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.
Upcoming Events
March 4: President Trump will give an address to a joint session of Congress
March 5: The Senate HELP Committee will hold a confirmation hearing for Jay Bhattacharya as NIH Director
March 6: The Senate HELP Committee will hold a confirmation hearing for Marty Makary as FDA Commissioner
What’s Happening In Public Health?
Catastrophic Cuts Are Creating Chaos And Endangering Americans’ Health And Scientific Innovation
The Atlantic: Inside the Collapse at the NIH For decades, the National Institutes of Health has had one core function: support health research in the United States. But for the past month, the agency has been doing very little of that, despite multiple separate orders from multiple federal judges blocking the Trump administration’s freeze on federal funding. For weeks on end, as other parts of the government have restarted funding, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, have pressed staff at the agency to ignore court orders, according to nearly a dozen former and current NIH officials I spoke with. Even advice from NIH lawyers to resume business as usual was dismissed by the agency’s acting director, those officials said. When NIH officials have fought back, they have been told to heed the administration’s wishes—or, in some cases, have simply been pushed out.
Stat: Medicare and Medicaid agency faces compromised functions and disruption from Trump’s firings The federal agency that oversees Medicare, Medicaid, and other major health care programs is facing employee firings, flagging morale, confusing messaging, and the specter of additional disruption — compromising its oversight and administration of key programs that finance care for half of Americans. Leaders at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services still haven’t formally received a list of who was fired in the initial round of cuts from the Trump administration, which focused on employees in their probationary periods. CMS leaders think at least 300 of the agency’s 6,700 employees have been let go, or a little under 5%, one senior CMS official told STAT. The Trump administration, guided by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, has cut thousands of people across federal health agencies, and more firings appear to be coming across departments, with plans due by March 13. An order for workers to return to their offices is also likely to contribute to attrition. However, some terminated CMS employees who are attorneys or work on Medicare Advantage have been asked to come back — a sign of the haphazard approach to the job cuts. Now, the administration is getting pushback. On Friday, Jeff Grant, a top career official who has been with CMS since 1993, retired from the agency. On his way out, Grant excoriated the federal human resources officer who carried out the firings and demanded that all terminated employees in his division, which oversees Affordable Care Act plans, get their jobs back.
Axios: Universities feel ripple effects of DOGE cuts to health As the battle over Elon Musk’s DOGE-directed cuts to federal medical research continues, institutions already are freezing hiring, cutting back on the number of Ph.D. students they’ll accept and making other contingencies. Why it matters: Capping how much the National Institutes of Health covers the schools’ overhead costs could lead to billions of dollars in cuts to scientific research funding and widespread economic fallout. Driving the news: An economic analysis by software company Implan on Tuesday estimates proposed cuts could lead to a loss of $6.1 billion in the nation’s gross domestic product, a $4.6 billion reduction in labor income and result in the loss of more than 46,000 jobs nationwide. This includes the direct effects of the research itself, with 17,000 expected job cuts, but also indirect effects through a slowing of business-to-business spending in the R&D supply chain that could support 14,000 more jobs.
Chaotic Firings and Re-Hirings:
Cruel and Destructive Policy Changes:
RFK Jr. Is An Extreme Anti-Vaxxer Who’s Already Breaking His “Assurances” To Key Republicans To Get Confirmed
New York Times: Federal Officials Underplaying Measles Vaccination, Experts Say In a first test of the Trump administration’s ability to respond to an infectious disease emergency, its top health official has shied away from one of the government’s most important tools, experts said on Sunday: loudly and directly encouraging parents to get their children vaccinated. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, was widely criticized as minimizing the measles outbreak in West Texas at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday. In a social media post on Friday, he took a new tact, saying that the outbreak was a “top priority” for his department, Health and Human Services. He noted various ways in which the department is aiding Texas, among them by funding the state’s immunization program and updating advice that doctors give children vitamin A. But on neither occasion did Mr. Kennedy himself advise Americans to make sure their children got the shots.
- Axios: RFK Jr. urges people to get vaccinated amid deadly Texas outbreak Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke of the benefits of the MMR vaccine on Sunday in response to a growing measles outbreak in Texas. Why it matters: Kennedy has a long record of sowing skepticism about vaccines and last week appeared to downplay the situation in Texas when he described such outbreaks as “not unusual.” He has previously repeated debunked claims about vaccines and provided elusive answers to senators on his stance on vaccinations ahead of being confirmed. Driving the news: Kennedy wrote an op-ed for Fox News’ website on Sunday with the headline “Measles outbreak is call to action for all of us” and the subheading “MMR vaccine is crucial to avoiding potentially deadly disease.” Kennedy wrote that before the introduction of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in the 1960s, “virtually every child in the United States contracted measles.” He noted that from 1953 to 1962, “on average there were 530,217 confirmed cases and 440 deaths,” with a fatality rate of 1 in 1,205 cases. “Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons,” Kennedy wrote. Yes, but: Kennedy emphasized that the decision to vaccinate is “a personal one.”
- Boston Globe: After dismissing outbreak as ‘not unusual,’ RFK Jr. says ending measles in Texas is ‘top priority’ Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in an X post Friday that ending the major measles outbreak in Texas is a “top priority for me and my extraordinary team at HHS.” “I recognize the serious impact of this outbreak on families, children, and healthcare workers,” he wrote. The outbreak made headlines after an unvaccinated child in rural West Texas died from the virus Tuesday night, the first US death from the highly contagious respiratory disease since 2015. The following day, Kennedy described the situation as “not unusual.” He also appeared to misspeak at the Wednesday Cabinet meeting, claiming that two people had died from the virus. A federal agency spokesman later clarified that the CDC has confirmed only one death.
- CNN: RFK Jr. said measles outbreaks are ‘not unusual’ in the US. Doctors say he’s wrong When Health and Human Services Sec. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy answered questions during the first cabinet meeting of the new Trump administration, he incorrectly described the number of people who died in a West Texas measles outbreak and the reason people were hospitalized. Measles outbreaks are “not unusual,” Kennedy said. Doctors say that was wrong, too.
NBC: A measles crisis decades in the making: How RFK Jr. helped drive America to this moment A child in the United States has died from measles. Just two weeks after his confirmation as Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faces the public health crisis that experts have long warned would come. Little is known about the child, besides that they were school-age, unvaccinated and lived in an area of West Texas with a large Mennonite community, where vaccine refusal is among the highest in the country. In another administration, the death of this child, and the growing outbreak that has sickened more than 150 across Texas and New Mexico and hospitalized 20, would likely have been met with urgent calls from the president and health secretary for parents in Texas and beyond to vaccinate their children. The measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is safe, well studied and the only effective method of preventing an illness that can cause a high fever, pneumonia and, in rare cases, brain swelling that is disabling or fatal. But this is public health in the Kennedy era, where the secretary’s life’s work has been dismantling trust in the very vaccines that could have prevented this outbreak, and where the public official now in charge of the agencies that regulate and advise on vaccines wrote in a 2021 book that measles outbreaks had been “fabricated to create fear that in turn forces government officials to ‘do something.’” And so, at a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Kennedy’s response to the child’s death offered something else entirely: an unconcerned and casual reply.
- Washington Post: Amid West Texas measles outbreak, vaccine resistance hardens Texas’s worst measles eruption in three decades has surged to 146 known cases, with the true toll likely much higher, exposing how under-vaccinated communities are unnecessarily vulnerable to one of the world’s most contagious diseases, experts say. The first known victim was 6 and otherwise healthy, according to two individuals with knowledge of the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details that haven’t been publicly released. The life-threatening outbreak in West Texas starkly illustrates the stakes of slipping immunization rates and the ascension of vaccine skeptics, including Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to the highest levels of the public health establishment. And it has revealed how fear and the scientifically false claims of the anti-vaccine movement have seeped into communities like Gaines County, the epicenter of the outbreak, hardening attitudes about vaccines, pro and con, in the face of a dangerous, preventable disease. […] The outbreak spurred hundreds in the region to vaccinate themselves and their children as the threat of the virus became immediate. But it has made others dig in their heels, arguing that measles is no worse than chicken pox or the flu.
Stat: RFK Jr. moves to eliminate public comment in HHS decisions Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted a document Friday proposing to strip public participation from much of the business his department conducts. The move comes during a time of major upheaval across federal health agencies, and as the public waits to see how Kennedy will enact his pledge of “radical transparency” at the department. The statement, placed in the Federal Register, said HHS would rescind its longtime practice of giving members of the public a chance to comment on the agency’s plans. “This is a direct attack on the idea that HHS — a gigantic agency — should have to tell the public everything that it’s doing,” said Alex Howard, an open government advocate and former director of the Digital Democracy Project at Demand Progress Educational Fund.
New York Times: F.D.A. Cancels Meeting of Vaccine Experts Scheduled to Advise on Flu Shots A panel of scientific experts that advises the Food and Drug Administration on vaccine policy — and that has been the target of criticism from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — learned on Wednesday that its upcoming meeting to discuss next year’s flu vaccines had been canceled. The F.D.A. sent an email to members of the panel, the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, on Monday afternoon informing them of the cancellation, according to a senior official familiar with the decision. There was no reason given. The panel was to meet on March 13. One committee member, Dr. Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, an outspoken critic of Mr. Kennedy, confirmed the cancellation and warned that it could interfere with or delay production of flu vaccines.
Bloomberg: Trump Team Weighs Pulling Funding for Moderna Bird Flu Vaccine US health officials are reevaluating a $590 million contract for bird flu shots that the Biden administration awarded to Moderna Inc., people familiar with the matter said. The review is part of a government push to examine spending on messenger RNA-based vaccines, the technology that powered Moderna’s Covid vaccine. The bird flu shot contract was awarded to Moderna in the Biden administration’s final days, sending the company’s stock up 13% in the two days following the Jan. 17 announcement. The US is in the midst of a record-breaking bird flu outbreak that’s affected dozens of cattle herds along with poultry flocks nationwide, sending egg prices soaring. While human cases have been relatively rare, the virus has caused deaths in the past, and experts are concerned that it could become more transmissible and dangerous.
Fox News: Multimillion-dollar Biden-era COVID-19 vax project halted by Trump’s HHS Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has paused a multimillion-dollar contract from the Biden administration to create a new COVID-19 vaccine, Fox News Digital has learned. “While it is crucial that the Department [of] Health and Human Services (HHS) support pandemic preparedness, four years of the Biden administration’s failed oversight have made it necessary to review agreements for vaccine production, including Vaxart’s,” Kennedy said in comments provided to Fox News Digital on Tuesday. “I look forward to working with Vaxart and medical experts to ensure this work produces safe, effective, and fiscal-minded vaccine technology.” Kennedy issued a 90-day stop-work order on Friday related to the HHS contract with American biotech company Vaxart Inc., which is working to develop a new COVID-19 vaccine that can be taken orally. The stop-work order comes as 10,000 individuals were slated to begin clinical trials on Monday.
NOTUS: RFK Jr.-Tied ‘MAHA’ Group Has Hired One of QAnon’s Earliest Influencers A political advocacy group closely tied to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has enlisted one of the earliest promoters of the QAnon movement to help “Make America Healthy Again.” Tracy “Beanz” Diaz is a podcaster, YouTuber and writer and was one of the first people to discuss QAnon on social media, posting her first video on the topic only six days after “Q” posted on 4chan for the first time in 2017. Now, Diaz says she will be serving as editor-in-chief for MAHA Action, the 501(c)(4) affiliated with Kennedy’s super PAC, MAHA Alliance. MAHA Alliance was formed after Kennedy ended his own bid for the presidency and joined Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Its leadership includes former Kennedy campaign staffers, including campaign communications director Del Bigtree and Brigid Rasmussen, the chief of staff. While the Super PAC’s mission statement was originally to inspire Kennedy followers to vote for Trump, MAHA Action is now recruiting to help “reverse the chronic disease epidemic and restore America’s position as a global leader in public health outcomes.” With its close ties to the Health and Human Services secretary, the organization says it is seeking to transform public health.
Associated Press: CDC report adds to evidence that HPV vaccine is preventing cervical cancer in U.S. women A new government report adds to evidence that the HPV vaccine, once called dangerous by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is preventing cervical cancer in young women. The report comes after Kennedy pledged to give a family member any fees he might earn from HPV vaccine litigation. In a 2019 video posted on the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense website, Kennedy called Gardasil “the most dangerous vaccine ever invented.” The new report found that from 2008 to 2022, rates for precancerous lesions decreased about 80% among 20- to 24-year-old women who were screened for cervical cancer. The estimates were published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
NOTUS: Bill Cassidy Is Already Pressing RFK Jr. on Vaccine Policy Two weeks into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure as health secretary, some of the Republican senators who voted for him already have questions about how he’s handling the nation’s health policy. “I just want to know what the rationale is,” Sen. Bill Cassidy told NOTUS when asked about the recent cancellation of a Food and Drug Administration committee meeting intended to pick which flu strains to use in next year’s flu shot. He said he plans to ask Kennedy during a scheduled call on Friday about the canceled meeting. During his hearings, Kennedy downplayed his history as an anti-vaccine advocate and said he would not interfere with the country’s vaccine infrastructure. Those commitments helped him win over Cassidy and other Republicans with reservations about his record. But his promises already seem to be wearing thin.
Axios: The businesses hoping to boom under an RFK Jr.-led HHS Supplement makers, practitioners of alternative medicine and others in the wellness movement are hoping to capitalize on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure as the nation’s top health official. Why it matters: Kennedy’s interest in treating the root causes of chronic illnesses through lifestyle changes could elevate unregulated alternatives and risky pseudoscience while relegating diagnosis and treatment of disease to the back burner, critics warn. The question is how that will play with many Americans who are fed up with an increasingly corporate health care system and eager to take more direct control over their care. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer with no health background, has long railed against drug companies and other industries profiteering off people’s illnesses. “It’s sort of open season for grifters. There’s no doubt in my mind,” said Peter Lurie, executive director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Vanity Fair: America’s Food Safety Is Now in the Hands of Don Jr.’s Hunting Buddy Late last week, amid mass purges of key personnel at the nation’s health agencies, a Florida attorney with a surprisingly slim résumé was named acting deputy commissioner for human foods at the Food and Drug Administration. The role, which is not subject to Senate approval, is an important one. In it, Kyle Diamantas, 37, will be responsible for ensuring the safety of roughly 80% of the nation’s food supply. The already-overtaxed division is vital to public health, responsible for everything from overseeing the complex manufacturing of infant formula to responding to deadly bacterial contamination and managing food supplies in the wake of hurricanes and floods. Diamantas’s LinkedIn profile is a study in brevity. He received a law degree from the University of Florida in 2013. He started his next-listed job, as an attorney at the law firm Jones Day in Miami, in 2021, ascending to partner last year. His now archived Jones Day bio described him as having “more than 10 years of experience advising food, cosmetic, dietary supplement, drug, and other life sciences and consumer goods clients on a wide range of regulatory, compliance, and enforcement matters.” Prior to that job, he worked as a senior associate at the Orlando office of the law firm Baker Donelson. Diamantas’s limited experience for such a major regulatory position, when compared with the experience of his predecessor, appears to have been offset by another significant qualification. The young attorney is a friend and hunting buddy of Donald Trump Jr., the president’s firstborn son, Vanity Fair has learned.
Public Health Threats
Washington Post: Texas child is first confirmed death in growing measles outbreak A child has died of measles here , the first confirmed fatality in Texas’s worst outbreak of the disease in three decades, state health officials said Wednesday. The unvaccinated school-age child was hospitalized last week, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. The death is the first known U.S. measles fatality since 2015. Officials have reported 124 cases in Texas, mostly in west Texas, since late January, and nine cases in a neighboring New Mexico county. Nearly 80 percent are children, who are more susceptible to the vaccine-preventable disease. “It’s heartbreaking,” said Katherine Wells, Lubbock’s director of public health. “My heart just goes out to the family. And I hope this will help people reconsider getting children vaccinated.”
- Politico: Only one CDC employee is in Texas to help with the measles outbreak Only one CDC employee — a field officer who is usually based in Austin — is in Texas helping with the measles outbreak response, according to Lara M. Anton, a senior press officer for the Texas Department of State Health Services. The state has not asked for additional assistance from the federal agency — and the CDC can’t send personnel unless the state requests help — even as the measles case count has ballooned to 146 since late January and an unvaccinated child died. The epicenter of the outbreak is west Texas, where the one CDC employee is working.
New York Times: U.S. Terminates Funding for Polio, H.I.V., Malaria and Nutrition Programs Around the World Starting Wednesday afternoon, a wave of emails went out from the State Department in Washington around the world, landing in inboxes for refugee camps, tuberculosis clinics, polio vaccination projects and thousands of other organizations that received crucial funding from the United States for lifesaving work. “This award is being terminated for convenience and the interest of the U.S. government,” they began. The terse notes ended funding for some 5,800 projects that had been financed by the United States Agency for International Development, indicating that a tumultuous period when the Trump administration said it was freezing projects for ostensible review was over, and that any faint hope American assistance might continue had ended. Many were projects that had received a waiver from the freeze because the State Department previously identified its work as essential and lifesaving. “People will die,” said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, “but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.” The projects terminated include H.I.V. treatment programs that had served millions of people, the main malaria control programs in the worst-affected African countries and global efforts to wipe out polio.
Wall Street Journal: Mystery Disease Linked to Bats Kills Scores in Congo A fast-spreading mystery illness linked to bats has killed scores of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with nearly half dying within 48 hours of showing symptoms, the World Health Organization said Thursday. The disease, which causes uncontrolled bleeding, vomiting, diarrhea and other symptoms of hemorrhagic fever, had infected 1,096 people and killed 60 as of Feb. 23, the WHO said.
Washington Post: Musk claims DOGE ‘restored’ Ebola prevention effort. Officials disagree. Elon Musk on Wednesday acknowledged that the U.S. DOGE Service “accidentally canceled” efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development to prevent the spread of Ebola — but the billionaire entrepreneur insisted that the initiative was quickly restored. “We will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly,” Musk said at a meeting of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet officials, defending his group’s fast-moving approach to canceling federal programs in a bid for cost savings. “So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately. And there was no interruption.” Yet current and former USAID officials said that Musk was wrong: USAID’s Ebola prevention efforts have been largely halted since Musk and his DOGE allies moved last month to gut the global-assistance agency and freeze its outgoing payments, they said. The teams and contractors that would be deployed to fight an Ebola outbreak have been dismantled, they added. While the Trump administration issued a waiver to allow USAID to respond to an Ebola outbreak in Uganda last month, partner organizations were not promptly paid for their work, and USAID’s own efforts were sharply curtailed compared to past efforts to fight Ebola outbreaks.
- New York Times: A 4-Year-Old Boy Dies of Ebola in Uganda as U.S. Pulls Back on Help The Ebola outbreak in Uganda, which had seemed to be in retreat, has claimed a new victim: a 4-year-old boy who died on Monday, according to a State Department cable viewed by The New York Times. News of the child’s death comes even as the Trump administration has canceled at least four of the five contracts with organizations that helped manage the outbreak. It also placed the manager of the Ebola response at U.S.A.I.D. on administrative leave.
Opinion and Commentary
New York Post (Editorial): Hey, RFK: Go to Texas and prove you mean it on vaccines In seeking Senate approval to take his new job, Health Secretary Robert Kennedy insisted he’d come around on the safety and efficacy of (most) vaccines. Now he has a chance to prove he really meant it. The measles outbreak in Texas (and now New Mexico) just claimed its first life, an unvaccinated school-age child who’d been hospitalized in Lubbock last week. It was the first US measles death since 2015. More may be ahead: Most of the Texas cases are among the Mennonite faith community, where resistance to vaccinations is strong. Go to Texas, Mr. Secretary, and preach the truth as only a convert can: This vaccine is safe, and getting children jabbed is an act of love.
New York Times (Zeynep Tufecki): The Texas Measles Outbreak Is Even Scarier Than It Looks The news that an outbreak in Texas has caused the nation’s first confirmed measles death in a decade — an unvaccinated child — is as unsurprising as it is tragic. Spreading largely in rural Mennonite communities that typically have low vaccination rates, the outbreak has already grown to at least 146 cases since late January. Almost all of them are children. Parents whose children got infected but survived are no doubt grateful that their family was spared. But startling research about the virus unfortunately tells a new and very different story, recasting what was previously known about how measles works and making clear why the Trump administration’s approach to vaccines is nowhere even close to meeting the moment. That research, conducted over the past decade by the immunologist and medical doctor Michael Mina and others, revealed that measles destroys immune cells. Even people who recover from the virus lose much of their immune memory, and therefore the protection they had acquired from prior infections or vaccines to all the other childhood illnesses. This leaves survivors more vulnerable to many other diseases for years afterward. Worse, these victims may now face those childhood diseases, to which they lost immune protections, as older children, which puts them more at risk for complications.
The HIll (Tom Frieden): Postponing last week’s vaccine meeting endangers Americans’ health The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — a group of pediatricians, parents and public health specialists that provides vaccine recommendations to the FDA — was scheduled to meet last week. Instead, the meeting has been postponed indefinitely. The panel’s webpage says the meeting was “postponed to accommodate public comment in advance of the meeting.” But the Trump administration has had since Feb. 3 to open the comment period, and it still has not done so. This is the first time this committee’s meeting has been postponed since it was first established in 1964. This is concerning. But what’s more troubling is the possibility that this delay could be used to change the panel’s composition, for example by claiming conflicts of interest among its members.
