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: HHS cancels nearly $600 million Moderna contract on vaccines for flu pandemics The Department of Health and Human Services has notified Moderna that it is canceling contracts worth $766 million with the company to develop, test, and license vaccines for flu subtypes that could trigger future pandemics, including the dangerous H5N1 bird flu virus. Though the possibility of the cancellation had been anticipated — the new leadership at HHS told the company in February that it was reviewing the two contracts, signed with the Biden administration — the move is being seen as a significant blow to the country’s capacity to respond to pandemic influenza. No other flu vaccine production approach can produce doses with the speed of the messenger RNA platform used by Moderna and other companies that work with mRNA. But the vaccine platform is viewed with deep suspicion by health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his political base. Moderna had conducted a Phase 1/2 clinical trial of its H5N1 vaccine, and was optimistic about the results it was seeing, the company said in a statement.
ProPublica: Trump Pledged to “Make America Healthy Again,” Then Cut a Program Many Tribes Rely on for Healthy Food As he has promoted the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, has lamented the toll that processed foods have taken on the health of Americans, in particular Native Americans. Prepackaged foods have “mass poisoned” tribal communities, he said last month when he met with tribal leaders and visited a Native American health clinic in Arizona. Weeks later, in testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, he said processed foods had resulted in a “genocide” among Native Americans, who disproportionately live in places where there are few or no grocery stores. “One of my big priorities will be getting good food — high-quality food, traditional foods — onto the reservation because processed foods for American Indians is poison,” Kennedy told the committee. Healthy food is key to combating the high rates of chronic disease in tribal communities, he said. Yet even as the president tasks Kennedy’s agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture with improving healthy eating programs, the USDA has terminated the very program that dozens of tribal food banks say has helped them provide fresh, locally produced food that is important to their traditions and cultures. That program — the USDA’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement program — began under President Joe Biden in late 2021 as a response to challenges accessing food that were magnified by the pandemic. Its goal was to boost purchases from local farmers and ranchers, and the funding went to hundreds of food banks across the country, including 90 focused on serving tribes. In March, the Trump administration decided the program did not align with its priorities. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins defended the cut of a half-billion dollars by calling the program a remnant of the COVID era.
Stat: New HHS document details deep NIH cuts as part of Trump budget request The Department of Health and Human Services on Friday released a summary of President Trump’s budget request for the 2026 fiscal year that provides the most detailed look yet at how his administration hopes to reshape the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies. The “budget in brief” document doubles down on a previous request to slash NIH’s discretionary budget to $27.5 billion, an $18 billion or nearly 40% reduction. It also details plans to consolidate the agency’s 27 institutes and centers into just eight. But while those plans were disclosed in previous documents that were leaked or shared publicly by the administration, Friday’s budget summary spells out more clearly precisely where these cuts would come from — and just how deep they will be. The president’s proposal would leave just three of the NIH’s current institutes intact: the National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the National Institute of Aging. But that doesn’t mean these institutes would be spared. If enacted, Trump’s request would slash the budgets of NCI from $7.2 billion to $4.5 billion, NIAID from around $6.6 billion to $4.2 billion, and NIA from $4.4 billion to $2.7 billion.
CBS: Trump administration ending multiple HIV vaccine studies, scientists and officials say The Trump administration has moved to end funding for a broad swath of HIV vaccine research, saying current approaches are enough to counter the virus, multiple scientists and federal health officials say. Notifications that the funding would not be extended were relayed Friday to researchers, who were told by National Institutes of Health officials that the Department of Health and Human Services had elected “to go with currently available approaches to eliminate HIV” instead. The cuts will shutter two major HIV vaccine research efforts that were first funded by the NIH in 2012 at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute and the Scripps Research Institute, multiple scientists said. A spokesperson for Moderna said the vaccine manufacturer’s clinical trials through the NIH’s HIV Vaccine Trials Network have also been put on pause. One senior NIH official said the HHS had also instructed the agency not to issue any more funding in the next fiscal year for HIV vaccine research, with only a small handful of exceptions. A budgetary rule change specifically targeted at HIV vaccine research is also expected to lead to another cut to the NIH’s awards for studies initiated by scientists, an official said.
Local Impacts:
The FDA Is Being Dismantled – Stalling Drug Development And Leaving Us Vulnerable To Food-Borne Illness
Stat: Lawmaker wants to know how FDA can police drug ads after cutting its oversight workforce Amid ongoing controversy over pharmaceutical advertising, one lawmaker wants to know how the U.S. government will enforce regulations after the Food and Drug Administration let go numerous employees from the office that oversees prescription drug promotions. In a May 27 letter to FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) noted that four key leaders of the Office of Prescription Drug Promotion recently departed the agency, and the entire Division of Promotion Policy, Research, and Operations — a unit within the office that developed guidance on pharmaceutical advertising — also was reportedly laid off.
NBC: FDA chief says pregnant women should decide on Covid vaccine with doctors The Food and Drug Administration commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary, said Wednesday that the decision of whether a pregnant woman should get a Covid vaccine should come down to a conversation with her doctor — not a recommendation by the federal government. Makary took part in Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement Tuesday revoking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation that Covid shots should be offered to pregnant women and healthy children. “The data on the Covid vaccine booster in pregnant women is a mixed set of data,” Makary said in an interview. “Now, I think the decision should be between a doctor and a pregnant woman, but the idea that the government has to tell you what to do in this in an area where there is mixed data.” That assertion — that the data is mixed — isn’t supported by evidence, vaccine experts say.
RFK Jr. Is An Extreme MAGA Anti-Vaxxer Who’s Breaking His “Assurances” To Key Republicans To Get Confirmed And Mis-Managing HHS
NOTUS: The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report harnesses “gold-standard” science, citing more than 500 studies and other sources to back up its claims. Those citations, though, are rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions. Seven of the cited sources don’t appear to exist at all. Epidemiologist Katherine Keyes is listed in the MAHA report as the first author of a study on anxiety in adolescents. When NOTUS reached out to her this week, she was surprised to hear of the citation. She does study mental health and substance use, she said. But she didn’t write the paper listed. “The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS via email. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”
- NOTUS: The MAHA Report Has Been Updated With Fresh Errors The Trump administration’s clean up of the “Make America Healthy Again” Commission’s hallmark and error-riddled report is opening new questions about how the report’s authors drew some of its sweeping conclusions about the state of Americans’ health. At least 18 of the original report’s citations have been edited or completely swapped out for new references since NOTUS first revealed the errors Thursday morning. While some of the original report’s inconsistencies have been changed, a few of the new updated citations continue to misinterpret scientific studies. One study NOTUS identified as misinterpreted in the original report was intended to support the claim that psychotherapy is more effective for children than medication for treating mental health concerns. That study was swapped out with a new “systematic overview” authored by psychologist Pim Cuijpers, who told NOTUS via email that MAHA’s new citation is also wrong. Cuijpers said his referenced study doesn’t cover psychiatric medications in children at all — the research was focused on adults. The citation is located in a section of the MAHA report titled, “American children are highly medicated – and it’s not working.”
- NOTUS: The MAHA Report Cites a Paper Criticized as ‘Junk Science’ on Pesticides One of the papers cited in the “Make America Healthy Again” Commission’s report was rejected by a judge as “junk science,” NOTUS found. In a review of the MAHA report’s coverage of crop protection and dietary guidelines, NOTUS found citations that misinterpreted findings and misattributed information, including crediting an outside paper to the United States Department of Agriculture and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s own department. Although the MAHA report was updated after NOTUS first reported inconsistencies on Thursday, these issues remain. HHS did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Axios: RFK Jr.’s on-the-fly health policy strategy Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure as the nation’s top health official is becoming increasingly known for abrupt policy pronouncements based on limited or sketchy evidence that perplex health care providers, industries and patients. Why it matters: While Kennedy has branded himself as a change agent bringing “radical transparency” to a bloated federal bureaucracy and promoting “gold standard” science, the results have at times been chaotic, even exposing rifts between President Trump’s circle and Kennedy’s own base.
Politico: RFK Jr. threatens to bar government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threatened to stop government scientists from publishing their work in major medical journals on a podcast Tuesday as part of his escalating war on institutions he says are influenced by pharmaceutical companies. Speaking on the “Ultimate Human” podcast, Kennedy said the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet, three of the most influential medical journals in the world, were “corrupt” and publish studies funded and approved by pharmaceutical companies. “Unless those journals change dramatically, we are going to stop NIH scientists from publishing in them and we’re going to create our own journals in-house,” he said, referring to the National Institutes of Health, an HHS agency that is the world’s largest funder of health research.
- The Guardian: Exclusive: US veterans agency orders scientists not to publish in journals without clearance Senior officials at the US Department of Veterans Affairs have ordered that VA physicians and scientists not publish in medical journals or speak with the public without first seeking clearance from political appointees of Donald Trump, the Guardian has learned. The edict, laid down in emails on Friday by Curt Cashour, the VA’s assistant secretary for public and intergovernmental affairs, and John Bartrum, a senior adviser to VA secretary Doug Collins, came hours after the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published a perspective co-authored by two pulmonologists who work for the VA in Texas. The article warned that cancelled contracts, layoffs and a planned staff reduction of 80,000 employees in the nation’s largest integrated healthcare system jeopardizes the health of a million veterans seeking help for conditions linked to toxic exposure – ranging from Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange to veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who developed cancer after being exposed to smoke from piles of flaming toxic waste.
Washington Post: Contradicting RFK Jr., CDC keeps recommending covid vaccine for kids Coronavirus vaccines are still recommended for healthy children if their doctors approve, according to updated immunization schedules published late Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, contradicting Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement earlier this week. The revisions, which also say the vaccines are no longer advised during pregnancy, add to the confusion surrounding the Trump administration’s move to bypass the traditional system for immunization advice through expert review and CDC guidance. The CDC did not remove the coronavirus vaccines from the childhood schedule, as Kennedy said it would, when it updated its website late Thursday. Instead, the agency recommends the shots based on “shared clinical decision-making,” meaning children can get vaccinated if their parents and doctors agree.
New York Times: Canada Wants to Kill 400 Ostriches. Kennedy and Dr. Oz Want to Save Them. What do the U.S. health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the celebrity physician Mehmet Oz and some Canadian animal lovers have in common? They all want to save a flock of 400 ostriches on a British Columbia farm. But there’s a catch. The birds were in contact with a deadly virus: H5N1, a type of avian flu. Canada ordered the birds to be culled after the avian virus spread through Universal Ostrich Farms in Edgewood, British Columbia, a town in the province’s interior, north of Washington State. The plight of the wobble — a term sometimes used to describe a group of ostriches — has divided Canadians, but the birds have won allies across the border, namely top officials in the Trump administration. Mr. Kennedy last week urged the Canadian authorities not to kill the ostriches but to do further testing to try to better understand the virus. “We believe significant scientific knowledge may be garnered from following the ostriches in a controlled environment,” Mr. Kennedy said in a letter to the head of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which ordered the culling. Dr. Oz, who oversees Medicare and Medicaid for the Trump administration, offered to relocate the doomed birds to his 900-acre ranch in Florida. John Catsimatidis, a billionaire Republican businessman who owns a New York City radio station, made a plea to save the birds on his radio program, demanding “truth, justice and the American way for the ostriches up in British Columbia.” But most veterinarians agree that keeping birds alive that may still have active infections and could spread the virus to others is a threat to public health.
NOTUS: RFK Jr.’s Child Trafficking Claims Upend the Office of Refugee Resettlement Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is workshopping a new theory: The HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement sanctioned child trafficking during the Biden administration, and he has a mandate to stop it and track down the missing migrant children. “During the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking and for sex and for slavery,” Kennedy said during a cabinet meeting this month. “We have ended that and we’re very aggressively going out and trying to find these children — 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.” But former HHS employees and conspiracy theory experts told NOTUS they believe Kennedy’s theory is being used as an excuse for HHS and the Department of Homeland Security to arrest and deport the often undocumented people who volunteered to take care of children who immigrated to the U.S. without their parents — with dire consequences for the unaccompanied minors themselves.
Disastrous, Dangerous Appointments
Vanity Fair: The Dizzying Rise of MAHA Warrior Calley Means, RFK Jr.’s Right-Hand Man Given Means’s dizzying rise from relative obscurity to the summit of America’s federal health apparatus, his hyperconfidence may well be justified. That climb has been propelled by the personal story he has shared often: that he was a food and pharmaceutical lobbyist who saw firsthand the collusion of both industries with medical groups and academia. And yet, a six-month Vanity Fair investigation raises questions about whether Means has embellished his personal story. Nine of Means’s former PR colleagues dispute some of his key biographical assertions. As well, his health care company, Truemed, which helps patients use tax-free dollars to buy wellness products, is poised to benefit from the radical health care overhaul he has been championing. VF interviewed more than 60 people for this account, and reviewed 24 of Means’s public appearances since 2023, his social media accounts, and related federal and state legislation, tax, lobbying, and business records.
GOP State Policymakers Are Following RFK Jr.’s Lead Attacking Vaccines And Proven Public Health Measures
Associated Press: Amid measles outbreak, Texas is poised to make vaccine exemptions for kids easier Texas this year has been the center of the nation’s largest measles outbreak in more than two decades, as a mostly eradicated disease has sickened more than 700 in the state, sent dozens to hospitals and led to the death of two children who were unvaccinated. But even as the outbreak slows, a bill approved by state lawmakers and sent to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott would make it significantly easier for parents to enroll their children in school without standard vaccinations for diseases such as measles, whooping cough, polio and hepatitis A and B.
Stat: 25 million cavities and $9.8 billion: Study estimates the costs of removing fluoride from water Even before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took office as health secretary, he promised to take action on water fluoridation. He would provide “good information” to municipalities, which regulate the water supply, and “fluoride will disappear,” he said in November. In just over a couple of months, some places have made this a reality. Utah and Florida have both banned the addition of fluoride in water, with advocates of the laws like Kennedy arguing that adding the mineral to water poses a risk to children’s developing brains. A new study tried to predict the consequences if the rest of the nation were to follow suit. In five years, the researchers estimated, 7.5% more U.S. children ages 0-19 would get cavities, affecting 25.4 million additional teeth and costing the country around $9.8 billion. While these findings are worrisome, several experts said, they were unsure if the new data would move the needle on a debate that has become so heated and politicized.
Public Health Threats
Associated Press: Deep cuts erode the foundations of US public health system, end progress, threaten worse to come Americans are losing a vast array of people and programs dedicated to keeping them healthy. Gone are specialists who were confronting a measles outbreak in Ohio, workers who drove a van to schools in North Carolina to offer vaccinations and a program that provided free tests to sick people in Tennessee. State and local health departments responsible for invisible but critical work such as inspecting restaurants, monitoring wastewater for new and harmful germs, responding to outbreaks before they get too big — and a host of other tasks to protect both individuals and communities — are being hollowed out.
NBC: A new Covid variant could drive up summer cases: Here’s what you should know A new Covid variant that’s gaining momentum globally has landed in the U.S. The World Health Organization announced last week that it was monitoring the variant, NB.1.8.1, following a rise in cases in several parts of the world, including Europe, Southeast Asia and North and South America. The variant appears to be more transmissible than the dominant strain worldwide, LP.8.1, meaning it has the potential to drive up cases this summer.
The Hill: US, Argentina launching new ‘alternative’ to WHO The top health authorities of the U.S. and Argentina are launching what they call an “alternative international health system” separate from the World Health Organization (WHO). On the first day of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order starting the yearlong process of withdrawing the U.S. from the WHO. In February, Argentinian President Javier Milei followed suit. In a joint statement Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Argentine Minister of Health Mario Lugones remarked on the decision to withdraw from the global health authority. “The WHO’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed serious structural and operational shortcomings that undermined global trust and highlighted the urgent need for independent, science-based leadership in global health,” their statement read.
