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 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?
Dangerous Chaos At The HHS and the CDC
Washington Post: Trump administration seeks to move special education to different agency The Trump administration is exploring moving the $15 billion program that supports students with disabilities to a different agency within the federal government as it works to close the Education Department altogether, a department official said Tuesday. The effort comes on the heels of the agency’s decision this month to lay off the vast majority of employees working on special-education services and months after Education Secretary Linda McMahon talked about moving the program to the Department of Health and Human Services. Her goal is to fulfill President Donald Trump’s promise to close the Education Department and move its functions to other parts of the government.
The Bulwark: The CDC Diaspora Fights Back CDC staff traditionally attend IDWeek in large numbers, to present and to learn—and to make connections for future collaborations, including in a potential crisis. A year ago, when the Atlanta location for this year’s meeting was announced, everybody assumed CDC attendance would be higher than usual because it would be almost literally down the street. But no CDC staff were present in their official capacity this week. The immediate reason was the federal shutdown, which includes government-wide rules forbidding conduct of most normal business. But several former officials who were at the meeting told me the agency’s new political leaders had made clear long before the shutdown that they would be dramatically limiting attendance and presentations. HHS officials did not confirm that, or (yet again) respond to my queries for this article. But scaling back CDC participation in the conference would be consistent with Kennedy’s contempt both for expertise and for experts—and with the way he has treated the CDC more generally, through a series of cuts, firings, and forced resignations that have effectively wiped out whole divisions. One reason I came to Atlanta this week was to get a better sense of just how big a toll Kennedy’s actions had taken. The answers I got were not exactly encouraging. The attendees I met (along with some CDC veterans I reached separately) painted a picture of an agency that is struggling to carry out some basic operations, and in which scientists are subject to a level of political control that goes well beyond anything in CDC history. In the aftermath of this devastation, however, something quite unique to the scientific community has arisen: a coordinated effort to step into the void the CDC is leaving, as a source of information the public can trust. Nobody thinks these efforts can come close to making up for what the CDC is no longer doing. But there was a discernible sense that the effort itself has value—that by taking action the scientists were making clear not only their determination to call out the administration’s attacks, but to do something about it.
RFK Jr.’s War on Vaccines Will Have Deadly Consequences
The Hill: Trump offers new warning on Tylenol for pregnant women President Trump on Sunday once again urged pregnant women not to take Tylenol unless “absolutely necessary,” to avoid giving the over-the-counter drug to children “for virtually any reason” and to break up certain vaccine dosages. Trump’s renewed call comes a month after he and top health officials said pregnant women should not take acetaminophen — one of the most widely used medications in the world — for pain relief because of a potential risk of autism, despite no new evidence proving the drug directly causes it. The advice was also notable because acetaminophen had been seen as the safest pain medication for pregnant women to take. But Trump doubled down on his calls with the Sunday post. “Pregnant Women, DON’T USE TYLENOL UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, DON’T GIVE TYLENOL TO YOUR YOUNG CHILD FOR VIRTUALLY ANY REASON, BREAK UP THE MMR SHOT INTO THREE TOTALLY SEPARATE SHOTS (NOT MIXED!), TAKE CHICKEN P SHOT SEPARATELY, TAKE HEPATITAS B SHOT AT 12 YEARS OLD, OR OLDER, AND, IMPORTANTLY, TAKE VACCINE IN 5 SEPARATE MEDICAL VISITS! President DJT,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social that linked to a Daily Caller article claiming the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stayed silent about potential Tylenol risks.
MAHA in the States
Associated Press: Anti-science bills hit statehouses, stripping away public health protections built over a century More than 420 anti-science bills attacking longstanding public health protections – vaccines, milk safety and fluoride – have been introduced in statehouses across the U.S. this year, part of an organized, politically savvy campaign to enshrine a conspiracy theory-driven agenda into law. An Associated Press investigation found that the wave of legislation has cropped up in most states, pushed by people with close ties to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The effort would strip away protections that have been built over a century and are integral to American lives and society. Around 30 bills have been enacted or adopted in 12 states.
ABC: DeSantis moves to end Florida’s childhood vaccination mandates. Doctors brace for impact Florida plans to end nearly a half-century of required childhood immunizations against diseases that have killed and maimed millions of children. Many critics of the decision, including doctors, are afraid to speak up against it. With the support of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on Sept. 3 announced his plan to end all school-age vaccination mandates in the state. “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” he told a cheering crowd of vaccination foes in Tallahassee. “Who am I, as a government or anyone else,” he said, “to tell you what you should put in your body?” History shows that mandates increase the use of vaccines. Lower vaccination rates will mean increased rates of diseases like measles, hepatitis, meningitis, and pneumonia — and even the return of diphtheria and polio. Many of these diseases threaten not just the unvaccinated but also those they come in contact with, including babies and older people with weakened immunity.
ProPublica: Idaho Banned Vaccine Mandates. Activists Want to Make It a Model for the Country. Three women become choked up as they deliver news in a video posted to social media. “We did it, everybody,” says Leslie Manookian, the woman in the middle. She is a driving force in a campaign that has chipped away at the foundations of modern public health in Idaho. The group had just gotten lawmakers to pass what she called the first true “medical freedom” bill in the nation. “It’s literally landmark,” Manookian said. “It is changing everything.” With Manookian in the video are two of her allies, the leaders of Health Freedom Idaho. It was April 4, hours after the governor signed the Idaho Medical Freedom Act into law. The act makes it illegal for state and local governments, private businesses, employers, schools and day cares to require anyone to take a vaccine or receive any other “medical intervention.” Whether the law will actually alter day-to-day life in Idaho is an open question, because Idaho already made it easy to get around the few existing vaccination requirements. But it could have a significant effect in other states, where rules aren’t already so relaxed. And it comes at a time when diseases once eradicated from the U.S. through vaccination are making a resurgence. The law runs against one of the hallmarks of modern public health: that a person’s full participation in society depends on their willingness to follow certain rules. (Want to send your child to public school? They’ll need a measles vaccine. Want to work in a retirement community during flu season? You might have to wear a mask.) The new Idaho law flips that on its head. It not only removes the obligation to follow such rules, it makes the rules themselves illegal.
Public Health Threats
Axios: Bird flu’s comeback raises fears about readiness Migratory birds are driving up avian flu cases across the country, reviving concerns about U.S. readiness to respond to outbreaks, especially during the government shutdown. Why it matters: The most immediate concern is how the spread of the disease in commercial poultry flocks could drive up food prices. But the virus is continuing to evolve and spill over to other species, fueling fears of human-to-human transmissions and a possible pandemic “It’s happening pretty fast and doesn’t seem to be slowing down and I’m really very unclear about what the U.S.’s approach is going to be,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan Driving the news: Influenza was found in 62 commercial and backyard flocks across 17 states in the last month, affecting an estimated 6.6 million birds, according to the USDA. Infections have also been identified in dairy cows, cats and other mammals in a half dozen states in recent months. Public health officials say the federal response is hampered by staff cuts at both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Department of Agriculture, immigration enforcement on farms and the government shutdown, which has suspended some activities like a weekly call among animal health laboratories.
NBC: Measles spreading beyond the center of the Utah-Arizona outbreak The nation’s second-largest measles outbreak this year is spreading beyond its epicenter along the Utah-Arizona border. Most of the known measles cases — 123 as of Wednesday — are linked to a tight-knit community of twin towns: Colorado City, in Mohave County, Arizona, and Hildale, which is in Washington County, Utah. Within the past few weeks, there have been three cases in nearby, larger towns, such as Hurricane and St. George, Utah. Those exposures occurred in hospital and urgent care settings, according to the Southwest Utah Public Health Department. There is no discernible border; residents live, work and worship interchangeably between the two towns. Many of the clusters started in schools, said David Heaton, public information officer for the health department. “But now we have community spread,” he said. Measles has also reached Iron County, just north of the current outbreak. The new areas are popular tourist destinations in southwest Utah, which is also home to Zion National Park. All three affected counties have vaccination rates far lower than the 95% experts say is needed for herd immunity.
New York Times: Diphtheria, a Once Vanquished Killer of Children, Is Resurgent Qurraisha Mukhtar’s two youngest children fell sick in early September, with a fever, cough and short gasping breaths. Their throats turned white, their necks swelled. She asked a healer in the neighborhood for a remedy, but 1-year-old Salman’s struggle for air grew much worse one night and he died. The next day, Hassan, 2, began to choke, and he died, too. Ms. Mukhtar, who lives with her family in a stick-and-tin shack on the edge of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, could not sit and grieve, because two more of her children began to show signs of the same illness. She and her husband appealed to friends and relatives and scraped together the money to take them to a hospital in a three-wheeled taxi. At Demartino Hospital in the center of the city, she was directed to a new building erected during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. These days, it has been repurposed to respond to an old foe: diphtheria, a horrific and vaccine-preventable disease, which is infecting thousands of children and some adults too. Diphtheria is caused by a bacteria that produces a powerful toxin that kills cells, usually in the throat and tonsils, creating a thick, gray membrane of dead tissue that can grow large enough to block the airway and cause suffocation. It is particularly dangerous in young children with small airways. If caught early, it can be treated effectively with antibiotics, but if not, cases can swiftly turn fatal. It is among the diseases that were relics of pre-vaccine days but have resurged in recent years, with mass displacement driven by climate change and war. The disruptions in routine immunization that came with Covid and its stress on global health systems, and the rise in vaccine hesitancy, have fueled their spread.