Last April, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. promised that his agency would find the cause of autism “by September.” That didn’t pan out, but this week he appears to be trying again—by stacking a decades-old committee devoted to “innovations in autism research, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention” with his friends and fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine and pseudoscience world.  Much like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Kennedy overhauled last fall with a full slate of new appointees after firing all the old members, he filled the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), which was first established in 2000 to help set the federal agenda for autism research, with Kennedy’s allies in the anti-vaccine movement. Many of the 21 new members have previously worked in some capacity with Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy group that Kennedy founded. Others are parent advocates with little to no apparent scientific training. In keeping with IACC requirements, the committee has three autistic members; one of them is a high school senior. Many of the new committee members have been involved with movements that claim there is a biomedical “cure” for autism, a stance that is opposed by most autistism self-advocacy groups. A few of the other committee members have an unusual specialty in common. Several have relationships with organizations that promote “spelling to communicate” a controversial technique that claims to help non-speaking autistic people communicate with the use of letter boards. However, several expert organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the Association for Science in Autism Treatment, warn that there’s scant scientific evidence that spelling to communicate works, that unconscious influence might be exercised by the person interpreting the speller’s apparent messages—often a parent or a caregiver—and that focusing on spelling might discourage caregivers from using more evidence-based interventions.  Here’s a non-exhaustive guide to some of Kennedy’s controversial picks: Tracy Slepcevic is an “integrative health practitioner” who claims that she cured her son’s autism. In 2022, she was a speaker at Reawaken America, a MAGA-meets-evangelical Christian tour convened by former Trump national security advisor Mike Flynn. As Kiera Butler wrote at the time: > Last year, Slepcevic was a featured speaker on the ReAwaken America tour where > she hawked her new book, Warrior Mom: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Her Son > With Autism, with an introduction by Andrew Wakefield. In December, Slepcevic > was interviewed by [far-right live streamer] Stew Peters. She told Peters the > story of her son’s “recovery” from autism with supplements and diets. In > January, Michael Flynn promoted Slepcevic’s book, tweeting “check out this > e-book for only $.99 cents on how one Mama Bear nurtured her son back to > health from autism resulting from a jab!” In 2024, as our colleagues David Corn and Dan Friedman reported, Slepcevic and her husband, Steve Slepcevic, hosted a fundraiser for Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Steve was also present at the rally at the Capitol that preceded the insurrection of January 6, 2021.  Toby Rogers is an anti-vaccine activist and fellow at the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research, a libertarian think tank founded in 2021 which opposed Covid safety measures during the pandemic. Rogers has said he believes that vaccines are the primary cause of autism, and he often uses extreme rhetoric to express this view. Vaccines, he has said, are “genocidal,” and vaccine makers, he argued in an article last year on the Brownstone Institute website, “enslave society.” He believes that “no thinking person vaccinates.” In a 2024 tweet, Rogers argued that Anthony Fauci was “in the same league as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. He must be arrested and prosecuted.” He also has a habit of waxing conspiratorial on X. Earlier this month, for example, he mused, “What if the entire Covid disaster—the design and release of SARS-CoV-2, lockdowns, masks, social distancing, censorship, the suppression of effective meds, Remdesivir, the toxic Covid shots, etc.—was engineered by AI to increase the power of AI?” Ginger Taylor is a former marriage and family therapist-turned-anti-vaccine activist who “writes on the politics of autism, health, vaccination, informed consent and both corporate and government corruption from a biblical perspective.” She previously served on the “Spiritual Advisory Committee” for Children’s Health Defense. The founder of a Maine-based anti-vaccine group, she also runs NoDeception.org, a website on vaccines and Christianity where she writes about “the removal of religious exemptions to vaccine mandates” and what this “means for the Body of Christ.” Elena Monarch is a neuropsychologist who does not appear to specialize in autism; rather she runs an independent clinic in Massachusetts for people who suffer from Lyme disease and the controversial strep-related neurological condition PANS/PANDAS. Fellow committee-member Sylvia Fogel, who has opposed efforts to eliminate religious exemptions for routine childhood vaccination requirements, works as a psychiatrist at the same practice. Monarch appeared at events with Kennedy during his presidential campaign, and Fogel was a recent guest on a Children’s Health Defense podcast. John Gilmore is, like many of the others on the committee, a longtime anti-vaccine activist. He’s the co-founder of the Autism Action Network, which he created after his now-adult son was, according to him, injured by a vaccine. He, too, has ties to Children’s Health Defense and co-authored an editorial in 2021 with Mary Holland, the organization’s legal counsel and current CEO.  (On Children’s Health Defense’s website, Holland is quoted as saying, “It is wonderful news that there are now people on this committee who are truly motivated to solve many of the existential autism issues, including prevention, treatment, education, employment opportunities, long-term care and housing.”) Walter Zahorodny, Ph.D., is an associate professor of pediatrics at Rutgers University’s medical school. He appeared onstage with Kennedy during his first-ever press conference as HHS Secretary in April 2025. As Mother Jones reported at the time, Zahorodny has ties to researchers who deal in autism-related pseudoscience. He appeared in a 2018 video for the organization SafeMinds, which has falsely suggested that autism is caused by mercury exposure in vaccines. (In the video, Zahorodny didn’t take a position on mercury exposure, but instead talked about what he described as an increase in autism prevalence.) Zahorodny also co-authored a study in 2020 of autism rates in Black and Hispanic children with Cynthia Nevison, a University of Colorado climate scientist who is also a contributor to Children’s Health Defense. Dan Rossignol is a family medicine doctor who runs autism clinics in Florida and California. Rossignol has advocated for “chelation” therapy, a debunked autism treatment. In 2010, he was sued by the father of a child for using “dangerous and unnecessary experimental treatments” on his son. (The outcome of that suit is unclear.) Two people on the panel are nonverbal communicators. One of them, Minnesota community college student Caden Larson, communicates with spelling and serves on the board of an organization called the Spellers Freedom Foundation. Another person on the board, Elizabeth Bonker, an autism advocate, uses typing to communicate and is the executive director of Communication 4 ALL, a group which advocates for typing-based communication for nonverbal students, saying that they should be provided access to “spelling on a letterboard or typing on a keyboard with a communication partner.” Honey Rinicella is the executive director of the Medical Academy of Pediatrics and Special Needs (MedMAPS). While the organization looks, from a certain angle, like a professional medical body, it often shares decidedly pseudoscientific ideas that aren’t supported by actual medical organizations. Several of its experts previously worked with Defeat Autism Now! (DAN) , a program created by the Autism Research Institute that advocated for unproven “biomedical” interventions to “cure” autism, including massive doses of supplements and chelation therapy, a process that removes heavy metals from the blood; there is no evidence that either approach “treats” autism, and both have the potential to cause serious harm. (The Autism Research Institute stopped promoting DAN in 2011.) Today, MedMAPS contributors often promote the idea that autism and other neurodevelopmental delays could be caused by vaccines; contributors have also made other pseudo-medical, vaccine-skeptical claims, including promoting the false idea that Covid vaccines were actually “gene therapy.” MedMAPS also uncritically cites other anti-vaccine, pseudomedical groups with anodyne names, including the National Vaccine Information Center.  Katie Sweeney is another self-proclaimed “autism warrior mom” who works as an executive support manager for MedMAPS, meaning that two people from the same pseudomedical organization are now serving on the IACC.  Krystal Higgins is the executive director of the National Autism Association, a small nonprofit whose board consists of people whose children have autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions. The organization has expressed skepticism about vaccines: in a 2012 statement to a Congressional committee — before Higgins was the executive director — the NAA claimed that vaccines “can cause immune and/or inflammatory injuries to  the brain that  eventually manifest as an autism diagnosis,” which is not a thesis that is shared by any mainstream medical body. (Today, the NAA’s website does not seem to take a specific position on the debunked vaccine-autism connection.) The organization also advocates for assisted communication, including S2C (Spelling 2 Communicate) and RPM (Rapid Prompting Method) both of which are controversial in mainstream medical bodies. The American Speech-Hearing-Language Association says, of RPM, “There is no scientific evidence supporting the assertion that messages produced using RPM reflect the communication of the person with a disability.” Higgins is, per her bio on HHS’ website, “a certified Spelling to Communicate (S2C) practitioner, and is a devoted mother to an adolescent with complex medical needs.”  In all, Kennedy’s selections are another startlingly blatant effort to stack HHS with people who distrust vaccines and, in many cases, have devoted long careers to promoting debunked medical misinformation about them, as well as people who promote unproven “cures” and treatments for the condition. In a statement, Alison Singer, the president of the Autism Science Foundation (ASF), a body that focuses on funding actual scientific research and evidence-based autism interventions, called the new committee “a complete and unprecedented overhaul, with no continuity from prior committees and a striking absence of scientific experts.”  “The IACC, created through the efforts of the broad autism community’s work with Congress and sustained for more than two decades by the dedicated service of leading scientists, advocates, and public servants, has been fundamentally compromised,” ASF added in its statement. “The current committee has been hijacked by a narrow ideological agenda that does not reflect either the autism community or the state of autism science. By sidelining rigorous, evidence-based inquiry, this shift will stall scientific progress, distort research priorities, and ultimately harm people with autism and all who love and support them.” 

With 789 cases and counting, the current measles outbreak in South Carolina is now the nation’s largest since measles was officially eliminated in 2000. The highly contagious virus “is circulating in the community, increasing the risk of exposure and the risk of infection for those who are not immune due to vaccination or natural infection,” the state’s Department of Public Health says on its website. Measles is spreading especially quickly among unvaccinated individuals—692 of the South Carolina cases are in unvaccinated individuals—just as it did in the large outbreak in Texas last year, which ultimately sickened 762, hospitalized 99, and killed two children. Yet despite that recent experience, the Department of Health and Human Services insisted last month that this time wouldn’t be that bad. In a December 16 email to Mother Jones, at which time South Carolina already had more than 100 cases, a spokesperson from HHS downplayed the threat of measles in South Carolina. “CDC is not currently concerned that this will develop into a large, long-running outbreak as was seen in Texas earlier this year and whose outbreak has been declared over,” wrote HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard in bold text. When I followed up on Tuesday this week to ask for comment on those earlier predictions, a spokesperson did not address my question but instead stated that “CDC is working closely with South Carolina health officials, including through regular coordination meetings.” The spokesperson added that the agency had provided $1.4 million in financial assistance to the state, and that “most cases are occurring in an under vaccinated immigrant community in the Spartanburg area.” In an emailed statement, South Carolina state epidemiologist Linda Bell wrote that DPH was currently collaborating with CDC on surveillance, testing, reporting, and outbreak control measures.  “Due to the fact that measles has been rare in the U.S. for over twenty years, we have benefitted from [CDC] experts,” she wrote. In her December email to Mother Jones, HHS’ Hilliard insisted that “Secretary [Robert F.] Kennedy [Jr.] has been very clear that vaccination is the most effective way to prevent measles. Any attempts to spin this are baseless.” In the email this week, the HHS spokesperson reiterated that “vaccination remains the most effective way to prevent measles, and the Secretary has been clear and consistent on this point.” Yet at the height of Texas’ measles outbreak last year, Kennedy speculated that the measles vaccination had harmed children in that state. He also falsely claimed that officials “don’t know what the risk profile” is for vaccines that prevent measles. In a press conference last week, CDC principal deputy director Ralph Abraham said of South Carolina’s outbreak, “We have these communities that choose to be unvaccinated,” he said. “That’s their personal freedom.” If the United States loses its measles elimination status, he added, that’s the “cost of doing business.”

About a decade ago, when Doris Tyler was 76, she still had her eyesight. She’d quit driving, but she could see well enough to cook, do laundry, and clean her Central Florida home. But when the treatment for her macular degeneration stopped working, she began exploring other options. Stem cell therapy—whereby patients receive injections of their own stem cells, usually sourced from fat or bone marrow—isn’t approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for her condition, but it sounded “promising,” she says. Representatives at a clinic in Georgia assured her, according to court documents, that injecting stem cells into her eyes would be safe and might even save her vision. After pulling together $8,900 for the procedure, she made an appointment for September 2016. “We were hopeful and very excited at that point,” she recalls. “Until things began to fall apart.” Within a month of the treatment, Tyler woke up unable to see in one eye—her retina had detached, a doctor would confirm. Soon after, the other one did, too. She tried several surgeries to fix the problem, but by December, she was permanently blind. “I don’t see any shapes or anything,” Tyler, now 85, told me. “All I see is blackness.” > “It’s completely changed my life. And I don’t want this to happen to anyone > else.” The clinic, part of the Cell Surgical Network, is one of thousands that have cropped up across the United States over the last two decades, touting stem cell treatments for a wide range of conditions: Alzheimer’s, autism, erectile dysfunction, Covid, joint pain, and more. While some stem cell therapies—like bone marrow transplants—are proven, many clinics, experts say, operate in a legal gray area, jumping ahead of the current science. Rather than rein them in, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pledged to end the FDA’s “war” on alternative medicine, which may include unapproved stem cell treatments. (Tyler sued Cell Surgical Network and eventually settled out of court. The company did not respond to a request for comment.) Some stem cells are like a wild card in the game Uno; the embryonic ones can develop into any tissue type (blood, heart, nerve, etc.), whereas nonembryonic “adult” stem cells are limited by the tissue in which they reside—blood stem cells, for example, produce only red blood cells, white blood cells, or platelets. It’s “a very promising field,” notes Sean Morrison, who chairs the Public Policy Committee of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, but scientists are still striving to understand stem cells and evaluate their potential as therapies. “We can’t just skip over the process of testing in clinical trials,” he says. Paul Knoepfler, a professor of cell biology and human anatomy at UC Davis, has read “encouraging” stem cell studies involving Type 1 diabetes, spina bifida, Parkinson’s, and age-related macular degeneration like Tyler’s. But clinics “are prematurely marketing stuff that’s not really ready for primetime yet.” And they are proliferating. In 2016, Knoepfler and a colleague tallied 570 clinics nationwide offering stem cell treatments. By 2021, there were more than 2,700, with hotspots in California, Florida, and Texas—many promoting stem cells for things like pain relief, sports medicine, and general wellness. That same year, Pew Charitable Trusts identified 360 reports of bacterial infections, blindness, cardiac arrest, organ failure, tumors, and other “adverse events” related to unapproved stem cell and regenerative medicine procedures from 2004 through September 2020. Toronto resident Srini Subramaniam told me he spent $28,000 at a Florida stem cell clinic to treat retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary eye condition, to no avail: “It was just that money down the drain.” How is this even allowed? Well, the FDA covers drugs, but regulation of medical practice—licensing, exams, surgical procedures—falls to the states. In 2018, the Trump administration sued clinics in Florida and California, along with the Cell Surgical Network, arguing that stem cell treatments are drugs and should be regulated as such. The case made it to the US Supreme Court, which effectively sided with the FDA. But under RFK Jr., the FDA seems less eager to crack down. Last May, Kennedy told a podcaster—the biologist and wellness influencer Gary Brecka—that he didn’t want to see a stem cell “Wild West,” but added that “charlatans” and “bad results” are an inevitable risk of medical freedom. “If you want to take an experimental drug,” he said, “you ought to be able to do that.” He himself had gone to Antigua for stem cell therapy to treat spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological voice condition, and it helped him “enormously,” Kennedy said. Several states, including California, now require clinics to disclose to customers when therapies aren’t FDA-approved. And a few state attorneys general have sued clinics for deceptive marketing. But several other states, as Knoepfler wrote in Stat last July, have introduced “right to try” bills that would allow clinics to offer biologically derived drugs like stem cells, and let the buyer beware. That’s not such a healthy policy for experimental medicines. Tyler told me that she never would have agreed to stem cell injections had she known the risks. “I grew up in the time when you went to a doctor, you expected them to tell you the truth,” she says. “And you trusted them. And that’s not true anymore.” As for RFK Jr., “if he thinks it should be approved,” he should talk to patients like her first. “It’s completely changed my life,” Tyler says. “And I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat far more meat and dairy products will, if followed, come at a major cost to the planet via huge swathes of habitat razed for farmland and millions of tons of extra planet-heating emissions. A new inverted food pyramid recently released by Donald Trump’s health department emphasizes pictures of steak, poultry, ground beef, and whole milk, alongside fruits and vegetables, as the most important foods to eat. The new guidelines are designed to nearly double the amount of protein currently consumed by Americans. “Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines,” said Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.” But a surge in meat-eating by Americans would involve flattening vast tracts of ecosystems such as forests to make way for the hefty environmental hoofprint of raised livestock, emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases in the process, experts have warned. > Choosing beef over protein sources like beans and lentils is “a big choice we > make that has real consequences.” Even a 25 percent increase in the amount of protein consumed in this way in the US would require about 100 million acres of additional agricultural land each year, an area about the size of California, and add hundreds of millions of tons of extra pollution to an already overheating planet, according to an estimate by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a nonprofit research body. “We are seeing millions of acres of forest cut down and agricultural expansion is the lead driver of that—adding 100 million acres to that to feed the US means additional pressure on the world’s remaining ecosystems,” said Richard Waite, the director of agriculture initiatives at WRI. “It’s already hard to feed the global population while reducing emissions and stopping deforestation, and a shift in this direction would make the challenge even harder. We need to reduce the impact of our food systems urgently and the US is an important piece of the puzzle in doing that.” While many Americans will simply ignore the guidelines, the new framework will probably influence institutions such as schools and federal workplaces. The average American already eats about 317 pounds of meat and seafood a year, second globally only to Portugal, and ingests more protein than previous federal government guidelines recommended. Any further increase will be felt in places such as the Amazon rainforest, which is already being felled at a rapid rate for cattle ranches and to grow livestock feed. Red meat, in particular, has an outsized impact upon the planet—beef requires 20 times more land and emits 20 times more greenhouse gases per gram of protein than common plant proteins, such as beans. The raising of cows, pigs, lamb and other animals for slaughter is also associated with significant localized air and water pollution. “To the extent that people follow these guidelines and eat more animal protein foods, particularly beef and dairy, they will negatively impact our environment, since the production of these foods emits way more greenhouse gases than vegetable protein foods, or even other animal foods,” said Diego Rose, a director of nutrition at Tulane University. Choosing beef over beans and lentils is “a big choice we make that has real consequences,” said Waite. “If people want more protein there are ways to do that via eating plant-based foods without the environmental impacts. We can have our protein and our forests, too.” > “Americans already eat a lot of meat, so this promotion of more meat and > things like beef tallow is puzzling to me.” Animal agriculture is responsible for about a fifth of global emissions, with little progress made in recent years to reduce its impact as more of the world starts to demand meat products. Worldwide consumption of pork, beef, poultry and meat is projected to reach over 500 metric tons by 2050—double what it was in 2000. In the US, much of this meat-eating is concentrated in a relatively small group of avid carnivores—just 12 percent of Americans consume nearly half of the country’s beef, a 2024 study found. But plant-based options, including “fake meat” burgers, have suffered a slump in sales in recent years amid a resurgent trend in meat-eating fueled by online “meatfluencers” and a broader desire to consume more protein. The environmental problems associated with the meat industry were previously highlighted by Kennedy himself, when he was a campaigner on green issues. At one point, Kennedy even said the pork industry was an even bigger threat to the US than Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind. “The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America’s rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of US citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty,” Kennedy wrote in 2004. However, since becoming Trump’s health secretary, Kennedy has sought to elevate meat-eating, dismissing an independent scientific committee’s advice to emphasize plant-based proteins to instead favor meat. “The Trump administration will no longer weaponize federal food policy to destroy the livelihoods of hard-working American ranchers and protein producers under the radical dogma of the Green New Scam,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said in response to questions about the knock-on environmental impacts of the new guidelines. “Americans already eat a lot of meat, so this promotion of more meat and things like beef tallow is puzzling to me,” said Benjamin Goldstein, a researcher at the University of Michigan who has studied the huge emissions associated with meat-eating by city-dwellers in the US. “We needed to be addressing climate change two decades ago and we are still not doing enough now. If we are adding more greenhouse gases to impose unnecessary ideas of protein intake, that’s going to destabilize the climate further. It’s going to have a big impact.”

Federal health officials reduced the number of vaccines recommended for all children from 17 to 11 on Monday. According to the new schedule, some routine vaccines are now only recommended for “high-risk” children, while others, like the flu shot, can be administered through “shared clinical decision-making” that is based on individual discussions between the health care provider and the patient or guardian.  An assessment that provided the scientific basis for the decision to revise the immunization schedule states that an “increased emphasis on shared clinical decision-making would help restore trust in public health recommendations made by CDC.” It cites that from 2020 to 2024, trust in health care declined, “coinciding with school closures, other lockdowns, mandatory face masks, COVID-19 vaccination mandates with their de facto denial of infection-acquired immunity, and other public health recommendations that lacked scientific rationale.”  The Department of Health and Human Services’ announcement comes in response to a presidential order from Donald Trump last month that directed HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill to update the vaccine schedule according to “peer, developed countries.” Trump’s memo said that at the beginning of 2025, the US “was a high outlier” in the number of vaccinations it recommended.   But, as STAT News reports, “some other wealthy countries, including those consulted by U.S. officials, actually have similar recommendations.” HHS’ announcement said many of the peer nations that “recommend fewer routine vaccines achieve strong child health outcomes and maintain high vaccination rates through public trust and education rather than mandates.” “We are aligning the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule with international consensus while strengthening transparency and informed consent,” Kennedy said in the announcement. “This decision protects children, respects families, and rebuilds trust in public health.” This change to the vaccine schedule is the culmination of months of efforts by Kennedy, who has a long record of anti-vaccine activism, to alter the way vaccines are approved and recommended. CDC recommendations were also a target in Project 2025, which states, never again should CDC officials be allowed to say in their official capacity that school children ‘should be’ masked or vaccinated (through a schedule or otherwise).” Last month, a panel appointed by Kennedy, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, voted to end universal hepatitis B recommendations for newborns.  According to NPR, officials said that the revision was made without formal public comment or response from vaccine makers, evading the usual process in which bodies like the CDC’s ACIP evaluate changes. Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, told NPR that the decision “will sow further doubt and confusion among parents and put children’s lives at risk.”

Kara Swisher, the veteran tech journalist who had a leading hand in uncovering the affair between then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and journalist Olivia Nuzzi, said in a Friday interview that RFK Jr. also needs to be held accountable given his long history as a “predator.” “It’s crazy that people don’t care,” Swisher said, regarding how his well-documented allegations of sexual misconduct didn’t impact his confirmation as secretary of health and human services. “It’s because he’s lying about it.”  Eliza Cooney, a former babysitter for the Kennedy family, said that RFK Jr. sexually assaulted her when she was 23 years old and he was 45.  Kennedy reportedly sent a text to Cooney that deflected responsibility: “I have no memory of this incident but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable…If I hurt you, it was inadvertent.” Before he was confirmed, his cousin Caroline Kennedy wrote to several Congress members that they shouldn’t approve his nomination, calling him a “predator” that was “unqualified” for the job.  “He lacks any relevant government, financial, management, or medical experience,” she said. “His views on vaccines are dangerous and willfully misinformed.” RFK Jr. also appeared in Jeffrey Epstein flight records released in 2024.   But he was confirmed anyway.  “He’s murdering people with the vaccine stuff,” Swisher also told Miller. The CDC voted earlier this month to limit hepatitis B vaccines for newborns, rolling back over 30 years of evidence that the vaccine lowers the probability of liver diseases caused by the virus. Models project that delaying the vaccine from birth to two months could lead to at least 1,400 infections and 480 deaths every year.  The detrimental impact of RFK Jr.’s confirmation is obvious, but as Nina Martin noted in our Heroes and Monsters series this month, Swisher is correct—not just about Nuzzi but also how men in power like RFK Jr. continue to go unpunished.

The Food and Drug Administration is considering whether to place a “black-box” warning—a high-danger label only used to flag risk of death, severe harm, or incapacitation—on Covid vaccines, CNN has reported.  According to the Friday CNN report, the initiative to include the warning—part of a range of efforts by Trump administration health officials to limit access to, public support for, and uptake of Covid shots and other vaccinations—is being led by FDA chief medical and scientific officer Vinay Prasad, who is also director of the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. The plan to implement the warnings is expected to be made public by the end of December. Prasad has a long history of dismissing the pandemic, claiming in 2021 that Covid was not more harmful to children than the common flu. Health experts have continued to voice concerns that adding such a warning label may further reduce access to Covid vaccines by making clinicians more hesitant to recommend shots to groups who are at risk for severe Covid. Vaccines with black box warnings are particularly rare because vaccines are only approved after especially extensive safety and efficacy checks.  The news follows reporting earlier this week that the FDA is investigating whether Covid vaccines are linked to deaths in adults, continuing a campaign public health experts have viewed with extreme skepticism. Prasad wrote to FDA staffers in a November letter that “at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination,” without specific evidence. A CDC study released Thursday found that the 2024-2025 Covid vaccine was approximately 76 percent effective against emergency and urgent care visits in children aged 9 months to 4 years, and 56 percent effective for children 5-17 years old, compared to those who didn’t get the updated vaccine.  But since June, CDC recommendations have stated that “parents of children ages 6 months to 17 years should discuss the benefits of vaccination with their doctor.” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s FDA has already reversed previous federal policy on Covid vaccines, restricting the most recent vaccineto people who are at elevated risk due to age or an underlying health condition. Kennedy said in November that he instructed CDC to retract its long-held public stance that vaccines do not cause autism despite evidence to the contrary. (CDC’s website now claims that the assertion that vaccines do not cause autism is not “evidence-based.”) Health experts told my colleagues Kiera Butler and Anna Merlan earlier this year that RFK and his allies’ anti-vaccine decisions open the door to taking essential drugs off the market. “Kennedy’s crusade will create even more doubt over vaccines’ effectiveness, as he uses his position to broadcast and legitimize debunked ideas about their risks,” they wrote. “In the end, experts warn, it will be patients who suffer.”

Last week, the New York Times reported a rare bright spot in public health: The number of children who suffer from potentially life-threatening food allergies has declined sharply since the government changed its guidelines around early exposure to products containing common allergens such as peanuts. Federal guidelines had long recommended that parents avoid feeding babies these products in a misguided effort to prevent allergies. But in 2017, two years after a large trial found that early exposure to small amounts of the products actually seemed to protect against food allergies, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases reversed its previous guidelines. Since then, a new study published in the journal Pediatrics found, the rate of food allergies has declined from about 1.5 percent of all American children in 2015 to .9 percent in 2020, a significant drop of more than a third. The new findings would seem to complicate a theory, long championed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that food allergies are caused by small amounts of aluminum present in routine childhood vaccines. During a fireside chat-style discussion about the Make America Healthy Again movement at the National Governors Association’s Colorado summit in July, Kennedy claimed that a group that he had helped found in the late 1990s, the Food Allergy Initiative, had once visited a lab at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, where a scientist had told him that a team of researchers had discovered that exposure to aluminum causes allergies. > “I asked the scientist there, ‘How do you induce an allergy in a rat?’ And he > said, ‘It’s formulaic. You take aluminum adjuvant and inject it into that rat > with a protein. If it’s a peanut protein, that rat will have a lifetime > allergy to peanuts. If it’s a dairy protein, you’ll have a lifetime allergy to > dairy. If it’s a latex protein, you’ll have a lifetime allergy to latex.’ > That’s the same aluminum adjuvant that’s in the hepatitis B vaccine, and many > of those vaccines contain peanut oil excipients.” Curiously, though, a researcher who has been intimately involved in allergy studies at Mt. Sinai told Mother Jones in an email that he wasn’t sure what Kennedy could have been referring to. Dr. Hugh Sampson, a pediatrician who specializes in allergy and immunology, said he came to Mt. Sinai in 1997 to help found the institution’s Jaffe Food Allergy Institute. Dr. Sampson, whose lab used cholera toxins, not aluminum, to study anaphylaxis in mice, said his group had worked with the Food Allergy Initiative and that he recalled seeing Kennedy at Mt. Sinai. Possibly, Kennedy was referring to a different lab, but “I am not aware of any other lab at Mount Sinai that was doing this kind of work at that time,” he wrote. The addition of aluminum to vaccines has been a longstanding practice by manufacturers, who use it because it boosts the immunization’s effectiveness. The American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines note that “The amount of aluminum in vaccines is safe, regulated, and comparable to the amount of aluminum infants are exposed to through human milk and formula feeding.” Allergist and social media health communicator Dr. Zachary Rubin echoed those assertions, adding that “research consistently shows that early dietary introduction of allergens, not vaccine avoidance, is what helps prevent food allergies.” Experts’ confidence in the safety of aluminum hasn’t stopped Kennedy from insisting that it be reinvestigated; it’s listed in an October memo on questions to be considered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s newly reconstituted Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). > “Research consistently shows that early dietary introduction of allergens, not > vaccine avoidance, is what helps prevent food allergies.” At the Governors Association’s event, Colorado governor Jared Polis pushed back against Kennedy’s claims, citing the lower rate of peanut allergy in Israel, where babies are commonly fed a peanut-based snack as a first food. But Kennedy fired back that Israel’s Hepatitis B vaccine schedule was different. “They don’t give them early in life,” he said. This claim turns out not to be true. Israeli guidelines call for newborns to be vaccinated against Hepatitis B within the first 12 hours of life, the same as in the United States. Neither the US Department of Health and Human Services nor Food Allergy Research and Education, the group that grew out of Food Allergy Initiative, responded to a request for comment from Mother Jones. In the same Colorado appearance, Kennedy referred to a 2017 study published in the Journal of Translational Science that he claimed further substantiated the link between aluminum in vaccines and food allergies. But that study suffered from poor methodology and dubious provenance: parents of the 666 homeschooled children self-reported vaccination status, and these subjects were hardly a representative sample. The study was funded in part by Generation Rescue, Inc., and the Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute, both of which are anti-vaccine advocacy groups. The root cause of food allergy is likely complex, but Dr. J. Andrew Bird, a pediatric immunologist and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Section on Allergy and Immunology, told Mother Jones via email that there is “no credible evidence from high-quality studies that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines contribute to the development of any food allergy, including peanut allergy.” Rather, Dr. Bird wrote, allergies are thought to be “influenced by factors such as genetic predisposition, delayed introduction of peanut in infancy, and disruption of the skin barrier associated with eczema.” He pointed to a Danish cohort study of 1.2 million children, which found no link between aluminum in vaccines and the development of food allergies. Kennedy’s interest in food allergies is not new—in fact, it predates his anti-vaccine activism. A 2002 article in the celebrity gossip magazine 15 Minutes described a star-studded “food allergy ball” chaired by Kennedy, who told attendees that his own son was hospitalized multiple times due to his allergies to nuts, soy, and shellfish. The $2.1 million in proceeds from the event, 15 Minutes reported, were to be spent on finding a cure for food allergies. The option they planned to explore? A vaccine.

It hasn’t been a great week for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. On Saturday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, authored an op-ed in the New York Times calling for Kennedy to resign, as my colleague Inae Oh wrote. The next day, nine former directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) joined in, alleging in another Times op-ed that Kennedy “is endangering every American’s health.” More calls for his ouster came Wednesday, when more than 1,000 current and former HHS staffers published a letter demanding Kennedy’s resignation. “We believe health policy should be based on strong, evidence-based principles rather than partisan politics,” the letter states. “But under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, HHS policies are placing the health of all Americans at risk, regardless of their politics.” The letter cites several of the same examples as the New York Times op-ed written by the former CDC directors: Kennedy has fired thousands of HHS workers, boosted unproven treatments for measles while undermining vaccines, backed Medicaid cuts, and, of course, fired former CDC Director Susan Monarez, which led to the resignations of other top CDC officials. The letter from the former HHS staffers also mentions additional issues, like Kennedy’s habit of “appointing political ideologues who pose as scientific experts”—such as vaccine skeptic David Geier to investigate long debunked links between vaccines and autism—and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s recent decision to limit access to the Covid vaccines. If Kennedy declines to resign, they write, President Donald Trump and Congress should replace him with someone “whose qualifications and experience ensure that health policy is informed by independent and unbiased peer-reviewed science.” The signatories, part of a group called Save HHS, addressed the letter to members of Congress. Their names were reportedly provided to lawmakers but are not listed publicly “in order to safeguard the privacy and security” of the signatories, according to the group. Those who signed on worked at sub-agencies including the FDA, the CDC, and the National Institutes of Health. In a statement provided to Mother Jones, Andrew Nixon, communications director for HHS, claimed that “[Kennedy] and the HHS team have accomplished more than any health secretary in history in the fight to end the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.” Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But Kennedy and administration officials won’t be able to ignore the growing calls for his resignation or firing for long. On Thursday, he’s due to testify before the Senate Finance Committee, Politico first reported last week. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the committee’s top Democrat, wrote to Kennedy last week alleging that “transparency and communication from HHS has been selective at best and deceptive and deeply harmful at worst” and demanding that Kennedy “correct course and deliver on the promise of ‘radical transparency'” at the Thursday hearing.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is reeling this week after a major leadership upheaval. Its director Susan Monarez—a microbiologist confirmed by the Senate to lead the agency—was unexpectedly fired just weeks into her tenure. Monarez reportedly clashed with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over what she described as his demands for unscientific vaccine directives. Following her dismissal, top CDC officials resigned in protest, warning that political agendas were overriding scientific integrity and posing serious dangers to public health. They were escorted from the agency’s Atlanta headquarters. One of those officials was Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who led the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. Daskalakis told CBS News that he was “very concerned that there’s going to be an attempt to re-litigate vaccines that have already had clear recommendations with science that has been vetted.”  In the aftermath, Jim O’Neill, a former tech investor and current Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services under Kennedy, has been appointed acting director of the agency. A longtime associate of billionaire investor Peter Thiel, O’Neill comes not from a background in epidemiology or medicine but from Silicon Valley’s world of venture capital and techno-utopianism. He is especially well-connected in the longevity movement, which seeks to extend human lifespans, and, to a lesser extent, to the “network state” vision of decentralized techno-governance championed by Thiel and other influential Silicon Valley figures. O’Neill first entered the public spotlight in 2016, when President Donald Trump was organizing his first administration and considered him as a possible candidate to be commissioner for the Food and Drug Administration. At the time, O’Neill made waves by suggesting that the agency should not require clinical trials to prove drugs actually worked—but only that they were safe—and that access to drugs should be wide open. “Let people start using them, at their own risk,” he argued in a 2014 speech. During the Covid pandemic, O’Neill publicly advocated for treatments that medical authorities had deemed to be ineffective. The Guardian reported that O’Neill “voiced public support for unproven treatments that were not supported by scientific evidence, including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, as well as vitamin D as a supposed ‘prophylaxis.’” O’Neill’s worldview appears to be deeply influenced by his years working alongside Peter Thiel. O’Neill was managing director at Thiel’s Mithril Capital and later CEO of the Thiel-funded venture capital outfit, the Thiel Foundation. He also served as CEO of the Thiel-backed SENS Research Foundation, which seeks to “end aging as we know it.” As MIT Technology Review reported in June, O’Neill is also connected to a newer wave of techno-optimism taking root in Silicon Valley—the “network state” movement. Popularized by entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan in his 2022 book The Network State, the idea imagines online-first communities that eventually gain territorial sovereignty. Srinivasan has described it as “a country you can start from your computer.” O’Neill appeared alongside Srinivasan during Trump’s early tech-leader summits. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump picked up on the network state concept when he proposed building “freedom cities” on federal land in rural areas. An organization called the Frontier Foundation drafted an open letter in February pushing Trump to act on that idea. Last year, O’Neill posted on X, “Build freedom cities.” Financial disclosure documents uncovered by MIT Technology Review revealed that O’Neill also served on the board of the Seasteading Institute, a network-state project that aims to build a floating nation at sea. Another of O’Neill’s fans is Niklas Anzinger, an entrepreneur and founder of Infinita City, a biotech hub in Próspera, a special economic zone in Roatán, Honduras, and the crown jewel of the Network State movement. Anzinger advocates for “longevity cities”—experimental urban jurisdictions designed to fast-track biomedical advances through agile regulation and infrastructure. Last November, Anzinger wrote on X that O’Neill “would be my most celebrated pick for the new administration—go Jim!” The intersection of public health and techno-optimism alarms some experts. On Bluesky, Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University, compared O’Neill’s appointment as acting CDC head to “making Elon Musk head of the FAA.”