Tag: pro-virus policies

Exclusive: CDC expert resigns from COVID vaccines advisory role, sources say

Published June 3, 2025

Published by: Reuters
Published on: June 3, 2025
By Julie Steenhuysen, Michael Erman, Dan Levine

Pediatric infectious disease expert Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos of the U.S. CDC resigned on Tuesday as co-leader of a working group that advises outside experts on COVID-19 vaccines and is leaving the agency, two sources familiar with the move told Reuters.

Panagiotakopoulos said in an email to work group colleagues that her decision to step down was based on the belief she is “no longer able to help the most vulnerable members” of the U.S. population.

In her role at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s working group of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, she co-led the gathering of information on topics for presentation.

Her resignation comes one week after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time vaccine skeptic who oversees the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, said the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women had been removed from the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule.

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vaccines

RFK Jr.’s stance on Covid vaccines for pregnant women is profoundly unethical

Published June 3, 2025

Published by: STAT
Published on: June 3, 2025
By Ruth R. Faden

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy’s proposal to end the government’s existing Covid vaccine recommendation for healthy pregnant women, if enacted, will be a major setback to decades’ worth of efforts to advance the health of pregnant people and their babies.

It also profoundly unethical.

Pregnant people are consistently left behind in biomedical R&D in ways that are deeply harmful to the health of both mother and child. In the decade before the Covid pandemic, consensus reports emerged denouncing this pregnancy evidence gap and providing road maps for how to ethically generate evidence during pregnancy within the confines of existing research regulations. I co-led one of these efforts, the PREVENT project, initiated in response to the Zika epidemic and completed in fall 2019. PREVENT specifically focused on how to ethically include pregnant women in the development and deployment of new vaccines for emerging pandemic threats.

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avian flu

Cancelling funding for mRNA vaccine is both risky and foolish

Published June 2, 2025

Published by: The Ottawa Citizen
Published on: June 2, 2025
By Raywat Deonandan

With Donald Trump’s second administration, disruptive news seems to arise on a daily basis. Most concerning for clinicians and health scientists in Canada and around the world was Trump’s appointment of anti-vaccination zealot Robert Kennedy Jr. to the enormously influential position of Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy’s ideological dismantling of the U.S.’s vaunted health research apparatus has been at speeds surprising even to his most ardent critics.

But his recent decision to cancel a nearly $600-million contract with vaccine manufacturer Moderna might be among his most shortsighted and destructive moves, with ripple effects globally.

The contract with the mRNA pioneer, signed under the Joe Biden administration, was meant to fund the development, testing and licensing of vaccines targeting particular flu strains, including the strain responsible for the dreaded avian flu, H5N1. Many scientists fear that H5N1 could become the next world-stopping infectious disease pandemic.

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kakistocracy

Loss Of MRNA, Bird Flu Vaccines Threatens Our Biosecurity

Published May 29, 2025

Published by: Forbes
Published on: May 29, 2025
By Judy Stone

The Department of Health and Human Services announced Thursday that it’s canceling a $760 million contract with Moderna for a bird flu vaccine, saying that further development “was not scientifically or ethically justifiable.” The cancellation comes after Moderna received positive interim data from a trial testing the safety and immunogenicity of its H5N1 bird flu vaccine candidate. The fact that the Biden administration had approved the contract with Moderna did not help.

This administration’s distrust of mRNA vaccines has been apparent. In February, Rep. Adam Schiff stated that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “promoted the lie that mRNA vaccines alter human DNA.” Kennedy has previously called mRNA COVID-19 vaccinations dangerous. Further, at least seven states have proposed GOP-sponsored legislation banning or limiting mRNA vaccines and fueling mistrust in vaccines.

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kakistocracy

Doctors fear ‘devastating consequences’ for pregnant people after RFK Jr order on Covid-19 boosters

Published May 28, 2025

Published by: The Guardian
Published on: May 28, 2025
By Jessica Glenza

Kennedy’s unilateral decision to change the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule for Covid-19 vaccines demonstrates once again why he is completely unqualified to be the HHS secretary.

In Congressional testimony on May 14, Kennedy said, ‘I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.’ Yet two weeks later he is making arbitrary public health decisions, defying norms, and with no accountability.

— Dr Robert Steinbrook, research director at consumer rights group Public Citizen

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kakistocracy

RFK Jr says no COVID vaccines for healthy children, pregnant women

Published May 27, 2025

Published by: CIDRAP
Published on: May 27, 2025
By Stephanie Soucheray

Today Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made another sweeping change to the US vaccine landscape, saying the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has removed its recommendation of the COVID-19 vaccine for healthy children and pregnant women.

“I couldn’t be more pleased to announce that, as of today, the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant woman has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule,” Kennedy said in a video message, flanked by Martin Makary, MD, MPH, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, director of the National Institutes of Health.

The move comes just 1 week after the FDA announced—via an opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine—that the vaccine would now be offered only to adults 65 years and older or those with underlying conditions that made them vulnerable to severe COVID-19.

Today’s video message is short and direct but is already causing confusion, as pregnancy itself is considered a risk factor for severe COVID-19.

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kakistocracy

The FDA’s misguided new Covid vaccine policy repeats past mistakes

Published May 21, 2025

Published by: MSNBC
Published on: May 21, 2025
By Dr. Kavita Patel

The Food and Drug Administration is rewriting America’s Covid vaccine playbook — and not for the better. Its new guidance would trade the clarity and reach of our current vaccination strategy for a confusing age-based and risk-based framework that simply doesn’t fit the realities of Americans’ health. As a primary care physician who has spent years on the front lines of pandemic response, I see this as a step backward that ignores both the lessons of our past and the needs of our most vulnerable patients.

The FDA’s proposed framework eerily mirrors the segmentation we attempted in fall 2021 with Covid boosters. When boosters initially rolled out in September 2021, the FDA authorized them only for specific groups: adults 65 and older, those 18-64 with high-risk conditions, and those with occupational exposure risks.

The approach failed. As someone who had to explain these complex eligibility requirements to confused patients, I can attest to the chaos it created. This limited approach created tremendous confusion among health care providers and patients alike. Pharmacies and clinics struggled to verify eligibility, people misunderstood their risk category and, ultimately, many high-risk individuals who genuinely needed boosters never received them.

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pro-virus policies

RFK Jr. eyes reversing CDC’s Covid-19 vaccine recommendation for children

Published April 22, 2025

Published by: Politico
Published on: April 22, 2025
By Adam Cancryn

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is weighing pulling the Covid-19 vaccine from the government’s list of recommended immunizations for children, two people familiar with the discussions told POLITICO.

The directive under consideration would remove the Covid shot from the childhood vaccine schedule maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and widely used by physicians to guide vaccine distribution, marking Kennedy’s most significant move yet to shake up the nation’s vaccination practices.

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pandemic response

Is Public Health Really Dead?

Published April 22, 2025

Published by: The Tyee
Published on: April 22, 2025
By Michelle Gamage

Local podcaster Daniella Barreto called her latest project Public Health Is Dead to capture her frustration with how leaders handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It seemed like all of these things we’re taught in school, like prevention being key and using evidence to make decisions, was thrown out the window,” Barreto told The Tyee. “Mask mandates were being taken away, people were increasingly getting long COVID, and I decided I needed to do something because people were not getting the information they needed.”

Launching the podcast in November 2024, Barreto used her background in public health, with a master of science in population public health from the University of British Columbia and a bachelor of science in health science from Simon Fraser University, to help explain what went wrong. So far she’s released five episodes and has many more in the works.

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Federal cuts threaten to close Pennsylvania lab that certifies N95s and other respirators in June

Illustration of a white N95 respirator torn into two pieces, with violet background. Based on image by Rossie C S from Pixabay.

N95 respirators

Federal cuts threaten to close Pennsylvania lab that certifies N95s and other respirators in June

Published April 17, 2025

Published by: Pennsylvania Capital-Star
Published on: April 17, 2025
By Ian Karbal

The Pennsylvania laboratory that certifies all of the country’s NIOSH-approved respirators is on the chopping block. HHS is stonewalling employees who raise questions.

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war on science

Internal budget document reveals extent of Trump’s proposed health cuts

Published April 16, 2025

Published by: The Washington Post
Published on: April 16, 2025
By Lena H. Sun, Carolyn Y. Johnson, Rachel Roubein, Joel Achenbach, Lauren Weber

The Trump administration is seeking to deeply slash budgets for federal health programs, a roughly one-third cut in discretionary spending by the Department of Health and Human Services, according to a preliminary budget document obtained by The Washington Post.

The HHS budget draft, known as a “passback,” offers the first full look at the health and social service priorities of President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget as it prepares to send his 2026 fiscal year budget request to Congress. It shows how the Trump administration plans to reshape the federal health agencies that oversee food and drug safety, manage the nation’s response to infectious-disease threats and drive biomedical research.

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war on science

How Trump 2.0 is slashing NIH-backed research — in charts

Published April 10, 2025

Published by: Nature
Published on: April 10, 2025
By Max Kozlov, Chris Ryan

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has terminated nearly 800 research projects at a breakneck pace, wiping out significant chunks of funding to entire scientific fields, finds a Nature analysis of the unprecedented cuts.

The administration of US President Donald Trump began purging NIH-funded studies on topics that it deems problematic less than 50 days ago, continuously expanding its list to include research on topics ranging from COVID-19 to misinformation. Hundreds of the 30,000-plus scientists funded by the NIH yearly have been forced to halt their work after receiving notices that their research “no longer effectuates agency priorities”, and some have had to fire personnel or even shut down their laboratories.

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war on science

Top scientists pen letter calling for end to ‘assault on U.S. science’

Published April 1, 2025

Published by: CBC Radio
Published on: April 1, 2025
By Catherine Zhu

Nearly 2,000 doctors, researchers, and scientists have signed an open letter calling for an end to what they describe as the Trump administration’s “wholesale assault on U.S. science.”

The letter, written by 13 scientists from disciplines including medicine, climate science and economics, urges Americans to demand their Congress protect scientific funding and integrity.

The signatories, all members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, wrote that the Trump administration is “destabilizing this enterprise by gutting funding for research, firing thousands of scientists, removing public access to scientific data, and pressuring researchers to alter or abandon their work on ideological grounds.”

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war on science

Rollout of ‘miracle’ HIV prevention drug is threatened by Trump cuts to global AIDS relief program

Published April 1, 2025

Published by: STAT
Published on: April 1, 2025
By Ed Silverman, Jason Mast

The Trump administration’s enormous cuts to a global AIDS relief program threaten to upend the planned rollout of a groundbreaking HIV prevention drug that was expected to save countless lives.

The medicine, lenacapavir, made by Gilead Sciences, has caused a stir because clinical trial data showed a single set of injections every six months could provide virtually complete protection against infection, a form of prevention known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or (PrEP). The drug, which is under regulatory review, has raised hopes that the deadly infectious disease can be mitigated around the globe. Early data for an even newer formulation suggest it might need to be given only once a year. “This is magical,” UNAIDS chief Winnie Byanyima declared last year.

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pro-virus policies

US cutting Gavi vaccine alliance aid may cause ‘over a million deaths’

Published March 27, 2025

Published by: France 24 / AFP
Published on: March 27, 2025

Paris (AFP) – The United States cutting funding to Gavi, an organisation that provides vaccines to the world’s poorest countries, could result in more than a million deaths and will endanger lives everywhere, the group’s CEO warned on Thursday.

The news that Washington is planning to end funding for Gavi, first reported in the New York Times, comes as the two-month-old administration of President Donald Trump aggressively slashes foreign aid.

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pro-virus policies

CDC is pulling back $11B in Covid funding sent to health departments across the U.S.

Published March 25, 2025

Published by: NBC News
Published on: March 25, 2025
By Brandy Zadrozny

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is pulling back $11.4 billion in funds allocated in response to the pandemic to state and community health departments, nongovernment organizations and international recipients, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed Tuesday.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement. “HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.”

HHS oversees 13 agencies, including the CDC, which is tasked with protecting the nation’s health. Notices began going out Monday, and awardees have 30 days to reconcile their expenditures. Figures are subject to change.

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avian flu

Kennedy’s Alarming Prescription for Bird Flu on Poultry Farms

Published March 18, 2025

Published by: The New York Times
Published on: March 18, 2025
By Apoorva Mandavilli

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, has an unorthodox idea for tackling the bird flu bedeviling U.S. poultry farms. Let the virus rip.

Instead of culling birds when the infection is discovered, farmers “should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it,” Mr. Kennedy said recently on Fox News.

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rapid tests

U.S. reverses plan to shut down free covid test program

Published February 18, 2025

Published by: The Washington Post
Published on: February 18, 2025
By Lena H. Sun, Carolyn Y. Johnson

The government had been preparing to shut down the program that ships free coronavirus tests to American households and was considering destroying 160 million tests.

The Trump administration reversed a plan to shut down the government website that ships free coronavirus tests to households late Tuesday, after The Washington Post reported that the administration was preparing to end the program and was evaluating the costs of destroying or disposing of tens of millions of tests.

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Tag: pro-virus policies

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The government had been preparing to shut down the program that ships free coronavirus tests to American households and was considering destroying 160 million tests.