CDC Director’s Credibility Stock Plummets: Public Health Project Newsletter

Bloomberg Opinion’s Lisa Jarvis is right: “Erica Schwartz is failing her first test as CDC head” by letting RFK Jr. “use her agency’s megaphone to spread misinformation.”

This week we learned that fledgling CDC Director Schwartz took the “unheard of” step of scrubbing two deaths reported last week by the PA Health Department from the CDC’s online measles tracker – flying in the face of the agency’s longstanding reporting protocol and procedure. Then Reuters reporting revealed Schwartz had acted on a directive from anti-vax Trump health Secretary RFK Jr., “without objection” despite PA officials insisting the deaths were “meticulously investigated” and meet the CDC’s “case definition for a measles case.”

Why was RFK Jr so worried about reporting these measles deaths? Because he and Donald Trump have been superspreaders of disinformation about the MMR vaccine that has supercharged the record-breaking measles crisis that families across the country are suffering through today. And Trump’s new Executive Order on the vaccine will only make matters worse. Kennedy would rather bury facts than face the reality of what the Trump anti-vax agenda has wrought.

The unanswered question is why Dr. Schwartz did Kennedy’s anti-vax dirty work “without objection” after promising Congress, her staff, and the public she would always “follow the science” and speak “truth to power” on CDC vaccine-related matters. As Protect Our Care president Brad Woodhouse noted, Director Schwartz’s decision to carry Kennedy’s water and help downplay the measles crisis has dried up her credibility. It’s clear Schwartz has no intention of turning the page on the Trump-RFK Jr anti-vax agenda and will let the science deniers in the administration keep calling all the shots even when it compromises public health. As PA pediatrician Dr. Offit bluntly put it: ‘I’ve lost trust in the CDC’.

Health Department Teeming With Political Lackeys: Speaking of letting the inmates run the asylum, Politico reports: “Kennedy’s HHS now has more political appointees than any other department, including much larger ones such as Defense and Justice. It has hired 264 non-Senate confirmed political appointees as of June.” The career scientists, medical experts and safety inspectors at HHS that were unceremoniously fired en masse by RFK Jr. are being replaced more and more with political stooges, many skilled in nothing but science denialism. This includes the president of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vax group RFK Jr founded that is standing by the accused child murderer they used as prop for propaganda.

More Evidence Trump Anti-Vax Agenda Causes Parental Hesitancy, Endangers Children: Reuters reports that refusals of life-saving Vitamin K shot for newborns skyrocketed 57 percent after Trump-RFK Jr Child Vaccine Schedule Downgrade in January. As Protect Our Care stressed, even a harmless vitamin shot that has prevented brain bleeds in babies for decades has become collateral damage in the anti-vax misinformation campaign led by RFK Jr.

Robbing Life-Saving NIH Funds to Pay Pete Hegseth’s DoD Bills: In an investigation-warranting abuse of taxpayer money at the expense of public health, the Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee discovered that Pete Hegseth’s Defense Department signed a secret interagency agreement – “without notifying Congress” — that allows DoD to sap billions of dollars from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for Hegseth’s own departmental purposes. Hegseth has no business raiding tax dollars specifically appropriated for finding cures to diseases for his own highly questionable purposes.

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