Trump, RFK Jr. Ratchet Up Anti-Vax Agenda to Authoritarian Levels: Public Health Project Newsletter

Not long ago White House officials were insisting “We’re just kind of done with the vaccine issue. We’ve done what we want to do on the vaccine front” and that health secretary RFK Jr. has been “reined in” as poll after poll showed the administration’s deadly anti-vax agenda is political poison for Republicans.

For an administration ‘done’ with the issue, they sure do keep swinging around the wrecking ball. It’s clear Donald Trump and RFK Jr. are more determined than ever to fan the flames of unfounded vaccine skepticism, further drive down vaccination rates, and spark more outbreaks of preventable disease:

‘More Fear-Mongering, That’s An Order’: Last Friday, Trump himself signed an executive order directing ‘all executive departments and agencies’ to ‘align their policies’ with a January ‘study’ from RFK Jr.’s HHS that was widely panned by public health experts for baselessly calling for a major downgrade of the CDC’s child vaccine schedule.

Invading Americans’ Medical Privacy for the Anti-Vax Cause: Then came the bombshell reporting that health secretary Kennedy “is pursuing federal government access to most Americans’ medical records, in a quest to research a link between vaccines and autism — a connection the medical establishment studied for decades and flatly rejects.” As Protect Our Care noted, RFK Jr’s medical privacy violation scheme is egregious government overreach and a desperate fishing expedition to find a shred of data he can cherry-pick to revitalize his fully debunked vaccine-autism claims, after already scaring many families into declining proven-safe shots.

Debunked Claims and Deadly Consequences: Trump and RFK’s latest anti-vax moves will effectively stoke much more of the same fear that has already driven vaccine rates down and left doctors around the country reeling. The NYT dropped depressing news this week that as Trump and Kennedy have fueled distrust in vaccines, “Doctors around the country say they are seeing more cases of serious, sometimes life-threatening illnesses that vaccines have long kept at bay, including whooping cough and bacterial infections that can cause pneumonia or meningitis.”

We also learned this week that “three scientific papers that raised questions about vaccine safety and were used by the Trump administration to justify controversial changes to US vaccine policies have over the last two months been removed, retracted or placed under investigation by the journals that published them.” Of course, RFK Jr. has signaled no intention of retracting his latest debunked claims. He also has done nothing to discourage the militantly anti-vax group he founded from going all-in on a new legal strategy: demanding exemptions from vaccines on religious grounds.

Convincing Americans to Poison Themselves: Also an actual legitimate study out this week found that there was a 38.7% spike in Vitamin A poisonings while RFK Jr.’s was baselessly promoting the supplement as a measles miracle cure rather than the safest and most effective option: the MMR vaccine.

Far from being ‘over’, the Trump-RFK Jr anti-vax agenda has gotten so out of hand that even Secretary of State Marco Rubio could not muster a defense of a key component of it: defunding Gavi, an organization that provides immunizations for low-income nations and maintains the global Ebola vaccine stockpile.

Trump Determined to Keep Making the Ebola Crisis Worse. The situation is grim. The Ebola outbreak in central and east Africa remains at risk of becoming ‘deadliest on record’ with now nearly 400 confirmed cases and over 60 deaths. In another turn for the worst, the spread has reached a corner of the Congo controlled by Islamic State militants, an area deemed ‘too dangerous for health workers fighting to stop the deadly virus.’ Meanwhile, Trump’s sociopathic plan to push Americans exposed to Ebola to a makeshift camp in Kenya — rather than do what the U.S. has always done and safely bring them home for the best possible care – has run into major problems: deadly protests and Kenyan court orders blocking it. Yet the administration is pretending everything is fine and pressing forward with Trump’s plan to put Americans in harm’s way and leave them behind to die.

In response to the administration’s audacious blame-shifting, this week Protect Our Care was joined by leading lawmakers and public health experts to spotlight how the historic leadership void at the Trump HHS and short-sighted cuts to critical priorities like USAID created the perfect storm for the Ebola outbreak to go unnoticed for weeks with tragic consequences. And yet when the Trump HHS remains without permanent leaders for several critical role and needs all hands on-deck, they of course proceeded this week with their ridiculous plan to “move hundreds of senior career staff to a new civil service classification that will make it easier to fire them.”

RFK Jr.’s Revamped Food Pyramid About to Get Even More Unfordable, Unrealistic Thanks to Trump-Made Screwworm Problem: As Protect Our Care has been stressing for months, RFK Jr.’s ‘real food’ campaign is feeding nothing but his own ego. Persistent punishing prices for meat, dairy and veggies under 3-year high Trump inflation translates into over $1,000 more in grocery bills – one-third more a year — for American families under Kennedy’s revised food pyramid, which he touts as his greatest accomplishment. Now already-sky-high beef prices – up 75% since December 2020 — could get even worse after the flesh-eating screwworm parasite that hasn’t been seen in U.S. livestock since the 1960s has now reared its ugly head in Texas. ‘How?,’ you might ask. Well, Trump in his infinite wisdom decided it was a good idea to ax funding dedicated to monitoring and containing New World screwworm in Central America.