largest health insurance association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, also announced that its members will rely on the previous ACIP recommendations to determine their coverage of the covid-19 vaccine for the time being. It additionally stated that patients covered by these plans would not experience cost-sharing through the end of 2026.

    In a 6 to 6 vote, the ACIP declined to endorse a recommendation calling for people to require a prescription for the covid-19 vaccines—ACIP chairman Martin Kulldorff issued the tiebreaker, voting “no.”

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    Ed Cara

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  • RFK Jr.’s Handpicked Vaccine Panel Nixes Measles-Chickenpox Combo for Kids Under 4

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    Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s handpicked vaccine recommendation panel has just issued guidance that, if acted on, could overhaul when and how children receive vaccines designed to protect them from dangerous diseases like measles, rubella, and chickenpox.

    The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) met on Thursday. In an 8 to 3 vote, they recommended against the use of the combined measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella (chickenpox) vaccine in children under four. They are instead now recommending that children should only receive two separate vaccines covering these four diseases.

    Kennedy’s new guard

    The ACIP has traditionally been a panel of independent experts organized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help steer the country’s vaccine policy. Their recommendations, while non-binding, carry significant weight; many states mandate that children receive all the vaccines recommended by ACIP before entering public school, for instance. But under U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., critics say that ACIP has become a platform for vaccine skepticism.

    In early June, Kennedy unilaterally fired all 17 former members of ACIP and then, without any outside review, appointed eight new members, some of whom have previously misrepresented science on vaccine safety or who have financially benefited from attacking vaccines. Kennedy added five new members to the panel earlier this week, including some individuals who have questioned the safety and effectiveness of the covid-19 vaccines.

    At the panel’s last meeting in June, in a majority vote, Kennedy’s new members recommended the removal of a mercury-based additive called thimerosal from the very few remaining vaccines that contain it. The recommendation was formally adopted by the government in July. Anti-vaccination proponents have long blamed thimerosal in vaccines for causing autism and other neurological conditions, even after it was phased out from all childhood shots two decades ago out of an abundance of caution. And dozens of studies have since failed to support any link between thimerosal (or, for that matter, any vaccine or specific ingredient) and autism.

    Under Kennedy’s leadership, the CDC has been rocked by a series of high-profile departures. The Centers’ director Susan Monarez was reportedly fired for reportedly refusing to support Kennedy’s vaccine agenda—a decision that spurred the resignation of several other senior CDC staff and an unprecedented public display of support from remaining employees.

    Monarez testified at a Senate hearing earlier this week, alleging that Kennedy had pressured her to rubber-stamp recommendations from ACIP. She also stated that Kennedy told her that the childhood vaccine schedule was going to change in September and that she needed to be “on board with it.”

    What the latest vote means for these vaccines

    In what was its second meeting since Kennedy dismissed the former members in June, the panel first debated the safety of the measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella (MMRV) vaccine.

    The MMRV vaccine was approved in 2005 as a convenient alternative to children being given the MMR vaccine and a separate varicella vaccine, providing protection against all four diseases at once. Soon after its release to the public, however, evidence emerged that the first dose of the MMRV vaccine is associated with a slightly increased risk of febrile seizure (seizures caused by a fever) in children under the age of four as compared to the MMR plus varicella vaccine. Importantly, an additional risk of seizure wasn’t seen with the second dose of the MMRV vaccine given to older children.

    The CDC was the first to discover and acknowledge this risk and has long recommended that, unless parents specifically request the MMRV vaccines, younger children should receive the MMR plus varicella vaccine as their first dose and the combined MMRV vaccine for the second dose. At Thursday’s ACIP meeting, CDC staff presented data showing that about 85% of parents choose the MMR and a separate varicella vaccine as recommended for the first dose. But since some families may prefer their children taking fewer vaccines overall, parents were advised they could opt for either vaccine strategy.

    Febrile seizures are certainly scary for both the parent and for the child to experience. However, they’re generally short-lasting and aren’t often linked to longer-term health problems. In turn, the vast majority of these kinds of seizures aren’t tied to vaccination but to infections.

    The long and short of it is that this change is wholly unnecessary, given that most parents take the CDC’s advice and don’t use the MMRV vaccine for the first dose. But the ACIP’s vote will effectively remove a family’s right to decide which shot their young children receive—an ironic fate given how anti-vaccination proponents often frame their decision to not vaccinate themselves or their children as an expression of freedom.

    CDC staff noted that the ACIP’s recommendation could affect Medicaid coverage of these vaccines, as well as coverage offered through the Vaccines for Children (VFC) program, a federal program that provides vaccines to families unable to afford them. And it’s possible that some children who would have received the MMRV vaccine will end up not receiving the two separate vaccines for any number of reasons.

    That said, the ACIP voted ‘No’ on whether the VFC should change its coverage in alignment with the new recommendation. This means that the program should stick to its existing coverage of the MMRV vaccine.

    The ACIP also discussed whether it should continue to recommend universal hepatitis B vaccination starting at birth—a policy first endorsed by the group over 30 years ago. But due to a longer meeting than scheduled, the ACIP has delayed its vote on the matter until tomorrow. The ACIP is expected to weigh in on the covid-19 vaccines tomorrow as well.

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    Ed Cara

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