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 HHS and the FDA
Axios: New FDA turmoil throws agency’s reliability into question Chaos at the Food and Drug Administration is prompting questions around how much more the agency can take before its functionality is seriously impaired. Why it matters: An agency is only as good as its workforce, and after months of high-profile departures and open hostility from top health officials, some argue the FDA’s performance is already deteriorating. Text messages from current FDA staffers shared confidentially with Axios show people disturbed by the turmoil and increasingly motivated to leave the agency — a threat heightened by how many experienced career officials have already left. “If they could get enough money elsewhere, if they could get remote jobs, if they could get as much vacation, they would just leave,” a former FDA staffer told Axios, speaking of current staffers. “I don’t know that I’ve talked to anyone who’s happy there.”
Stat: Experts worry FDA’s credibility is being shredded by scandal and ‘soap opera’ Last Friday, George Tidmarsh, the top drug regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, was pulled into Commissioner Marty Makary’s office for an unscheduled meeting. Tidmarsh assumed Makary was going to tell him Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA center that oversees vaccines and biologics, was no longer with the agency, following the publication of a story that detailed unrest among employees working in that division. Tidmarsh would have welcomed that possibility. “I think you should fire that person,” he said of Prasad in an interview later with STAT. “In a company, this person would not see the light of day on Monday morning. Lives are at stake, and you have someone unbalanced.” Instead, Tidmarsh was told he was being put on administrative leave — accused of using his regulatory authority to target a former business associate. It was the latest shockwave to sweep through an agency beset by all kinds of tumult in recent months. In interviews, observers characterized the spate of dismissals, policy reversals, and controversies in all kinds of ways: Soap opera. Unpredictable. In total disarray. And, potentially, unprincipled.
ProPublica: Foreign Food Safety Inspections Hit Historic Low After Trump Cuts American inspections of foreign food facilities — which produce everything from crawfish to cookies for the U.S. market — have plummeted to historic lows this year, a ProPublica analysis of federal data shows, even as inspections reveal alarming conditions at some manufacturers. About two dozen current and former Food and Drug Administration officials blame the pullback on deep staffing cuts under the Trump administration. The stark reduction marks a dramatic shift in oversight at a time when the United States has never been more dependent on foreign food, which accounts for the vast majority of the nation’s seafood and more than half its fresh fruit.
RFK Jr.’s War on Vaccines Will Have Deadly Consequences
MSNBC: There’s no question where Cheryl Hines stands on vaccines now People have speculated for years about the actress Cheryl Hines’ views on vaccines — whether she shares or condones those of her husband, longtime anti-vaccine activist and current Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or whether her beliefs align more closely with scientific consensus and overwhelming public opinion. Hines’ appearance at the annual conference for the nation’s largest and most profitable anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, or CHD, leaves little room for doubt. “CHD has been such supporters of families of parents with children that have been injured with vaccines or any sort of health issue,” Hines said to rousing applause. “Thank you for supporting CHD and Bobby for all these years.”
Politico: The anti-vaccine movement isn’t satisfied with winning over the GOP The anti-vaccine movement once led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is making a play for the mainstream. More Republicans are embracing it as part of the GOP coalition. But the ambitions of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy group Kennedy founded, are much larger. The nonprofit imagines an America in which everyone realizes the danger they see in vaccination. And now with one of their own in charge of vaccine policy, they finally see that vision taking shape. Kennedy “is moving the culture of this nation,” Del Bigtree, a longtime anti-vaccine activist who served as spokesperson for Kennedy’s presidential bid in 2024, told POLITICO at the nonprofit’s third conference in Austin, Texas. Kennedy’s “certainly not a Republican,” Bigtree added, and can draw support from both parties. Bigtree and other jubilant attendees, basking in their new proximity to power at the sold-out gathering, said their goal is to convince people to stop taking vaccines they believe are unsafe.
Other Dangerous MAHA Initiatives
Stat: Kennedy, a longtime pharma critic, embraces Trump deal to expand access to obesity drugs Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was uncharacteristically chummy with pharma executives at the White House on Thursday as he cheered the Trump administration’s plan for lowering obesity medication prices. Kennedy has railed against drugmakers in the past, and his lifestyle-focused Make America Healthy Again movement has opposed Medicare coverage of GLP-1 weight loss drugs. But he struck a different tone in commenting on the president’s deal to expand access to the popular drugs made by Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, including for Medicare and Medicaid patients, calling it “a momentous accomplishment.” “This is a tool in the toolkit,” Kennedy said in the Oval Office, with Lilly and Novo’s CEOs standing nearby. “It is not a silver bullet. It is an arrow in our quiver.”
New York Times: The MAHA-Fueled Rise of Natural Family Planning. Since the birth control pill gained widespread acceptance in the 1960s and 1970s, mainstream political voices have rarely expressed opposition to the medication celebrated for giving women more control over their reproductive lives. For decades, only certain traditional Catholic and Christian circles publicly rejected the pill and other forms of contraception, believing that some methods came too close to abortion, or that the act of intercourse should always have the potential to bring about new life. But a practice known as “fertility awareness” or “natural family planning” — originally devised over 50 years ago by doctors with ties to the Catholic church — is now gaining support among a broader group of social conservatives and adherents of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement. The rising interest comes as many prominent conservatives are encouraging women to abandon birth control pills and other forms of hormonal contraceptives.
NOTUS: MAHA’s Gone Viral. Can Science? In some ways, Lauren Hughes is a classic “momfluencer”: She is a bubbly mother of three who sells mugs with slogans like “I need this FORKING coffee” and makes videos for her 548,000 followers about how she weaned her twins off pacifiers. In other ways, she is not. A pediatrician whose day job is running the medical practice she founded in Kansas City, Kansas, Hughes is offering something not often associated with social media’s health influencers: evidence-based information. Her Instagram account’s pinned post is a flowchart on how to follow the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations on the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. “It’s a lot of just saying these things over and over and acknowledging that people have questions, which is a perfectly reasonable, normal response,” Hughes told NOTUS. Hughes is part of a growing ecosystem of online influencers trying — and struggling — to counter Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement and its most misinformed and dangerous policy positions. This campaign now includes some familiar names from the Democratic party; Chelsea Clinton recently launched a podcast called “That Can’t Be True,” writing on X that it will “sort fact from fiction — especially on issues impacting our health.”
Public Health Threats
NBC: 6 dead, 25 hospitalized in nationwide listeria outbreak linked to precooked pasta meals Six people have died and 25 people have been hospitalized due to a listeria outbreak linked to now-recalled precooked pasta meals, according to an update provided by the Food and Drug Administration last week. The outbreak was first announced in June and has caused a wave of recalls of ready-to-eat pasta meals that include pasta from food supplier Nate’s Fine Foods, according to the FDA. The FDA is working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate the multistate listeria outbreak.
New Yorker: The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands Within hours of being sworn in, President Trump signed an executive order for a “pause” to all foreign assistance. Secretary Rubio sent a cable suspending every program outright. No program staff could be paid. No services could be delivered. Medicines and food already on the shelves could not be used. No warning had been given to the governments that relied on them. It was immediately obvious that hundreds of thousands of people would die in the first year alone. But the Administration did not reconsider; it escalated. Elon Musk exulted in swinging his chainsaw. Within weeks and in defiance of legal mandates, he and Rubio purged U.S.A.I.D.’s staff, terminated more than four-fifths of its contracts, impounded its funds, and dismantled the agency. Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court did anything to stop it. We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respected tracker of current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustain the programs that remain. As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.