All posts tagged "robert f. kennedy jr"

RFK set to make bizarre new autism claim: report

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. plans to announce a report claiming that pregnant women’s use of Tylenol could be linked to autism.

The report will also suggest that a medicine derived from folate, an important vitamin women take during pregnancy, can be used in treating symptoms of the developmental disorder for some people, sources familiar with the announcement told the Wall Street Journal.

The agency apparently wants to highlight how a form of folate, known as folinic acid or leucovorin, can decrease symptoms of autism, which in 2022 affected roughly 1 in 31 8-year-olds in the United States.

Over-the-counter medication Tylenol is a widely used pain reliever whose main ingredient is acetaminophen, also used during pregnancy.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says it is safe for women to take the medication to treat fever or pain during pregnancy and advises that, like all medications, women should consult with their doctors.

McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a division of Kenvue, makes Tylenol and other acetaminophen-based products. The company disputes the claims that the medication can harm women or babies.

“Nothing is more important to us than the health and safety of the people who use our products,” a Kenvue spokeswoman said. “We have continuously evaluated the science and continue to believe there is no causal link between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and autism.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is expected to announce large grant awards to academic researchers alongside the report, as part of the National Institute of Health's autism data science initiative, and called for these study proposals back in May.

Kennedy has long promised to find the cause of autism, indicating that information would be released.

“By September we will know what has caused the autism epidemic,” he said during a cabinet meeting with President Trump in April.

No reputable research has found a connection between autism and vaccines.

The expected announcement comes as calls for Kennedy's impeachment grow after a fiery hearing on Thursday, including calls from MAGA for him to resign from his position.

The GOP CDC assault began long before RFK's Senate car crash

By Jordan Miller, Teaching Professor of Public Health, Arizona State University.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), long considered the nation’s — if not the world’s — premier public health organization, is mired in a crisis that not only threatens Americans’ health but also its very survival as a leading public health institution.

The degree of this crisis was on full display during Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Sept. 4, 2025, testimony before the U.S. Senate.

In the hearing, Kennedy openly criticized CDC professionals’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic, saying “the people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving.”

Kennedy’s hearing came on the heels of a contentious week in which Kennedy fired the CDC director, Susan Monarez, spurring 12 members of the Senate Finance Committee — 11 Democrats and independent Bernie Sanders — to call on Kennedy to resign from his position.

At least four top CDC leaders resigned following Monarez’s ouster, citing pressure from Kennedy to depart from recommendations based on sound scientific evidence.

I am a teaching professor and public health professional. Like many of my colleagues, the disruption happening at the CDC in recent months has left me scrambling to find alternate credible sources of health information and feeling deeply concerned for the future of public health.

The CDC’s unraveling

These leadership shakeups come on the heels of months of targeted actions aimed at unraveling the CDC’s structure, function and leadership as it has existed for decades.

The turmoil began almost as soon as President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, when his administration enacted sweeping cuts to the CDC’s workforce that health experts broadly agree jeopardized its ability to respond to emerging health threats.

Trump used executive orders to limit CDC employees’ communication with the public and other external agencies, like the World Health Organization.

Within weeks, he ordered as much as 10 percent of the overall workforce to be cut.

Soon after, Kennedy — who was newly appointed by Trump — began undoing long-standing CDC institutions, like the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, replacing all 17 of its members in a move that was widely denounced by health experts.

Critics pointed to a lack of qualifications for the new committee members, with more than half never having published research on vaccinations and many having predetermined hostility toward vaccines.

In June, more than 20 authoritative organizations, including the National Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics, expressed serious concerns for the health impacts of overhauling the advisory committee.

Monarez’s removal

Public health leaders had cheered the July confirmation of Monarez as the CDC’s new director, seeing her nomination as a welcome relief to those who value evidence-based practice in public health. Monarez is an accomplished scientist and career public servant.

Many viewed her as a potential voice of scientific wisdom amid untrained officials appointed by Trump, who has a track record of policies that undermine public health and science.

In her role as acting director, to which she was appointed in January, Monarez had quietly presided over the wave of cuts to the CDC workforce and other moves that drastically reshaped the agency and weakened the country’s capacity to steward the nation’s health.

Yet Monarez had “red lines” that she would not cross: She would not fire CDC leadership, and she would not endorse vaccine policies that ran contrary to scientifically supported recommendations.

According to Monarez, Kennedy asked her to do both in an Aug. 27 meeting. When she refused, he asked her to resign.

Her lawyers pushed back, arguing that only the president had the authority to remove her, stating: “When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda. For that, she has been targeted.”

Ultimately, the White House made her dismissal official later that evening.

Agency in turmoil

Further exemplifying and deepening the crisis at the agency, on Aug. 8, a gunman who had expressed anger over COVID-19 vaccinations opened fire on CDC headquarters, killing a police officer.

Many health workers attributed this directly to misinformation spread by Kennedy. The shooting amplified tensions and made tangible the sense of threat under which the CDC has been operating over the tumultuous months since Trump’s second term began. One employee stated that “the CDC is crumbling.”

Public health experts, including former CDC directors, are sounding the alarm, speaking out about the precariousness of the agency’s position. Some are questioning whether the CDC can even survive.

Crisis of trust

Even before the most recent shock waves, Americans said they were losing trust and confidence in CDC guidance: In April, 44 percent of U.S. adults polled said that they will place less trust in CDC recommendations under the new leadership. This would undoubtedly undermine the U.S. response if the country faces another public health challenge requiring a rapid, coordinated response, like COVID-19.

In addition to installing new members on the vaccine advisory committee, Kennedy abruptly changed the recommendations for flu and COVID-19 vaccines without input from the CDC or the vaccine advisory committee, and contrary to data presented by CDC scientists.

Public health professionals and advocates are now warning the public that vaccine recommendations coming from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices may not be trustworthy. They point to the lack of credibility in the review process for the new committee, the fact that members have made statements contrary to scientific evidence in the past, and failure to apply an evidence-to-recommendations framework as compromising factors. Critics of the committee even describe a lack of basic understanding of the science behind vaccines.

Health impacts are being felt in real time, with health care providers reporting confusion among parents as a result of the conflicting vaccine recommendations. Now, those who want to be vaccinated are facing barriers to access, with major retailers placing new limits on vaccine access in the face of federal pressure. This as vaccination rates were already declining, largely due to misinformation.

The end result is an environment in which the credibility of the CDC is in question because people are unsure whether recommendations made in the CDC’s name are coming from the science and scientists or from the politicians who are in charge.

Filling the gaps

Reputable organizations are working to fill the void created by the CDC’s precariousness and the fact that recommendations are now being made based on political will, rather than scientific evidence.

The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Gynecology have both released recommended vaccination schedules that, for the first time, diverge from CDC recommendations.

And medical organizations are discussing strategies that include giving more weight to their recommendations than the CDC’s and creating pathways for clinicians to obtain vaccines directly from manufacturers. These measures would create workarounds to compensate for CDC leadership voids.

Some states, including California, Oregon, Washington and New Mexico, are establishing their own guidance regarding vaccinations. Public health scientists and physicians are attempting to preserve data and surveillance systems that the Trump administration has been removing. But independent organizations may not be able to sustain this work without federal funding.

What’s at stake

As part of its crucial work in every facet of public health, the CDC oversees larger-scale operations, both nationally and globally, that cannot simply be handed off to states or individual organizations. Some public health responses — such as to infectious diseases and foodborne illnesses — must be coordinated at the national level in order to be effective, since health risks are shared across state borders.

In a health information space that is awash with misinformation, having accurate, reliable health statistics and evidence-based guidelines is essential for public health educators like me to know what information to share and how to design effective health programs. Doctors and other clinicians rely on disease tracking to know how best to approach treating patients presenting with infections. The COVID-19 pandemic made clear the importance of laboratory science, a unified emergency response and rapid distribution of effective vaccines to the public.

One of the strengths of the American system of governance is its ability to approach challenges – including public health – in a coordinated way, having a federal level of cooperation that unifies state-level efforts.

The CDC has been the nation’s preeminent public health institution for more than eight decades as a result of its vast reach and unparalleled expertise. Right now, it’s all sitting at a precarious edge.

These MAGA justices are letting Trump get away with murder

During an absurdly obsequious, three-and-a-half-hour televised “cabinet meeting” this week, Donald Trump said he can “do whatever he wants as president,” and suggested that Americans might support him becoming a dictator.

So far, the Roberts court seems to be goose-stepping along, having granted nearly all of the Trump’s administration’s 19 emergency appeals on its shadow docket, where rationale and legal precedent are conveniently omitted.

The Republican majority on the high court has long wanted to gut the administrative state in service to expanded executive power that will in turn protect oligarchic interests over those of the common man. Their nihilistic legal philosophy holds that almost all regulatory agencies and laws should give way to private, for-profit interests.

Although the court’s majority does not officially label itself free-market capitalist, it’s rulings reflect support for a severely limited regulatory environment and laissez-faire capitalism, where private entities rather than the federal government drive and regulate for-profit activity.

In their view, government services that protect, educate, and serve the public, science that saves lives, and social programs providing safety nets to vulnerable populations could be better provided — if at all — by private ventures that turn a profit.

As Trump and the MAGA majority on the high court gut the administrative state and eliminate federal services, American casualties will continue to mount.

Gutting FEMA, lying about climate science

In the southwest US, just since 1970, nighttime temperatures have increased by about 4.5 degrees. In that time span, US heat-related deaths have doubled.

As heatwaves intensify throughout the world, there’s no lingering scientific debate about the root cause: greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, mostly from burning fossil fuels. The only truly emergent climate science is medical: data now show that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is killing more people, causing serious kidney damage, speeding up biological clocks and aging people prematurely — more than smoking or drinking.

In the UK, where news outlets are legally required to present information accurately, contrasted with US corporate-owned media selling propaganda, Imperial College London's Grantham Institute reported that heat-related deaths caused by climate change tripled this year alone, accounting for 1,500 deaths from climate change over a short 10-day period.

In the US this week, more than 180 Federal Emergency Management Agency employees wrote a letter to Congress criticizing Trump’s plan to drastically scale down FEMA as its unqualified director shifts more responsibility for disaster response to the states. Their letter commemorated the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, when 1,833 Americans died. For their candor and concern, many employees who signed their names have been placed on leave.

The anti-science movement now leading the US government refuses to acknowledge the link between carbon emissions and rising temperatures, in deference to Trump and the GOP’s fossil fuel donors, despite rising weather-related deaths in Texas, Arizona, and Florida, where heat deaths are the primary weather-related cause of mortality. At the same time, hurricanes, catastrophic flooding, and tropical cyclones along the Gulf Coast, wildfires in the West, and increasingly violent tornadoes in the heartland are killing more people and destroying infrastructure at record pace.

In late July, as if mocking the loss of life and habitat, the Trump administration proposed to rescind several Environmental Protection Agency regulations, including the Endangerment Finding that served as the legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases. Trump’s EPA initiative will repeal carbon pollution standards for power plants and eliminate greenhouse gas emission rules for cars and trucks, simultaneously accelerating climate change and degrading public health.

Trump’s EPA heralded the legal reversal as undoing “the underpinning of $1 trillion in costly regulations (to) save more than $54 billion annually.” They did not factor in the tens of thousands of Americans now dying annually from heat and climate-related events, nor the cost of rebuilding communities destroyed by calamitous weather, which Forbes estimates will reach $38 trillion by the year 2049.

Anti-science governance kills

Republican rejection of climate science in favor of their fossil fuel donors is already killing thousands of Americans each year. Their rejection of medical science is killing Americans in other ways.

Under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., medical science has become so politicized that long-accepted medical data is now questioned. This week, CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp Kennedy’s unscientific directives to fire dedicated health experts, and accused him of weaponizing public health for political gain. Kennedy urged Monarez to resign for “not supporting President Trump’s agenda.” Monarez refused, so the White House fired her, prompting three top agency scientists to resign rather than be complicit in causing unnecessary death, including the chief medical officer and the director of the CDC’s infectious-disease center.

The Monarez firing comes on the heels of Kennedy restricting approval of COVID vaccines to high-risk groups, which will lead to more preventable deaths. It is undeniably true that the coronavirus killed Americans at far higher rates than people in other wealthy nations, with more than 1.2 million U.S. covid deaths.

Due in large part to Trump’s denials and mismanagement, the COVID-19 pandemic ranks as the deadliest disaster in US history. If a new and more virulent strain returns, the death count could increase exponentially.

MAGA Court should check its Catholic bona fides

Republicans politicized the pandemic just as they have politicized gun control and climate science, churning anti-vax, anti-mask, and anti-climate-science sentiment into political power through culture wars. These initiatives are killing Americans in record numbers, and the MAGA majority on the Supreme Court is letting Trump get away it.

Last week, by a vote of 5-4, the Supreme Court allowed the National Institute of Health, the largest public funding source for biomedical research in the world, to terminate $783 million in medical grants on the thinnest of rationales: because they were “linked” to DEI initiatives.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in dissent described the ruling as “Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”

She might have added, “No matter how many Americans die in result.”

The Republican majority on the court consists of six Catholic justices. They should be ashamed of the loss of life they are condoning.

In the words of Father Michael Pfleger, a priest for more than 50 years, they should look into the “mirror and address the violence coming from the White House … address the violence of cutting Medicare and Medicaid … address the violence of refusing to ban assault weapons.”

They should accept responsibility for the loss of human life and liberty that attends their dismantling of an imperfect but salutary federal government 250 years in the making.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

Firing Trump's most lunatic lackey is now a matter of life and death

Bear with me on this one.

I know that to 99 percent of readers, headlines reading “CDC Director Fired” fall squarely into the daily category of “Trump stupidity that I don’t want to hear about.” Fair enough. Especially if it reads, “Susan Monarez Won’t Quit” and no one knows who Monarez is.

This one’s a little different.

Monarez was confirmed as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director on Trump’s enthusiastic nomination just 29 days ago, on a straight party-line vote of the U.S. Senate. Nothing unusual there.

But here’s the rub: The 47 Democratic “no” votes were tied to Monarez’s refusal to distance herself from the rantings of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — the twisted soul dubbed Secretary of Health and Human Services by Trump. Conversely, being Trump’s pick was the only possible consideration of 51 Republican senators.

Then an unusual thing happened. Shortly after Monarez received the keys to her office door, she started feuding with Boss Bananas because he (RFK Jr.) is, after all, not playing with anything resembling a deck of 52 when it comes to the public health. Or much of anything.

Here’s how it played out, according to New York Times reporting.

Kennedy Jr. summoned Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to his office in Washington earlier this week to deliver an ultimatum.

She needed to fire career agency officials and commit to backing his advisers if they recommended restricting access to proven vaccines — or risk being fired herself, according to people familiar with the events.

So what does Monarez do? She immediately starts doing precisely what all the Democrats demanded, which was to push back against RFK Jr.’s natural instincts to Make America A Dark Ages Pit of Death Again. (That’s MAADAPODA if you’re looking to put it on a T-shirt.)

RFK Jr. demanded her resignation on the spot, not surprisingly. Initially, the White House said nothing, briefly leaving a question as to whether an initial refusal to resign would matter. It didn’t.

Trump fired Monarez, five weeks to the day he had said this about her:

“As an incredible mother and dedicated public servant, Dr. Monarez understands the importance of protecting our children, our communities, and our future. Americans have lost confidence in the CDC due to political bias and disastrous mismanagement.”

Four top CDC officials resigned in protest within four hours of RFK Jr.’s attempt to evict Monarez. Mind you, they — and Monarez — were presumably part of Trump’s MAHA braintrust until, say, 15 minutes ago.

And the two who spoke out most vocally weren’t especially shy:

“People of dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor (are now) in charge of recommending vaccine policy. Their desire to please a political base will result in death and disability of vulnerable children and adults.” — Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

“Recently, the overstating of risks and the rise of misinformation have cost lives…If [Monarez] leaves, we don’t have scientific leadership anymore” — Dr. Debra Houry, CDC Chief Medical Officer.

As a footnote, the typically reticent American Public Health Association apparently snapped, calling Kennedy’s leadership “reckless mismanagement” and flatly stating: “RFK Jr. must be removed from his position.”

Unfortunately, that sort of condemnation from rational people with vast medical and scientific credentials might be precisely what Kennedy needs to survive. But it does seem to me that people who care about the collective health of our country — regardless of tribe or ideology — really ought to be speaking out.

As best as I can tell, Sen. Patty Murray, (D-Wa), has been the only Democrat willing to call for Kennedy’s firing. Where’d everyone else in her party go?

As Drs. Daskalakis and Houry told us, Kennedy’s derangement is a matter of life and death. We have no idea where this is headed.

But the nation will require a healthy dose of luck for this story to wind up as just more Trump noise.

These deranged imbeciles have replaced heart disease as America's biggest killer

Heart disease, step aside. There's a new number-one health hazard to Americans.

That would be Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The vacuous anti-vaxxer has proven just as dangerous as his own family members warned the United States Senate he would be. That was in late January after he was nominated as Secretary of Health and Human Services by President Donald Trump. He was confirmed, shamefully.

Kennedy squeaked through by placating Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy with the brazen lie that he wouldn’t dismantle the nation's vaccine safety systems or take down government vaccine guidance. And I do mean brazen: Kennedy specifically promised to respect the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, only to fire all 17 of its members.

Perhaps for not wearing tinfoil hats.

This week, things took a sharp turn for the worse. We got the answer to that age-old question, “What would happen if a deranged imbecile controlled America’s public health system?”

Kennedy canceled $500 million in contracts for projects to develop vaccines using mRNA technology. The medical community — not to be confused with Kennedy’s crackpot community — considers the emerging technology to be critical to the nation’s health and security.

It prompted a firestorm of uncommonly strident protests from some of the nation’s leading medical experts, as reported at NPR.

"This may be the most dangerous public health judgment that I've seen in my 50 years in this business," says Michael Osterholm, who runs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

"It is baseless, and we will pay a tremendous price in terms of illnesses and deaths. I'm extremely worried about it."

Dr. Peter Hotez, who runs the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, described mRNA as “a proven technology for emerging respiratory viruses or respiratory virus pandemics. It is extremely safe and has been incredibly effective."

And there was this from Jennifer Nuzzo, Director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University.

"This is a profoundly disappointing development. When there's the next pandemic, we're going to be caught flat-footed. It absolutely leaves the country vulnerable."

Speaking of pandemics, the one person most undermined by Kennedy was Trump, who either didn’t care to comment or was too cognitively declined to notice. It turns out that the attack on mRNA technology doubled as a kneecapping of the one (1) good thing Trump did in his first term.

Here’s how AP reported that:

“Trump once hailed mRNA vaccines as a ‘medical miracle.’ Now, his health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is halting the vaccine technology's advancement.”

This marks a sharp policy reversal — mRNA vaccines, developed under Operation Warp Speed during the Trump era, were lauded for saving millions and fast-tracking pandemic recovery by delivering safe and highly effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time.

Now, it would be a miracle if someone could determine why Trump has unleashed this charlatan on the world. Most of the president’s appointees can be understood in the context of the administration’s known priorities.

You know, like ending American democracy, enriching the Trump family and repaying unspecified debts to Vladimir Putin. But what’s in it for Trump by destroying the nation’s health and security to appease Kennedy?

The most widespread theory is that Trump made a deal with Kennedy to plague the nation with this guy as HHS secretary — and maybe start a plague in the process. But, Mr. President, why does this have to be the first time in 79 years that you’ve kept your word about anything?

It’s hard to understand Trump’s ulterior motive here. And that’s the only kind he has.

The Washington Post noticed the contradiction inherent in Kennedy’s treachery:

Kennedy’s resistance against mRNA vaccines is without evidence. In fact, the technology — which instructs the body’s cells to produce a harmless bit of virus that is then used to train the immune system, as opposed to using weakened or dead versions of a virus — delivered arguably the most important achievement of Trump’s first term: the production of effective vaccines against the novel coronavirus within the span of a few months.

Such speed was practically unheard-of in biomedical research. Thanks to the urgency created by Operation Warp Speed, the federal government was able to mount an impressive vaccination rollout that boosted the population’s immunity to the coronavirus just when it was needed.

Now, if we could only find some way to boost the population’s immunity to RFK, Jr.

This grotesque insanity proves Trump wants to take us all to his grave

I have become convinced that while the repulsive, 79-year-old Donald Trump slowly shrivels up and dies right in front of our eyes, he is going to do everything in his power to take as many Americans as possible to his bomb-crater-sized grave with him.

How else to explain the latest news pointing to just how little he and his disintegrating, America-attacking political party value life?

On Tuesday, which was just the latest, longest 24-hour stretch in America history, the quickly deteriorating Trump was seen on the roof of the White House screaming at people about nuclear weapons, and God knows what else, while the madman he appointed to run the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) completely into the ground, was proudly announcing the rollback of nearly $500 million dollars in vaccine funding.

Here’s where we all stop for five seconds to let that sink in …

In fact, read that again: The madman who Trump appointed to HHS was proudly announcing the rollback of nearly $500 million dollars in vaccine funding.

This insane, dangerous announcement comes on the charred heels of our nation’s bloody bout with COVID-19 in which more than one million Americans perished. Countless millions are still suffering the effects of this pandemic and might never recover. Well, the ghoulish Republican Party have all but forgotten them, and in record time …

These people don’t value life, they get off on death.

Instead of answers and more science and discovery to make sure we are ready for the next mass-medical emergency, Trump instead has inflicted us with this gruesome stray from the Kennedy dynasty, who is quickly becoming a one-man pandemic.

His approach to science makes chugging Lysol seem almost reasonable.

“This is a bad day for science,” Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who has been working to develop an mRNA vaccine against influenza said in The New York Times.

Here’s more on the grotesque funding cuts from that NYT piece Wednesday:

First used during the Covid-19 pandemic by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, mRNA shots instruct the body to produce a fragment of a virus, which then sets off the body’s immune response.

Unlike traditional vaccines, which can take years to develop and test, mRNA shots can be made within months and quickly altered as the virus changes. The technology won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023.

But Kennedy doesn’t trust science, even though science saved his life after a parasitic worm ate into his brain.

This was from the clunky news release out of Kennedy’s sick and fast-eroding HHS Tuesday:

“We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “BARDA is terminating 22 mRNA vaccine development investments because the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu. We’re shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.”

What “experts” was this complete moron listening to? Most likely, the voices inside his head have only gotten louder.

The fact is vaccines save lives, and the sooner they can be produced the better.

Like Kennedy, I am no medical expert, but I can accurately tell you that vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives the past century.

They have literally been a life-changing discovery.

Further, it is estimated that 317,000 lives in the United States alone would have been saved during the COVID outbreak had people just gotten vaccinated. Instead, many were discouraged from doing so by public-health hazards like Kennedy. No surprise, most of these people lived in Red States with West Virginia, Wyoming, Kentucky, Tennessee and Oklahoma leading the way.

These are also the Republican-led states most likely to ban books, defend guns, and support their dying, orange leader who lately is standing on roofs, and defending pedophiles.

Really, I could care less if the Republicans in these backward states want to kill themselves, but their toxic ignorance and recklessness are putting the lives of innocent children and other good-hearted people in jeopardy. Instead of acting for the common good, they have jammed their fingers inside their ears, and locked themselves deep inside a cult, which makes them both dangerous as hell and pathetic.

Here’s what Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health had to say after Kennedy’s death wish yesterday:

“By issuing this wildly incorrect statement, the secretary is demonstrating his commitment to his long-held goal of sowing doubts about all vaccines. Had we not used these lifesaving mRNA vaccines to protect against severe illness, we would have had millions of more Covid deaths.”

We would have had millions of more Covid deaths …

It will come as no surprise that the dreadful Kennedy has repeatedly been drawn to the Holocaust and Hitler’s Nazy Germany to make his case against vaccines that save millions of lives.

During the middle of a pandemic that was killing millions around the world he said this at an anti-vaxxer rally, comparing getting vaccines to dying in death camps:

“Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland … you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”

You can read that one again, too, if you like, but it was no one-off, because abominations like Kennedy can never stop themselves.

He has in the past called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention a “Nazi death camp.”

Even when he was against Trump, before he was with him when offered enough rope to try to hang all of us, he again tipped his hat to Hitler:

“And, you know, (Trump’s) not like Hitler. Hitler had like a plan, you know, Hitler was interested in policy.”

Yes, he had a plan, you morbid, dangerous asshole ...

And if you think I have gone too far here, I will continue to warn you that I am only getting warmed up.

Because unless the people who value life, vaccines, clean air and water, gun control, education, science, democracy, books, and healthcare do everything in their power to stop this fascist takeover, sickos like Kennedy and Trump will do everything they can to rub us out before they meet their maker.

Stopping them just as soon as we can has literally become a matter of life or death.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)

'Everybody hates Trump now': Analyst pinpoints move that has sent support 'tanking'

As President Donald Trump continues to bleed Republican support, a report in The New Republic posits that his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal may prove to be too much for even his staunchest supporters.

Senior editor Alex Shephard wrote in an article titled "Everybody Hates Trump Now" that Trump's talent for collecting voters in the first place has never been about attracting them to his own groundbreaking ideas; rather, Trump identified where voters were on particular issues, then said "what other political leaders are too afraid to say."

"His rapid rise within the Republican Party came from simply recognizing that the party’s voters were significantly further to the right on immigration than most of the party’s presidential candidates," Shephard wrote. "Trump parroted back to voters what they were already saying about undocumented immigrants, and he rapidly rose in the polls."

Likewise, Trump's assault on "political elites" and his alignment with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s MAHA movement tapped into the voter zeitgeist at the time of the 2024 elections. More than six months into his second term, however, Trump's policies in action have repelled some of his base, while the Epstein sex-trafficking scandal threatens to strip him of even the most stalwart MAGA faithful.

"His failure to follow through on his (admittedly half-hearted) promise to release [the Epstein] files has rattled his core supporters, even as he is ramping up an unprecedented deportation regime," Shephard wrote, adding, "There are signs that all of this is going to get worse too."

"Trump has no way out of the Epstein problem; he can either continue to stonewall, which makes him look guilty, or he can release everything, which may make him look even guiltier," Shepard wrote.

Democrats have voter problems of their own, of course, but Shephard concluded, "For now, all that really matters is that Trump’s support is tanking—and he looks powerless to halt the slide, let alone reverse it."

Read The New Republic Article here.

There is one Trump truth: all his henchmen are incompetent liars

We all know and expect that a president’s top appointees are picked in large part because of their willingness to carry out a president’s agenda. But usually these are people with some experience in the areas that they are overseeing. Insofar as this is not the case, they can generally rely on the high-level career officials in the departments or agencies under their control to make sure that necessary tasks get accomplished.

Unfortunately, this is not the case now. The main and possibly only qualification for Trump’s top appointees is the ability to tell blatant lies with a straight face. He has picked people who not only have no background in the areas they oversee, they don’t even have the most basic understanding of their responsibilities. And in many cases they have fired or marginalized the career people with expertise.

Starting at the top, Trump picked a former Fox talk show host with an alleged drinking problem, Pete Hegseth, to be his Secretary of Defense. Secretary Hegseth apparently didn’t know that he shouldn’t be making war plans on unsecured channels and without knowing who was included in the conversations. He apparently also didn’t know that his wife should not be included in the discussions.

Trump has a Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, who claims he doesn’t know that tariffs (import taxes) are taxes. Since tariffs are among the oldest form of taxes, long predating the income tax, this is a pretty elementary point that a Treasury Secretary would be expected to know.

Kristi Noem, Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary, didn’t know what habeas corpus is. Since that is basic right guaranteed by the Constitution, it would be rather important for the person controlling the largest federal police force to be familiar with the concept.

While knowledge of their areas may not be a strong point for top Trump officials, lying in front of TV cameras is an area of real expertise. We see this constantly.

We just saw Attorney General Pam Bondi tell us that there is no Jeffrey Epstein client list. This was after telling us back in February that the list was sitting on her desk and promising that it was soon to be released.

After Trump released his “Liberation Day” tariffs, which included a steep tariff on the uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insisted this was not a mistake and an indication of a rushed job. Instead, he said the tariffs were necessary to prevent transshipment from other countries to escape the taxes Trump was imposing.

This is obviously an absurd claim since there were many uninhabited islands that escaped taxation. In addition, while the problem of transshipment to avoid tariffs is real, it is not one that can be solved by putting a tariff on imports from islands inhabited by penguins and seals.

China and other countries whose exports are subject to high tariffs can and will ship them through countries that face much lower import taxes. If our customs agents can’t recognize that we are not actually importing cars and television sets from uninhabited islands, they surely will not be able to detect that the goods coming from Thailand or Indonesia were actually manufactured in China.

Trump appointees do have a remarkable ability to lie. RFK Jr. can tell us that discouraging people from getting the measles vaccines has nothing to do with the largest measles outbreak in decades. They all tell us that we can reduce Medicaid spending by $800 billion over the decade (roughly 10 percent), without throwing anyone off the program. And former DOGE boss Elon Musk told us 20 million dead people were getting Social Security benefits.

But it seems that none of them can do their jobs, and since they have fired or sidelined most of the high- level civil servants with expertise, these jobs are not getting done. Hundreds of people just died in Texas because of this failure, and we are virtually certain to see far worse in the future. As much as Trump might insist otherwise, incompetence is not a virtue.

Dean Baker is the co-founder and the senior economist of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of several books, including "Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better bargain for Working People," "The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive," "The United States Since 1980," "Social Security: The Phony Crisis" (with Mark Weisbrot), and "The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer." He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.

'Talk show': RFK Jr. slammed for turning vital health panel into circus

Donald Trump’s Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., reduced a key government immunizations committee to a “talk show” by inviting a presentation from a leading anti-vaccine campaigner, a former senior government physician said.

Dr. Fiona Havers also said her prediction on resigning last month as a senior adviser on vaccine policy at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), that Americans would die as a result of Kennedy’s actions, was coming true.

In June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP. Last week, the new members held a public meeting.

Speaking to the former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal on his podcast, The Court of History, Havers said: “Watching the ACIP meeting … was wild because it was so different than how these meetings should be conducted.

“Lyn Redwood was invited to present at ACIP, and she gave a really poorly put-together summary of thimerosal and flu vaccines and safety, which is a settled issue.”

Thimerosal is a preservative used in vaccines. Redwood is a nurse turned anti-vaccine campaigner, president emerita of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group Kennedy founded and chaired.

Redwood has long advanced the claim that mercury in thimerosal is harmful to pregnant women and children — a claim the New York Times says has been “contradicted by dozens of rigorous studies and … largely … rejected by vaccine scientists.”

Regardless, only one voting ACIP member rejected Redwood’s recommendations.

Havers said: “They moved to a vote immediately. That is not the way this process works.

“First of all, ACIP is not a talk show. You don't invite like random outside people that have no expertise. Second, planning for an official vote to change CDC recommendations takes months — like, there is a whole process for that.

“…There's a work group and they would review the evidence. There's a formal process called the Evidence to Recommendations Framework that the work group leads go into. They put together evidence about the specific policy question. They go through seven different domains [including] risks, benefits, costs, feasibility.

“The work group then votes on that, and then the CDC staffer, the official who's an expert in that work group, takes that and formally presents it to the ACIP voting members at the public meetings … so the evidence is literally graded.

“… And then after the ACIP voting members have seen the Evidence to Recommendations Framework and the recommendations from the work group, then and only then do they vote.

“What they did [in the most recent meeting] was adding a vote on a proposal that has never been discussed by the influenza work group, which would have been the appropriate work group.

“CDC officials and [Food and Drug Administration] experts on safety were never given an opportunity to collate and present the data … the work group … never saw this policy question in front of them, so they completely violated all norms for ACIP procedures by holding a vote without the proper review.”

Havers said she had “never seen an outside person with no qualifications present at ACIP … sometimes they'll get academics and put on a cost-effectiveness analysis, but usually CDC officials that have the slides go through a very rigorous clearance process. All the references are correct, and it's done in a very systematic way.

“And they just like, put a vote on a schedule, invited this woman who nobody at CDC knew was on the schedule like a week ago, and then had her present and moved forward based on her presentation.”

Redwood, Havers said, “introduced herself as a private citizen” but “is a well-known charlatan who’s spread misinformation about vaccines for decades … and she has been closely tied to RFK Jr for many years.

“And the fact that she was invited to present at ACIP was … a travesty to be honest.”

Havers, who played a prominent role in efforts to combat Zika, Ebola and COVID-19, resigned from the CDC on Monday 16 June, in protest, after Kennedy fired the ACIP members.

Havers told the Times then: “If it isn’t stopped, and some of this isn’t reversed, like, immediately, a lot of Americans are going to die as a result of vaccine-preventable diseases.”

Speaking to Blumenthal, Havers said people “already are” dying as a result of Kennedy’s actions, for example from a measles outbreak in southwestern states.

“Two children have died of measles since RFK Jr became secretary,” Havers said. “And keep in mind that is a disease that was officially eliminated from the US decades ago.

“… I think RFK Jr. [with] his megaphone was spreading misinformation before he was HHS Secretary [and] contributed to a decrease in vaccine confidence and increasing rates of unvaccinated children and adults, so I think that that has led directly to increased deaths.

“But what I think is more concerning now is that he is pulling the levers of government regulatory power to restrict access. And there's the FDA approval and licensure side, which I think they're having an impact on. And then there's the CDC recommendation side, which is tied to insurance coverage.

“So he now actually, literally has the access to stop Americans from getting safe and effective vaccines that have been vetted, previously approved by ACIP, and he will be tampering … potentially with insurance access and with the ability of providers to give vaccines to their patients if they want to.”

Kennedy’s firing of the whole ACIP committee left “people at CDC … crushed,” Havers said, because he “had blown up the process by which we contribute the data and the evidence.

“And everyone was like, ‘Can it get any worse?' And then when we saw that Lyn Redwood was going to be on the schedule and they were going to act, they added a vote on thimerosal. I mean, it blew my mind.”

'The cognitive dissonance is frightening': How Trump controls his supporters

As I was editing the following interview with Charles Gaba, founder of ACAsignups.com, I was reminded of something Will Stancil told me during my chat with him. Will said: “I think people are used to living in a relatively stable era and have come to believe that stability is normal."

Will was talking about the dominant interpretation of political history among liberals. For most of us, the battles of the past settled the biggest arguments, and from those settlements arose a period of relative peace and stability that nearly all of us take for granted.

Will said: “Liberals have trained themselves to see the world through this very particular end-of-history lens, where the ‘stuff that matters’ is inevitably wonky policy questions, the day-to-day of taxes and government, who gets subsidies, what healthcare policy looks like.

“But it’s ridiculous. History isn’t over, the future will contain events as dramatic and horrible as the events of the past, and this stuff is just what it looks like: an assault on the foundations of our government, with all the terrifying and weighty implications that it seems to have.”

Complicating this is the concept of American exceptionalism, which is to say, the idea that America is the exception to the rule of the world. In most of the nations in global history, might has made right. The law was never applied equally, or universally. It has usually been just another tool of political elites to maintain their preferred status quo.

But liberals don’t want to believe that about America, even when they acknowledge that the country often falls short of its stated ideals. We tell ourselves that whatever tyranny we face is a temporary setback to the inevitability of America's soul being revealed once and for all.

Because of this faith, most liberals, but not only liberals, can’t imagine a future in which the government is trying to hurt them. We say that that only happens in times like the early 20th century, in places like Soviet Russia or Maoist China. There are no gulags here, we say. The government can’t possibly seek to inflict mass suffering and death.

We have to change this mindset. America is just like any other country. It’s not that special. We can love it, flaws and all, even when it’s not the exception to the rule of the world. The battles of the past century have not settled the biggest arguments. Social instability arising from insane public policies will almost certainly become the new norm. And the government can, as it seems to be doing now, try to kill the sickest 5 percent of the population to create conditions for controlling the rest.

In the dark disturbing interview with Charles Gaba that follows, the specter of social Darwinism lurks in the background. The unstated belief behind every policy decided by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is “the survival of the fittest,” in which the strong should rule and the weak should die.

“Everything [Kennedy], the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are doing seems to be intended to ensure that sick people simply die off, which presumably would make those who survive healthier on average, thus achieving his ‘MAHA’ goal,” Charles said.

JS: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to change the way children are given vaccines. First, is there a problem with the status quo? What are they looking for that we don't know about, if anything?

CG: To the best of my knowledge there aren't any issues with the status quo beyond some states being far too lenient on vaccination requirements (religious objections, etc). My view is that the sole exceptions should be people who have legitimate medical conditions, which make them unable to take a particular vaccine.

The argument seems to be that children are being over-vaccinated as a way of padding drug companies pockets with unnecessary vaccinations. The claim seems to be that children are extremely unlikely to die from or to be seriously harmed by COVID, for instance, and therefore, it's unnecessary to vaccinate them — except that even if true, they can still be carriers who infect higher-risk adults, and so on.

It seems like this is what happens when conspiracy theory finds traction in public health policy. Is that right and why?

Absolutely. The most recent anti-vax movement (sparked by [British fraudster] Andrew Wakefield and popularized by celebrities like Jenny McCarthy) started out as more of a left-leaning thing via "granola mom" types (I believe Marin County, California, is considered the "birthplace" of that resurgence) in the late 1990ss and early 2000s.

I think — and again, I'm not an expert on this — it began gaining major traction among Republicans during the 2016 primary when Donald Trump told a vague anti-vax story about a supposedly non-autistic child who "became" autistic after getting vaccinated.

And of course this thinking went into overdrive among MAGA Republicans during the COVID pandemic, even though it was the administration of their own lord and savior, Donald Trump that helped develop the very mRNA vaccines they were protesting against.

Since then it's gotten so far out of control that Republican lawmakers in several deep-red states — including Iowa, Montana and Idaho — have actually introduced legislation that would ban mRNA vaccines!

The cognitive dissonance is frightening.

So conspiracy theories are being used to rationalize political outcomes? If so, one of the outcomes is death. Getting rid of people is a rightwing goal, historically. We can say that reasonably, no?

Vaccine specialist and science communicator Edward Nirenberg put it best: "If I were HHS secretary and my goal were to kill as many children as possible, it would be difficult to distinguish the actions I would take from those that Kennedy has taken."

In this particular instance he was referring to the announcement that RFK Jr. is withdrawing US funding from the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), but he could be talking about any number of other policy changes RFK Jr. has made already.

I don't know if it's a "rightwing" goal generally, but it sure as hell seems to be the goal of the Trump administration and MAGA Republicans.

When RFK Jr. rolled out his "Make America Healthy Again" campaign, the assumption was that he intended to make existing Americans healthy. Instead, everything he, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are doing seems to be intended to ensure that sick people simply die off, which presumably would make those who survive healthier on average, thus achieving his "MAHA" goal.

Call it Operation Nietzsche, I suppose.

I've written several explainers about the goals of the Affordable Care Act and how health insurance risk pools work, which involve this concept: Generally speaking, around 5 percent of a given large population tends to eat up around 50 percent of all medical spending.

Kennedy’s and the administration’s "logic," therefore, seems to be that if you simply killed off the sickest 5 percent of the population, healthcare costs for the remaining 95 percent would be cut in half.

This is obviously immoral and appalling, but it also seems to be the driving force behind many of their decisions.

It sounds like social Darwinism has been restored in popularity. I mean, even MAGAs, who will themselves be killed by such policies, will nevertheless support them if they also kill people who are "undeserving." It's like a suicide cult that few can see.

This is a trend that folks like Jonathan Metzl (one of his books is literally titled Dying of Whiteness) have been talking about for years, and which I analyzed extensively during the covid pandemic.

I found a direct and steep correlation between Trump support and COVID death rates as well as a direct inverse correlation between Trump support and vaccination rates at the county level.

Lyndon Johnson famously put it best:

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

Another goal of rightwing politics is social control. Kennedy came close to saying that when he said this week his goal is everyone wearing "wearables" in four years. How is this even debatable?

The irony goes through the roof. One of the biggest and most absurd conspiracy theories among the MAGA anti-vax crowd regarding COVID vaccines was that they supposedly included tiny "microchips" that would "magnetize" you, and allow Bill Gates to track your every move etc. (Of course, the fact that everyone carrying smartphones around these days pretty much allows various companies to do exactly that already was apparently lost on them).

Yet many of the same crowd gush over Elon Musk's companies, including Neuralink, which literally implants microchips into the human brain, and Tesla, which can literally track the location of their cars (so can most other carmakers to some extent these days).

And now you have RFK Jr. pushing for "everyone" to wear small devices on their bodies that allow private companies and/or potentially the federal government to track not only your every move but your most private medical and health data via biometrics, etc.

Meanwhile, Republicans in some states like Virginia have introduced bills to track women’s menstrual cycles, something which Vice President JD Vance was a proponent of as recently as 2023.