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?
Chaos At HHS and the FDA
New York Magazine: Working at the CDC Is a Living Hell: Gaslighting, surveillance, and layoffs under the RFK Jr. regime. It’s all part of what CDC staffers describe as the Trump administration’s bid to “rebuild” the agency into something less about science and more about Kennedy’s personal agenda, which seems founded in large part on a grudge against the agency. Six staffers interviewed, both current and former, were baffled by the disdain they have received from their bosses.
New York Times: F.D.A. Names Agency Veteran to Run Drug Division. In recent weeks, federal officials accepted the resignation of Dr. Pazdur’s predecessor, Dr. George Tidmarsh, a biotech executive who was a faculty member at Stanford. He said in a previous interview that he had been put on leave pending an investigation by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services related to criticism he aired publicly about a particular medication. He also said he had been critical of a new rapid-approval program that he said had opened the door to political interference with drug approval decisions.
Stat: A MAHA Summit, minus the radical transparency. The event, which was “hush-hush” according to one person familiar with the planning, raises new questions about which groups get access to top leaders and when policy ideas are disclosed to the public — even as health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his deputies have promised “radical transparency” and decried closed-door meetings between former policymakers and industry leaders.
New York Times: N.I.H. Worker Who Criticized Trump Health Policies Says She Is on Administrative Leave. A National Institutes of Health employee who has been publicly critical of the Trump administration’s health policies said she was placed on “nondisciplinary” administrative leave when she returned to work on Thursday after the government reopened. The employee, Jenna Norton, said in a TikTok video that the move “was designed to scare and silence me.”
Wall Street Journal: RFK Jr. Discussed Curbing FDA Head’s Role After Complaints About Management Style. Trump administration officials including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have discussed scaling back the role of Marty Makary, the Food and Drug Administration commissioner, according to people familiar with the matter. Discussions regarding concerns over Makary’s management included officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, of which the FDA is a part, and later reached the White House, the people said. Among the topics was infighting between Makary’s handpicked deputies, those people said. Kennedy weighed whether to add a leader to run the agency day to day while leaving Makary in place as a figurehead, some of the people said.
RFK Jr.’s War on Vaccines Will Have Deadly Consequences
Bloomberg: RFK Jr. Tries to Tie Aluminum in Vaccines to Food Allergies. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continued his campaign against the aluminum in some vaccines by suggesting at a conference on Monday that they may play a role in the rise of food allergies. Kennedy acknowledged there is no science backing the connection, but said he wanted researchers to study aluminum adjuvants in childhood vaccines because he believes their use “fit the timeline perfectly” with an increased prevalence of food allergies. He added that pesticides and ultraprocessed food also could be contributing factors, without providing evidence.
Stat: How two top FDA officials are quietly upending vaccine regulations. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he does not want to take vaccines away from Americans. But at a closed-door meeting of Food and Drug Administration vaccine scientists in September, a top official suggested doing just that. Scientists listened as Tracy Beth Høeg, a lieutenant to FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, laid out her plan: She wanted to change the label of all Covid-19 vaccines to say the risks outweighed the benefits for men ages 12 to 24 — a move that would make it prohibitively difficult for men in this age group to receive the vaccine.
Stat: How Children’s Health Defense plans to cement its agenda beyond RFK Jr. Children’s Health Defense, the vaccine-skeptical organization once led by now-health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is playing the long game. The group has more power in Washington than the group’s CEO, Mary Holland, imagined possible in her lifetime. In an interview with STAT, she said CHD plans to parlay that influence into permanent policy changes — upending the childhood vaccination schedule, reformulating the shots, and abolishing mandates to get them, among a host of goals — that will outlast Kennedy’s tenure at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Other Dangerous MAHA Initiatives
The Hill: RFK Jr. says new dietary guidelines coming soon: ‘We’re ending the war on saturated fats’. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Monday that new dietary guidelines are expected to be released next month that will end the “war on saturated fats.” […] “We’re ending the war on saturated fats in this country. So, we’re going to publish dietary guidelines that are going to stress the importance of protein and saturated fats. And those will come out, I think, next month. And I think that will really revolutionize the food system in the country, the food culture in this country,” Kennedy said.
Politico: MAHA Is Embracing Elizabeth Holmes. Here’s Why. The Make America Healthy Again movement may have found its next cause: justice for Theranos founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes. […] What’s behind this budding alliance? It may seem unexpected, but the driving philosophies behind both MAHA and the disgraced Theranos founder are well aligned. […] But perhaps Holmes’ most attractive quality as a MAHA anti-establishment hero is her prosecution itself: It’s seen as proof that she was an outsider being punished for pushing back against corporate interests.
Associated Press: The FDA removes a long-standing warning from hormone-based menopause drugs. Hormone-based drugs used to treat hot flashes and other menopause symptoms will no longer carry a bold warning label about stroke, heart attack, dementia and other serious risks, the Food and Drug Administration announced Monday. U.S. health officials said they will remove the boxed warning from more than 20 pills, patches and creams containing hormones like estrogen and progestin, which are approved to ease disruptive symptoms like night sweats.
NOTUS: RFK Jr. Is Taking Aim at Weather Modification. States Like Utah Say They Need It. The process of cloud seeding, a long-studied method of artificially inducing precipitation, has been creating rain and snow in Utah since the 1950s. But in the era of President Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Health Again” movement, weather modification has become a target of conspiracy theories and political attacks.
The Daily Beast: ‘Crazy’ JD Vance Calls Common Pain Medication ‘Useless’. ice President JD Vance revealed that he thinks Ibuprofen, a common pain medication, is “useless,” admitting he’s “crazy” for a belief he said was in line with “MAHA style.” While speaking with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a Nov. 12 MAHA summit in Washington, D.C., Vance opened up about “the one way” he is “more instinctively MAHA,” referencing the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again initiative led by Kennedy.
New York Post: RFK Jr. allegedly smokes powerful psychedelic that gives people ‘near-death’ experiences: tell-all. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. allegedly admitted to smoking a powerful psychedelic that can make people feel like they’re having a near-death experience, a new tell-all book claims. The claim is laid bare in former New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi’s memoir, which dishes details of the pair’s scandalous sexting affair, the New York Times reported on Friday. Nuzzi, 32, alleges in her “American Canto” memoir that the 71-year-old Kennedy scion, who has been sober for decades and is an anti-vaccine activist, told her during their fling that he still used psychedelics — including dimethyltryptamine, or DMT.
Public Health Threats
The Hill: Canada loses its measles elimination status, and the US is close behind. Canada has lost its measles elimination status nearly three decades after it achieved the distinction, under circumstances that closely resemble what’s happened in the U.S. this year. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) notified the Public Health Agency of Canada last week that the country no longer holds a measles elimination status, meaning the region of the Americas at large has lost this categorization. […] According to the PAHO, if measles transmission isn’t halted by Jan. 20, 2026, the U.S. will also lose its measles elimination status. Mexico could follow soon after, having seen sustained transmission since Feb. 1, 2025.
Washington Post: Canada loses measles-free status amid resurgence of virus in Americas. In 1998, after once being a hot spot for measles in the Americas, Canada eliminated the highly contagious virus. By 2000, measles was “so rare” in the country that many practicing doctors had “never even seen it,” the Calgary Herald reported at the time. But nearly three decades after earning the designation, Canada has lost its measles-free status, the Pan American Health Organization announced Monday — making it the first nation in the Americas to lose the status since 2019 amid a broader resurgence of the vaccine-preventable respiratory virus around the world.