Yesterday, we looked into some of the dire implications the Trump budget has for health care, but what’s happening within the agencies tasked directly with protecting public health may well be an even bigger upheaval.
“News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry. I am neither. I am pro-safety,” then-nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said back in January at his confirmation hearing. The statement, coming from a career vaccine critic and former head of the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense, met plenty of skepticism — but that wasn’t sufficient to keep Kennedy from office.
Now that he heads the Department of Health and Human Services, Secretary Kennedy and his team of similarly minded deputies have rolled out a policy agenda that goes beyond the chaotic firings typical of the DOGE era and even Kennedy’s previous positions. The new recommendations reject medical consensus on the efficacy of vaccination altogether, even as new Covid-19 variants emerge and avian flu threatens the next pandemic. Among the changes:
The Department of Health and Human Services has laid off thousands of workers, including members of critical teams. [NPR]
The FDA, under Commissioner Martin Makary, imposed new restrictions on the traditionally produced Novavax Covid vaccine. [AP News]
Sec. Kennedy overruled the CDC’s own scientists to announce the agency would no longer recommend Covid vaccinations for healthy children and pregnant women, potentially triggering insurance companies to stop covering the shots and making them unaffordable for those who need or want to access them. [AP News]
HHS also cancelled its contract with Moderna to develop its mRNA-based avian flu vaccine. [NPR]
Sec. Kennedy and his ally Dr. Mehmet Oz moved to “rescue” 300 avian flu-stricken ostriches, rejecting expert advice that sick flocks be culled to minimize further spread of the disease. [The Guardian, World Health Organization]
Anat Shenker-Osorio made the case yesterday that the Republican budget’s threats to lives and livelihoods raise a very serious question. Does HHS deserve the same kind of scrutiny?
And by way of contrast, we invite you to look back at our coverage of the Covid pandemic and the very different world it seemed to open up. The response offered up a moment of possibility for government to get it right, from Operation Warp Speed under the first Trump White House through the Biden administration’s supervision of the recovery. It’s a reminder of what can be different, on the other side of Trump 2.0.
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This post was originally published on The.Ink.