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
AP News: HHS Layoffs Were Likely Unlawful and Must Be Halted, US Judge Says. A federal judge ruled that recent mass layoffs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services were likely unlawful and ordered the Trump administration to halt plans to downsize and reorganize the nation’s health workforce. … DuBose said the states had shown “irreparable harm,” from the cuts and were likely to prevail in their claims that “HHS’s action was both arbitrary and capricious as well as contrary to law. The executive branch does not have the authority to order, organize, or implement wholesale changes to the structure and function of the agencies created by Congress,” DuBose wrote in a 58-page order handed down in U.S. district court in Providence.
CNN: ‘MAHA Report’ Calls for Fighting Chronic Disease, But Trump and Kennedy Have Yanked Funding. The Trump administration has declared that it will aggressively combat chronic disease in America. Yet in its feverish purge of federal health programs, it has proposed eliminating the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and its annual funding of $1.4 billion. That’s one of many disconnects between what the administration says about health — notably, in the “MAHA Report” that President Donald Trump recently presented at the White House — and what it’s actually doing, scientists and public health advocates say.
STAT: How Republicans sidelined the health care industry and pushed through historic Medicaid cuts. Republicans swiftly approved President Trump’s tax cut bill last week, despite a full-court press from doctors, hospitals, and patients to beat back some of the largest health care cuts in American history — more than $1 trillion in all over the next decade. […] The looming loss in revenues from Medicaid alone will send providers scrambling, they told lawmakers, considering which services to cut back or facilities to shutter. The American Hospital Association said Congress’ passage of the bill was a “very difficult day for health care in America.” Even some leaders in the Make America Healthy Again Movement expressed concern, sending a letter to administration officials warning that the cuts would “be catastrophic to the espoused tenets and common-sense bipartisan policies that ‘Make America Healthy Again.’” The law’s July 4 signing begins a new era for state Medicaid programs, which will be forced to contend with the new rules and less cash. The bill is projected to leave about 12 million more people without health insurance.
Health Impacts:
- WFYI: HIV Community Faces a Double Whammy: Medicaid Reductions and CDC Funding Cuts
- STAT: How Trump’s tax-cut bill is set to upend health care
RFK Jr. Is An Extreme MAGA Anti-Vaxxer Who’s Breaking His “Assurances” To Key Republicans To Get Confirmed And Mis-Managing HHS
The New York Times: Medical Societies Sue Kennedy and H.H.S. Over Vaccine Advice. Six leading medical organizations filed a lawsuit on Monday against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, and the federal Department of Health and Human Services, charging that recent decisions limiting access to vaccines were unscientific and harmful to the public. The suit, filed in federal court in western Massachusetts, seeks to restore Covid vaccines to the list of recommended immunizations for healthy children and pregnant women. Mr. Kennedy has been on a “decades-long mission” to undermine vaccines and to portray them as more dangerous than the illnesses they are designed to prevent, said Richard H. Hughes IV, a lawyer who teaches vaccine law at George Washington University and is leading the effort. “The secretary’s intentions are clear,” Mr. Hughes said: “He aims to destroy vaccines.”
The New York Times: Top F.D.A. Official Overrode Scientists on Covid Shots. The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official rejected broad uses of two Covid vaccines, citing unknown risks or injuries despite assurances of safety from dozens of staff experts, newly released documents show. […] The new documents offer a window into Dr. Prasad’s vision for the agency and his thinking on vaccine policy. The records reveal that F.D.A. staff members concluded that the vaccines were safe and effective based on clinical trials of the shots tested in thousands of people. But Dr. Prasad wrote that there could still be vaccine-related injuries that have yet to be discovered.
Forbes: How RFK Jr. Could Disrupt Insurance Coverage Of Preventive Healthcare. But in light of Kennedy’s evident distrust of established expertise and traditional scientific institutions in government decision-making, this could give pause. Besides holding vaccine-skeptic views, Kennedy has questioned whether HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, advocated on behalf of lifting of raw milk restrictions and removing fluoride from drinking water. … What happened last month at the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, when the entire panel of experts was ousted and replaced, could offer clues as to how Kennedy may act, given that he has a similar authority to appoint and remove Task Force members. And this extends to his right to review and block their guidance before it takes effect.
CBS News: RFK Jr.’s FDA Officials Overrode Career Staff to Limit COVID Shots. Top-ranking Food and Drug Administration officials picked by the Trump administration under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. overrode career staff at the agency to limit the approvals of COVID-19 shots from Novavax and Moderna, according to records released by the FDA. In a memorandum following Novavax’s approval in May, which narrowed the shot’s label to only seniors ages 65 and older and others at-risk of severe disease, the FDA’s Dr. Vinay Prasad said that he disagreed with the agency’s career vaccine reviewers.
Washington Post: Public Health Groups File Lawsuit to Stop RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Changes. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. violated the law and imperiled public health when he withdrew some recommendations about coronavirus vaccines, a coalition of medical associations alleged in a lawsuit filed Monday. The lawsuit against Kennedy and other top government health officials seeks to overturn the health secretary’s decision in May to end the government’s long-standing blanket recommendation that children and pregnant women should receive the shots. The reversal has made it difficult for some pregnant women to get vaccinated to protect themselves and their future children, according to the health groups that filed the lawsuit. Medical professionals rely on — and are sometimes legally bound by — federal vaccine recommendations to decide whom to immunize.
The Verge: RFK Jr.’s Plan to Put ‘AI’ in Everything Is a Disaster. As the head of HHS, Kennedy said his federal department is undergoing an “AI revolution.” He implored viewers to “stop trusting the experts,” as highlighted by Gizmodo, and, presumably, put their trust into AI instead of decades of scientific consensus. He referenced that AI tools were being used to “detect waste, abuse, and fraud” across the federal government — the tagline for Elon Musk’s misguided and disastrous DOGE initiative that’s already led to a scramble to rehire hundreds of wrongfully cut CDC employees. Kennedy also vaguely declared that the CDC will be using AI to “look at the mega data that we have and be able to make really good decisions about interventions,” demonstrating how flimsy his grasp of AI is.
Other MAHA Activity:
- Fortune: RFK Jr. Wants More People Wearing Health Wearables in the Name of ‘MAHA’
- Wired: Insurers Aren’t Saying Whether They’ll Cover Vaccines for Kids if Government Stops Recommending Them
- The Guardian: Inside RFK Jr’s conflicted attempt to rid America of junk food
- ABC News: RFK Jr. promoted a food company he says will make Americans healthy. Their meals are ultraprocessed
Public Health Threats
New York Times Magazine: Inside the Collapse of the F.D.A. The reckoning that Robert Califf spent years warning about began, as so many things seem to these days, on social media. It was October 2024. His tenure as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration was winding down, and he was starting to imagine a happy retirement surrounded by grandchildren when he noticed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. taking aim at his agency, and the 19,000 or so people who worked there, on X. “FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” Kennedy wrote. “This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma. If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you. 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.” […] In Califf’s opinion, there was no good reason for any of it. “History will see this as a huge mistake,” he mused. “The F.D.A. as we’ve known it is finished.”
Washington Post: U.S. Measles Cases Reach 33-Year High as Outbreaks Spread. The United States has reached its highest annual measles case tally in 33 years, hitting at least 1,277 confirmed cases across 38 states and the District of Columbia. The milestone marks a public health reversal in defeating a highly contagious, vaccine-preventable disease as the anti-vaccine movement gains strength. … Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist who ascended to be the top U.S. health official, has offered mixed messages about measles and the vaccine to prevent it. He initially downplayed the seriousness of the Texas outbreak after the first child died, saying: “We have measles outbreaks every year.” He accompanied his calls for vaccination with caveats, raising concerns about the shots that public health experts called unfounded.
NPR: Study: 14 Million Lives Could Be Lost Due to Trump Aid Cuts. The Trump administration is formally shutting down the United States Agency for International Development today, after cancelling 83% of its programs earlier this year. The administration says the agency has misspent billions in funds and “has little to show since the end of the Cold War.” That argument clashes with a new study published Monday in the medical journal, The Lancet. The study estimates that USAID programs have saved over 90 million lives over the past two decades. The researchers also estimate that if the current cuts continue through 2030, 14 million people who might have otherwise lived could die.
Public Health Threats Around The World: