February 2025

Welcome to Public Health Watch, a weekly roundup from Protect Our Care tracking catastrophic activity as part of Donald Trump’s sweeping war on health care. From installing anti-vaccine zealot RFK Jr. as Secretary of HHS to empowering Elon Musk to make indiscriminate cuts to our public health infrastructure, including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, Donald Trump is endangering the lives of millions of Americans. Protect Our Care’s  Public Health Watch will shine a spotlight on the worst of the Trump/RFK/Musk war on vaccines, science and public health and serve as a resource for the press, public and advocacy groups to hold them accountable.   

What’s Happening In Public Health?

Catastrophic Cuts Are Creating Chaos And Endangering Americans’ Health And Scientific Innovation

STAT: Drug inspectors, AI experts, maternal health workers: Trump’s health agency cuts are far-reaching. The total number of workers let go was unclear — senior officials had told STAT on Friday that as many as 5,200 might receive termination notices, though the exact figure is now expected to be somewhat lower. There may have also been some reprieves. It was reported that the Indian Health Service was in line for big cuts; but those had not yet materialized. Likewise, members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service program, run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had been warned Friday they were to be fired, but by midday Monday none had received termination letters. Whatever the final toll, there was little doubt about the reason behind the cuts. 

Politico: Mass firings continue across nation’s health agencies.The Trump administration carried out more mass firings across the Health and Human Services Department this weekend, continuing a chaotic purge of the federal workforce that career officials and lawmakers warned would hurt key programs and impair efforts to track threats to public health. The cuts hit staffers at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, several people with knowledge of the firings told POLITICO. The administration also terminated some staff at the office responsible for emergency preparedness and response. The firings were part of a culling of roughly 3,600 probationary employees across the sprawling department that began earlier this week with terminations primarily at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health.

Politico: Trump administration firings hit key office handling bird flu response. Laboratories in a national network of 58 facilities responding to the spread of bird flu were notified Friday that 25 percent of the staff in a central program office coordinating their work were fired in the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of federal employees. USDA’s National Animal Health Laboratory Network program office has a staff of only 14 people, but it plays a major role in responding to animal disease outbreaks. It’s responsible for data management, ensuring that labs across the country are conducting the same tests and following similar protocols to accurately and effectively track animal diseases.

Stat: FDA’s former top food official says Trump firings are ‘dismantling’ the division. The former head of the Food and Drug Administration’s food division said Tuesday that he resigned this week because cuts made by the Trump administration imperil the agenda set forth by health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “I, personally, and the organization were very excited about the agenda that Secretary Kennedy has articulated for foods, in particular around nutrition and food chemical safety,” Jim Jones, who until Monday was the FDA’s deputy commissioner for foods, told STAT in an interview. “But so far, all of the actions we’re seeing from this administration — not just the rhetoric, which is very … dismissive would be the nicest thing to say about what they’ve said about federal employees — but also their actions. “So they’ve fired 89 people” in the food division, said Jones, whose resignation was first reported by the food industry website Food Fix. “Many of them were going to be doing chemical safety work. Some were doing nutrition work.” The administration, he said, is talking about further reductions in staff at the FDA. Efforts on the issues that RFK Jr. has said were among the most important to him, nutrition and chemical safety, were “decimated,” Jones said.

Time: NIH Budget Cuts Are the ‘Apocalypse of American Science,’ Experts Say. The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, and its grants create the foundation of basic science knowledge on which major health advances are built. On Feb. 7, the NIH announced that it would cut “indirect expenses” in the funding it provides to research grants by nearly half. “We were all just dumbstruck,” says Dr. Richard Huganir, professor and chairman of the department of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who relies on NIH grants for his research into therapies for autism and intellectual disabilities. “I’m calling it the apocalypse of American science. This will basically change science as we know it in the U.S.”

RFK Jr. Is An Extreme Anti-Vaxxer Who’s Already Breaking His “Assurances” To Key Republicans To Get Confirmed

Washington Post: Trump casts psychiatric and weight-loss drugs as threats to children. President Donald Trump has instructed his administration to scrutinize the “threat” to children posed by antidepressants, stimulants and other common psychiatric drugs, targeting medication taken by millions in his latest challenge to long-standing medical practices. The directive came in an executive order Thursday that established a “Make America Healthy Again” commission led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has criticized the use of those drugs and issued false claims about them. The order said the commission should prepare a “Make Our Children Healthy Again” assessment within 100 days that examines “the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs.” The directive comes as children and teens endure a mental health crisis exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Kennedy also has made childhood nutrition and healthful food a signature issue. He has been critical of the boom in weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound and Mounjaro.

NBC: Trump orders end to federal funding for schools that require Covid vaccines. President Donald Trump on Friday signed an executive order halting federal funds for schools that require students to be vaccinated against coronavirus before they can attend classes in person. Trump’s administration has already taken steps to end coronavirus vaccine requirements at the federal level, including for green card applicants, and reinstated service members who were discharged for refusing the vaccine. The order states that “[s]ome school districts and universities continue to coerce children and young adults into taking the COVID-19 vaccine by conditioning their education on it” and warns that others could re-implement such mandates. It calls for the secretary of education, working with the secretary of health and human services, to provide a plan to end coronavirus school mandates, including a list of federal grants and contracts provided to schools and universities that do not abide by the new executive order, which was first reported by Breitbart News. 

Public Health Threats 

Washington Post: As Trump vents about covid, experts worry his moves could worsen next threat. In Atlanta, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was told Friday to lay off an estimated 10 percent of its staff, including nearly an entire class of “disease detectives” — the infectious-disease experts charged with helping spot the next epidemic. In West Texas, local officials warned about the spreading risk of measles, saying that an outbreak of the vaccine-preventable disease had doubled to 48 cases since early last week. And in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order focused on coronavirus vaccination mandates in schools and universities. “President Trump is fulfilling his campaign promise: ‘I will not allow schools to impose COVID vaccine mandates,’” a White House fact sheet read. Even some GOP officials acknowledged that the order addresses an issue that is effectively moot: Almost all colleges and universities stopped requiring covid-19 vaccination after the public health emergency ended in May 2023, according to the American College Health Association. Five years after a public health crisis rattled Trump’s first White House, his second appears to be responding by rolling back the nation’s disease-spotting safety net — even as new threats lurk. Some of the emerging policies have been driven by backlash to the covid-19 response, after Trump made clear his disdain for the nation’s public health infrastructure. He and allies have said the U.S. approach to the virus, including mask and vaccine mandates and school shutdowns, was heavy-handed, a position that some Democrats now share too. But Trump’s latest moves may be cutting into the country’s fundamental ability to identify health threats and head them off, experts said.

Axios: U.S. facing worst flu season since 2009, experts say. The worst flu season in 15 years has left hundreds of thousands of Americans hospitalized while straining physicians’ offices and emergency departments. Why it matters: The virus is causing more severe complications and hitting young children especially hard. “The two predominant strains that are circulating right now are known to be more severe and have more severe outcomes, especially in high-risk patients,” said Carol McLay, president of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. “It’s really clogging up our ERs and our outpatient facilities. And for the first time, we’ve seen cases of influenza that have surpassed COVID-19 in hospitalizations and deaths, since the COVID pandemic began,” she said. By the numbers: This flu season is classified as a “high-severity” season, with estimates of at least 29 million cases, the most since the 2009-2010 flu season, according to the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

CNN: West Texas measles outbreak doubles to 48 cases. The measles outbreak first reported in Gaines County, Texas, has doubled to 48 cases since a count released earlier this week, the Texas Department of State Health Services said Friday. The first two cases were identified in late January, and the numbers have been rising since. Forty-two cases are reported in Gaines County. Surrounding counties have also reported cases, three in Terry County, two in Yoakum County and one in Lynn County. With the contagious nature of the disease, the state health department says it expects that more cases will be reported in Gaines County and the surrounding areas. All of the cases are in unvaccinated people or those who have unknown vaccination status. Most cases are in children 5 to 17 years old. All experienced an onset of symptoms in the past three weeks. Among the 48 cases, 13 have been hospitalized. Two measles cases were also reported in bordering Lea County, New Mexico, on Friday, bringing the total there this week to three. The first case involved an unvaccinated teenager, and the vaccination status in the other cases is unknown.

NBC: Trump’s drive to reshape government threatens bird flu response. As avian flu drives egg prices to record levels and increasingly poses a risk to humans, moves by the White House to cut spending and restrict communications have hobbled public health officials’ response, with the new administration yet to outline a clear strategy on how it plans to stem the spread of the virus. State and local public health officials have gone weeks without regular updates on avian flu from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after President Donald Trump froze nearly all external communications from the agency, said a person familiar with the situation. It wasn’t until this week that some of those communications began to resume, the person said.

Reuters: US bird flu response disrupted in early weeks of Trump administration, sources say.​ The Trump administration has disrupted the U.S. response to bird flu as the outbreak worsens, leading to confusion and concern among federal staff, state officials, veterinarians and health experts, 11 sources told Reuters. Since U.S. President Donald Trump took office on January 20, two federal agencies responsible for monitoring and responding to the epidemic have withheld bird flu reports and canceled congressional briefings and meetings with state health officials, the sources said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention withheld two weekly reports, one on bird flu transmission and another on surveillance, and canceled several meetings on bird flu with state officials. The CDC and U.S. Department of Agriculture held no congressional briefings for three weeks, and the USDA did not respond to a state official’s request for information on a new program to protect the nation’s food supply, the sources said. The result has been anxiety among federal health staff that critical information about bird flu will not be disseminated in a timely manner or at all, even as more people and livestock test positive for the virus.

Opinion and Commentary

Wall Street Journal (Editorial): RFK Jr. and the Measles Outbreak. The Senate voted 52-48 last week to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the nation’s health secretary. In other news, 13 people in Texas were hospitalized for measles amid an outbreak of 48 cases, almost all in children whose vaccination status is negative or unknown. That was as of Friday morning. “Due to the highly contagious nature of this disease,” the Texas health department said, “additional cases are likely.” The tragedy is that this doesn’t have to keep happening. In 2000 measles was declared eliminated from the U.S., meaning 12 months with no continuous spread. Immunization has saved millions of lives around the world since the vaccine became available in 1963. The peril isn’t small. “About 1 in 5 unvaccinated people in the U.S. who get measles is hospitalized,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Nearly 1 to 3 of every 1,000 children who become infected with measles will die.” Yet for some people, the reality of measles feels like a sepia-toned history lesson, whereas the antivax hooey featured on podcasts these days sounds current. RFK Jr., an environmental lawyer by trade, has long been part of the problem, and at his Senate confirmation hearings he presented himself as just asking questions, man. That undersells his role in spreading doubt and confusion.

STAT (Matthew Harper): How Trump’s ‘fear factor’ is already reshaping American science. Even before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as health secretary on Thursday, the Trump administration started bludgeoning the U.S government’s health care infrastructure — including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health — with one shuddering impact after another. The resulting fear among employees could reshape the government as much as the actions themselves. “If I were bird flu or whatever the next pandemic pathogen will be, this would be my exact playbook — decimate the federal science and health infrastructure,” said Holly Fernandez Lynch, a bioethicist and lawyer at the University of Pennsylvania.  “The sledgehammer approach — and the absolute cruelty and disrespect to public servants — will set back American scientific innovation for a generation at least,” Lynch said. “The shortsightedness is astounding. The number of cures we won’t get and scientific advances we won’t have as a result of these cuts are uncountable.”

New York Times (Jehan Alladina, C. Corey Hardin, and Alexander Rabin): Censored Science Can’t Save Lives. In our careers as pulmonary and critical-care doctors, we have witnessed a revolution in treating asthma, a disease that affects one in 12 Americans. Newer medications make it possible to reverse the course of the disease and bring people with severe asthma into remission. These new treatments mean that no one should die of an asthma attack. Yet we continue to see patients with life-threatening flare-ups in the intensive care units where we work. Shockingly, 10 people die of asthma daily in the United States. Why? Specifically, why do some patients with severe asthma get prescribed the newer drugs more than others? And what is the influence of race or gender on respiratory health? In recent weeks, studies that would help us answer these and other health equity questions have come under attack from the federal government for their “wokeness” and “shameful” agenda. They have, in a word, been censored. Censoring research on how to deliver treatments to those most in need isn’t just nonsensical — it puts lives at risk and undermines America’s leadership in medical innovation. Progress cannot occur if scientists are barred from asking certain questions. This is not how science works.