Tag: kakistocracy

Health minister says she worries about U.S. public health decisions harming Canadians

U.S. panel voted to remove universal hepatitis B vaccine recommendations for infants

Published December 13, 2025

Published by: CBC News
Published on: December 13, 2025
By Benjamin Lopez Steven

Health Minister Marjorie Michel says she worries about how recent actions by U.S. public health agencies, like removing a universal hepatitis B vaccine recommendation for American infants, could hurt Canadians’ health.

“It’s a big worry for me,” Michel said in an interview on CBC’s The House that airs Saturday morning. “The U.S. is our closest neighbour. And it’s a big neighbour.”

“It’s absolutely crucial to work with provinces and territories to be all on the same page, for example, on vaccination,” Michel told host Catherine Cullen.

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pro-virus policies

CDC advisers drop decades-old universal hepatitis B birth dose recommendation, suggest blood testing after 1 dose

Published December 5, 2025

Published by: CIDRAP
Published on: December 5, 2025
By Mary Van Beusekom, Laine Bergeson, Liz Szabo, Chris Dall

This morning, after contentious discussion, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted 8-3 to drop the recommendation for a universal birth hepatitis B vaccine dose and 6-4 to suggest that parents use serologic testing—which detects antibodies in the blood—to determine whether more than one dose of the three-dose series are needed.

Under the first recommendation, only infants born to mothers who test positive for hepatitis B would receive a birth dose, while parents of other babies would be advised to postpone the first dose for at least two months.

ACIP makes vaccination recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including those for different age-groups and disease risk status, as well as on US immunization schedules for children, adolescents, and adults. The CDC director has ultimate discretion whether to approve ACIP’s advice, and physicians can make their own decisions about whether to comply, but ACIP recommendations have historically affected insurance coverage of vaccines.

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pro-virus policies

Panel Votes to Stop Recommending Hepatitis B Shots at Birth for Most Newborns

In a move toward Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s goal of upending vaccine policy, the committee recommended delaying the shots for infants whose mothers test negative for the virus.

Published December 5, 2025

Published by: The New York Times
Published on: December 5, 2025
By Apoorva Mandavilli

A federal vaccine committee took a major step toward Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s goal of remaking the childhood vaccine schedule on Friday, voting to end a decades-long recommendation that all newborns be immunized at birth against hepatitis B, a highly infectious virus that can cause severe liver damage.

The divisiveness and dysfunction of the committee in making the decision, however, raised questions about the reliability of the advisory process and left at least one critic “very concerned about the future” of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The panel, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, voted 8 to 3 that women who test negative for hepatitis B should consult with their health care provider and decide “when or if” their child will be vaccinated against the virus at birth. The committee did not change the recommendation that newborns of mothers known to be infected or whose status is unknown be immunized. The shift is not expected to affect insurance coverage of the shots.

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pro-virus policies

Vaccine Committee May Make Significant Changes to Childhood Schedule

Comments by President Trump, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and some panelists suggest the committee is likely to delay hepatitis B shots and discuss revising the use of other vaccines.

Published December 2, 2025

Published by: The New York Times
Published on: December 2, 2025
By Apoorva Mandavilli

Advisers to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appear poised to make consequential changes to the childhood vaccination schedule, delaying a shot that is routinely administered to newborns and discussing big changes to when or how other childhood immunizations are given.

Decisions by the group are not legally binding, but they have profound implications for whether private insurance and government assistance programs are required to cover the vaccines.

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pro-virus policies

FDA official, without providing data, claims link between COVID-19 vaccines and pediatric deaths

Published November 29, 2025

Published by: CBS News
Published on: November 29, 2025
By Kerry Breen, Margaret Brennan, Dr. Céline Gounder

Dr. Vinay Prasad, the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine division, sent a memo to staff that linked children’s deaths to the COVID-19 vaccine, but did not provide data to back the claim.

The memo said that a review “found that at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination,” according to multiple sources familiar with the email. The memo was first reported by the New York Times.

Prasad suggested that the deaths were related to myocarditis, or the inflammation of the heart muscle. Prasad did not share any data used in the review, including the children’s ages, whether they had existing health conditions, or how the FDA determined there was a link between their death and the vaccine. The findings were not published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

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anti-vaxxers

Trump Rattles Vaccine Experts Over Aluminum

The president’s call for removal of the metal from childhood inoculations set off alarms. About half of shots for polio, whooping cough and other diseases would be affected.

Published October 15, 2025

Published by: The New York Times
Published on: October 15, 2025
By Christina Jewett

Federal health officials are examining the feasibility of taking aluminum salts out of vaccines, a prospect that vaccine experts said would wipe out about half of the nation’s supply of childhood inoculations and affect shots that protect against whooping cough, polio and deadly flu.

The review at the Food and Drug Administration began after President Trump listed aluminum in vaccines as harmful during a press briefing about the unproven link between Tylenol and autism.

Aluminum salts have been in vaccines since the 1920s and are added to enhance the immune-stimulating effect against the virus or bacteria covered by the inoculation. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, has been a longtime critic of aluminum in vaccines, which he has suggested is linked to autism.

Vaccine experts said the tiny amount of aluminum salts in vaccines — often measured in the one-millionth of a gram — has a long track record of safety and is essential to generating lasting immunity from disease. Developing vaccines without aluminum salts, they said, would require an entirely new formulation from scratch.

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war on science

Chaos following mass firings, rehirings at CDC

Published October 13, 2025

Published by: CIDRAP
Published on: October 13, 2025
By Stephanie Soucheray

Late Friday night more than 1,000 employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were sent an email saying they had been let go due to reduction-in-force (RIF) efforts at the end of the second week of the federal government shutdown.

Some, however, were mistakenly fired and were rehired the next day, according to sources close to the situation.

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war on science

They Fought Outbreaks Worldwide. Now They’re Fighting for New Lives.

Published October 13, 2025

Published by: The New York Times
Published on: October 13, 2025
By Apoorva Mandavilli

The Trump administration’s new global health strategy, released last month, lists its most important goal as outbreak prevention and response, both to protect Americans and to safeguard the economy.

Containing the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a decade ago cost the United States $5.4 billion globally and more than $70 million domestically, the strategy report notes, adding, “As we have unfortunately seen all too frequently, an outbreak anywhere in the world can quickly become a threat to Americans.”

Yet, the freeze on America’s foreign aid in January disrupted many programs that extinguished outbreaks. Citing “waste, fraud and abuse” at federal agencies, the administration also laid off thousands of scientists, including many who worked on preventing and containing infectious diseases.

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war on science

Trump Administration Is Bringing Back Scores of C.D.C. Experts Fired in Error

Friday’s layoffs swept up scientists involved in responding to disease outbreaks and running an influential journal. Officials said the mistaken dismissals were being rescinded.

Published October 11, 2025

Published by: The New York Times
Published on: October 11, 2025
By Apoorva Mandavilli, Sheryl Gay Stolberg

The Trump administration on Saturday raced to rescind layoffs of hundreds of scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who were mistakenly fired on Friday night in what appeared to be a substantial procedural lapse.

Among those wrongly dismissed were the top two leaders of the federal measles response team, those working to contain Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and the team that assembles the C.D.C.’s vaunted scientific journal, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

After The New York Times reported the dismissals, two federal health officials said on Saturday that many of those workers were being brought back. The officials spoke anonymously in order to disclose internal discussions.

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war on science

Trump Administration Lays Off Dozens of C.D.C. Officials

Published October 11, 2025

Published by: The New York Times
Published on: October 11, 2025
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg

Dozens of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — including “disease detectives,” high-ranking scientists and the entire Washington office — were notified late Friday that they were losing their jobs as part of the Trump administration’s latest round of federal layoffs.

It was unclear on Friday how many C.D.C. workers were affected. But it was the latest blow to an agency that has been wracked by mass resignations, a shooting at its Atlanta headquarters in August and the firing of its director under pressure from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Layoff notices landed in the email inboxes of C.D.C. employees shortly before 9 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, notifying employees that their duties had been deemed unnecessary or “virtually identical” to those being performed elsewhere in the agency. Scientists, including leaders, in offices addressing respiratory diseases, chronic diseases, injury prevention and global health were among those affected.

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war on science

Six surgeons general: It’s our duty to warn the nation about RFK Jr.

Published October 7, 2025

Published by: The Washington Post
Published on: October 7, 2025
By Jerome Adams, Richard Carmona, Joycelyn Elders, Vivek Murthy, Antonia Novello, David Satcher

The writers are all former U.S. surgeons general.

As former U.S. surgeons general appointed by every Republican and Democratic president since George H.W. Bush, we have collectively spent decades in service as the Nation’s Doctor. We took two sacred oaths in our lifetimes: first, as physicians who swore to care for our patients and, second, as public servants who committed to protecting the health of all Americans.

Today, in keeping with those oaths, we are compelled to speak with one voice to say that the actions of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are endangering the health of the nation. Never before have we issued a joint public warning like this. But the profound, immediate and unprecedented threat that Kennedy’s policies and positions pose to the nation’s health cannot be ignored.

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disinformation

No evidence that Tylenol causes autism, say Health Canada, World Health Organization

Published September 24, 2025

Published by: The Canadian Press
Published on: September 24, 2025
By Nicole Ireland

ORONTO – Health Canada, the World Health Organization and Canadian autism experts say there is no evidence that taking Tylenol during pregnancy causes autism.

Health Canada and the WHO issued statements last night and this morning in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s unproven claim linking the drug — whose generic name is acetaminophen — to the disorder.

Health Canada says acetaminophen is a “recommended treatment of pain or fever in pregnancy” and “has been used safely by millions of Canadians for decades, including during pregnancy and while breastfeeding.”

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science denial

Trump makes unfounded claims about Tylenol and repeats discredited link between vaccines and autism

Published September 22, 2025

Published by: The Associated Press
Published on: September 22, 2025
By Lauran Neergaard, Ali Swenson

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Monday used the platform of the presidency to promote unproven and in some cases discredited ties between Tylenol, vaccines and autism as his administration announced a wide-ranging effort to study the causes of the complex brain disorder.

“Don’t take Tylenol,” Trump instructed pregnant women around a dozen times during the unwieldy White House news conference, also urging mothers not to give their infants the drug, known by the generic name acetaminophen. He also fueled long-debunked claims that ingredients in vaccines or timing shots close together could contribute to rising rates of autism in the U.S., without providing any medical evidence.

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anti-vaxxers

Viewpoint: Four tips for understanding this week’s ACIP meeting

Published September 15, 2025

Published by: CIDRAP
Published on: September 15, 2025
By Vaccine Integrity Project Staff and Advisers

The last meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in June abandoned the use of its rigorous evidence-to-recommendation framework for making vaccine policy decisions, which structures decisions around key factors, including the balance of benefits and harms, the type or quality of evidence and health economic analyses, among other elements. The meeting also included new members making inaccurate statements about both vaccine safety and efficacy and included a presentation by a well-known anti-vaccine advocate that was filled with errors.

Now, the committee is set to include even more vaccine skeptics when it meets later this week, according to published reports, including multiple anti–COVID mRNA vaccine activists. (On Monday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) confirmed five new ACIP members.)

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anti-vaxxers

Video | How Trump’s cuts to the CDC could threaten Canadians’ public health

Published September 13, 2025

Published by: CBC News
Published on: September 13, 2025

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has long been a global leader in disease tracking and evidence-based medical guidelines, but recent funding cuts and firings have caused many to wonder whether the institution is still a trusted source. CBC’s Nisha Patel breaks down how some of those changes could put Canadians at risk.

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war on science

Six Nobel laureates speak out against Trump: ‘The closest analogy is with the Hitler regime’

Published September 7, 2025

Published by: El País
Published on: September 7, 2025
By Nuño Domínguez

In recent weeks, EL PAÍS contacted most of the Nobel Prize winners in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine from the United States over the past 20 years with a questionnaire about Donald Trump’s policies on science, research, and health. The vast majority are established researchers — some even retired — who should not fear retaliation; but only a handful of them agreed to respond.

“Why am I sad?” writes Roald Hoffmann, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. “We came to the U.S. when I was 11. Even as my parents could not work making full use of their training and talents, the country gave their child, me (and my sister, born here), a chance to get an education and to do wonderful research with talented coworkers from all over the world. If the Trump policies are carried through, the full flow of what I experienced will be very unlikely in the generation of my scientific grandchildren.”

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vaccines

CVS and Walgreens Clamp Down on Covid Vaccines in Many States

Published August 29, 2025

Published by: The New York Times
Published on: August 29, 2025
By Maggie Astor, Dani Blum

CVS and Walgreens, the country’s two largest pharmacy chains, are for now clamping down on offering Covid vaccines in more than a dozen states, even to people who meet newly restricted criteria from the Food and Drug Administration.

On Thursday, Amy Thibault, a spokeswoman for CVS, said the vaccine was not available at pharmacies in 16 states, citing “the current regulatory environment” and emphasizing that the list could change.

On Friday, CVS issued an update: It could administer vaccines in 13 of the 16 states, and in the District of Columbia, to people who had obtained a prescription from a doctor or other medical provider. (As of Friday morning, its online scheduling tool still did not allow anybody to book an appointment in those places; Ms. Thibault said an update was in progress.) In Massachusetts, Nevada and New Mexico, CVS still cannot offer the shots at all, Ms. Thibault said.

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war on science

Kennedy Sought to Fire C.D.C. Director Over Vaccine Policy

Published August 28, 2025

Published by: The New York Times
Published on: August 28, 2025
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Apoorva Mandavilli, Christina Jewett

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. summoned Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to his office in Washington earlier this week to deliver an ultimatum.

She needed to fire career agency officials and commit to backing his advisers if they recommended restricting access to proven vaccines — or risk being fired herself, according to people familiar with the events.

Dr. Monarez’s refusal to do so led to an extraordinary standoff on Thursday that paralyzed the nation’s health agency, which is still reeling from mass layoffs and a shooting this month that killed a police officer and terrified employees.

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Tag: kakistocracy

U.S. panel voted to remove universal hepatitis B vaccine recommendations for infants

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

In a move toward Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s goal of upending vaccine policy, the committee recommended delaying the shots for infants whose mothers test negative for the virus.

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Comments by President Trump, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and some panelists suggest the committee is likely to delay hepatitis B shots and discuss revising the use of other vaccines.

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

The president’s call for removal of the metal from childhood inoculations set off alarms. About half of shots for polio, whooping cough and other diseases would be affected.

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Friday’s layoffs swept up scientists involved in responding to disease outbreaks and running an influential journal. Officials said the mistaken dismissals were being rescinded.

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Still COVIDing Canada Posts

Still COVIDing Canada Posts