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/Musk 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?
Catastrophic Cuts Are Creating Chaos And Endangering Americans’ Health And Scientific Innovation
Associated Press: Judge extends temporary block to huge cuts in National Institutes of Health research funding A federal judge on Friday again blocked the Trump administration’s drastic cuts in medical research funding that many scientists say will endanger patients and delay new lifesaving studies. The new National Institutes of Health policy would strip research groups of hundreds of millions of dollars to cover so-called indirect expenses of studying Alzheimer’s, cancer, heart disease and a host of other illnesses — anything from clinical trials of new treatments to basic lab research that is the foundation for discoveries. Separate lawsuits filed by a group of 22 states plus organizations representing universities, hospitals and research institutions nationwide sued to stop the cuts, saying they would cause “irreparable harm.”
- New York Times: Trump Administration Stalls Scientific Research Despite Court Ruling The Trump administration has blocked key parts of the federal government’s apparatus for funding biomedical research, effectively halting progress on much of the country’s future work on illnesses like cancer and addiction despite a federal judge’s order to release grant money. The blockage, outlined in internal government memos, stems from an order forbidding health officials from giving public notice of upcoming grant review meetings. Those notices are an obscure but necessary cog in the grant-making machinery that delivers some $47 billion annually to research on Alzheimer’s, heart disease and other ailments.
Talking Points Memo: CDC Shutters PRAMS Program on Maternal and Infant Health The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) is a federal data collection system, run out of CDC, “designed to identify groups of women and infants at high risk for health problems, to monitor changes in health status, and to measure progress towards goals in improving the health of mothers and infants,” in the words of the program’s website. It has run continuously since 1988 and covers everything from the particulars of newborn health and morbidity to issues like post-partum depression in mothers. I can report that the Trump CDC has shuttered the program as part of its general clampdown on medical research and public health information.
Science: Ax falls on elite group of Ph.D.s training to lead U.S. public health labs Facing a furor after news reports last week that the prestigious corps of young epidemiologists being trained as “disease detectives” at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had been targeted for termination, the administration of President Donald Trump reversed course. The roughly 100 trainees at the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) were spared. But another outstanding group of young CDC trainees wasn’t so lucky. At least 15 of 21 fellows in CDC’s lesser known Laboratory Leadership Service (LLS) were axed last weekend. The ultracompetitive, 2-year program, which trains Ph.D. scientists in the intricacies of public health laboratory work, has spawned leaders at state and local labs from Milwaukee to Tennessee to New York City.
The New Republic: Oops: Trump-Musk Cuts Just Wrecked an NIH Org Championed by GOPers One downsizing just started attracting notice among insiders at the National Institutes of Health, because it seems particularly inexplicable: According to people familiar with the situation, approximately one-tenth of the workers have now been let go at the NIH’s Center for Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias, or CARD, including its incoming director, a highly regarded scientist credited with important innovations in the field. What makes this particularly jarring is that it could set back efforts to treat and develop cures for these awful afflictions, as these insiders and other experts fear. But it’s also that the potential for this center to do good—and the importance of the broader cause of battling Alzheimer’s—have both been championed by Republicans. Indeed, CARD’s full name—the Roy Blunt Center for Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias—honors former Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, an influential Republican who spoke glowingly about its potential to advance human progress when its opening was announced in 2022.
Stat: The lasting human impact of Trump funding freeze: An 86-year-old’s ride to dialysis now feels tenuous For Nancy Hastings, the face of the federal government is the young man who picks her up every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5:45 a.m. to drive her to dialysis. She’s 86, and frail, and he stands behind her in the smoky half-light as she maneuvers down her front stairs. “If you happen to fall, don’t get scared,” he tells her. “Just fall on me, and I’ll shield you.” Then suddenly, in late January, word came that he was gone. With the Trump administration’s spending freeze, the five-person nonprofit where he’d worked didn’t have money to keep paying everyone, and he was among the three workers laid off. One of the two remaining employees called Hastings to let her know. “She said, ‘We’ll come and get you one way or the other,’” Hastings recalled — both a reassurance and a reminder of her own fragility. The staff calls her dialysis “life-sustaining,” which is a nice way of saying that if she doesn’t receive it, she’ll die. In President Trump’s description, the freeze “in no way affected Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or other entitlements that Americans depend on.” Rather, it targeted “big bureaucracy” and its “fraud and waste and abuse.” The words conjured a cartoon of box-checking, do-nothing functionaries, pushing paper for paper-pushing’s sake. But part of what government staffers do is distribute federal dollars, often to programs that Americans do indeed depend on, in red and blue states alike. Turn off the spigot, even briefly, and it’s felt far from Washington, D.C.
ProPublica: They Worked to Prevent Death. The Trump Administration Fired Them. Every day, they tackled complex issues with life-or-death stakes: A failure to get donor organs to critically ill patients. Tobacco products designed to appeal to kids. Maternal and infant death. They were hired after lawmakers and bureaucrats debated and negotiated and persuaded their colleagues — sometimes over the course of years — to make those problems someone’s job to solve. Then, this month, they were fired as part of President Donald Trump’s widespread purge of federal workers. Suddenly, the future of their public health missions was in question. The White House hasn’t released figures on how many have been fired, but news reports have begun to take stock: about 750 workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which plays a central role responding to pandemics; more than 1,000 staffers at the National Institutes of Health, which funds and conducts life-saving research; dozens at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which manages public health care and insurance programs; and scores of employees at the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the safety of food, drugs and medical devices. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed to gut the federal health centers, stating “entire departments” at the FDA should be cut. Neither the administration nor the federal agencies responded to ProPublica’s questions, but a White House spokesperson has previously said they were removing newer employees who were “not mission critical.”
Major Staff Departures:
- Politico: Nirav Shah, a high-ranking CDC official, stepping down
- Stat: FDA’s head of device safety among employees terminated in ‘challenging’ weekend
Chaotic Firings and Re-Hirings:
- Bloomberg: FDA Begins to Rescind Firings, Calls Some Employees Back to Work
- NBC: USDA says it accidentally fired officials working on bird flu and is trying to rehire them
- New York Times: Trump, After G.O.P. Criticism, Reverses Cuts to 9/11 Survivors’ Program
RFK Jr. Is An Extreme Anti-Vaxxer Who’s Already Breaking His “Assurances” To Key Republicans To Get Confirmed
Politico: Inside RFK Jr.’s health department takeover Robert F. Kennedy Jr. arrived at the headquarters of the Health and Human Services Department earlier this week with a request for his new employees: Drop your preconceived notions of what I’m going to do. The health secretary’s first days are testing that sentiment. Kennedy has taken control of the nation’s health apparatus amid a barrage of firings and abrupt policy shifts, marking the start of a tenure that allies and adversaries alike equate to a hostile takeover of the agencies he spent the last two decades maligning. An anti-vaccine activist widely dismissed as a fringe political figure just six months ago, Kennedy in his first week began steering the 80,000-person department in a radically new direction — preparing to dismiss key vaccine advisers, vowing to alter longstanding public health priorities and standing by as the Department of Government Efficiency gutted elements of the workforce at health agencies that he’s openly accused of “corruption.”
Stat: HHS orders CDC to halt some vaccine ads, saying RFK Jr. wants message focused on ‘informed consent’ The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was ordered to shelve promotions it developed for a variety of vaccines, including a “Wild to Mild” advertising campaign urging people to get vaccinated against flu, two sources familiar with the decision told STAT. The Department of Health and Human Services’ assistant secretary for public affairs informed the CDC that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wanted advertisements that promote the idea of “informed consent” in vaccine decision-making instead. Informed consent is the principle that people should be notified of all the risks, as well as benefits, of any medical intervention they receive or any drug they are prescribed. It is a cornerstone of health care delivery. Shifting the framing of advertising for vaccines that the CDC has long recommended — like flu shots — to more heavily focus on the risks of vaccines could undermine people’s willingness to get vaccinated, or to have their children immunized.
Associated Press: Kennedy says panel will examine childhood vaccine schedule after promising not to change it
To earn the vote he needed to become the nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a special promise to a U.S. senator: He would not change the nation’s current vaccination schedule. But on Tuesday, speaking for the first time to thousands of U.S. Health and Human Services agency employees, he vowed to investigate the childhood vaccine schedule that prevents measles, polio and other dangerous diseases. “Nothing is going to be off limits,” Kennedy said, adding that pesticides, food additives, microplastics, antidepressants and the electromagnetic waves emitted by cellphones and microwaves also would be studied. Kennedy’s remarks, which circulated on social media, were delivered during a welcome ceremony for the new health secretary at the agency’s headquarters in Washington as a measles outbreak among mostly unvaccinated people raged in West Texas. The event was held after a weekend of mass firings of thousands of HHS employees. More dismissals are expected.
Politico: RFK Jr. prepares shake-up of vaccine advisers HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is preparing to remove members of the outside committees that advise the federal government on vaccine approvals and other key public health decisions, according to two people familiar with the planning. Kennedy plans to replace members who he perceives to have conflicts of interest, as part of a widespread effort to minimize what he’s criticized as undue industry influence over the nation’s health agencies, said one of the people, who were granted anonymity to speak freely. Kennedy has long argued that drugmakers have too much sway over the approval of their products.
Axios: HHS postpones first vaccine advisory meeting of RFK era The first CDC vaccine advisory committee meeting since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was sworn in as HHS secretary has been indefinitely postponed, the department confirmed. Why it matters: The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, offers guidance on vaccine approvals and influences which shots insurers cover. “The ACIP meeting will be postponed to accommodate public comment in advance of the meeting. The ACIP workgroups met as scheduled this month and will present at the upcoming ACIP meeting,” HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon wrote in an email The big picture: ACIP meetings have been rescheduled under previous administrations, but the delay throws into question whether the Trump administration will follow precedent with a leading vaccine critic at the helm of the federal health department.
Inside Health Policy: Trump Orders Shutdown Of Long COVID Advisory Committee, Leaving Advocates Wanting Answers Long COVID advocates were left puzzled following the Trump administration’s order to terminate the Advisory Committee on Long COVID and wondering whether the White House solely views the committee’s annual funding as too steep or if it signals a broader shift away from supporting long COVID efforts. President Donald Trump signed an executive order late Wednesday (Feb. 19) directing the HHS secretary to terminate the Advisory Committee on Long COVID, which was established under the previous administration to boost research on the causes and treatments for Long COVID.
- PBS: RFK Jr. commits to prioritizing funding for long COVID research Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., asked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to commit to directing funding for long COVID research toward potential treatments and diagnostics if he were to be confirmed as health and human services secretary. “Absolutely, senator, with enthusiasm,” Kennedy said in his hearing Wednesday before the Senate Committee on Finance.
Boston Globe: RFK Jr.’s campaign organization uses official health department seal in fund-raising solicitation Though Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is finally installed as President Trump’s health secretary, his longshot 2024 presidential campaign is still carrying nearly $2 million in debt, and it’s already using the trappings of his new office to help eliminate his cash burden. On Tuesday, Kennedy’s campaign organization — rebranded as the official arm of the “Make America Healthy Again Movement”— emailed supporters for donations. At the top of the email was a large photo of Kennedy, speaking in the Oval Office after being sworn in last week, with the official seal of the Department of Health and Human Services imposed prominently next to him. Using an official federal government seal for non-official purposes is prohibited under federal laws and rules, unless written authorization is obtained. “HHS emblems are for use by HHS employees conducting official HHS business,” reads an agency rule from 2014, which makes clear that violators would be subject to fines or other penalties.
Politico: Trump defends Obamacare at the Supreme Court — stressing RFK Jr.’s in charge now The Trump administration surprised groups across the political spectrum this week by taking the same side as President Joe Biden in a Supreme Court case that will decide whether a government task force can determine what health insurance companies have to cover. But the administration’s first brief since President Donald Trump inherited the case from Biden came with a big caveat: the argument that his new health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., can remake the independent panel of health experts in his image or overrule it.
Mother Jones: RFK Jr., Onetime Environmentalist, Kills NIH Climate Change Programs In 1999, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then an environmental lawyer, was named by Time magazine as a “hero of the planet” for his pioneering work to clean up America’s waterways. On February 14 of this year, his second day as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, he ended HHS funding for climate change and health programs at the National Institutes of Health, a move that will likely terminate this work.
New York Times: Citing ‘Biological Truth,’ Kennedy Issues Guidance Recognizing Only Two Sexes Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on Wednesday that the Trump administration had adopted a set of official government “sex-based definitions” to give the public and federal agencies precise terms with which to describe categories including “male,” “female,” “woman” and “man.” The definitions are listed in a one-page “guidance” that is aimed, in part, at keeping transgender women and girls out of female sports, discouraging gender-affirming care for young people and fulfilling President Trump’s pledge that the federal government will recognize only two sexes: male and female. “This administration is bringing back common sense and restoring biological truth to the federal government,” Mr. Kennedy said in a statement. “The prior administration’s policy of trying to engineer gender ideology into every aspect of public life is over.”
Public Health Threats
Washington Post: Measles, once eliminated in the U.S., sickens 99 in Texas and New Mexico Nearly 100 people across Texas and New Mexico have contracted measles, state officials say, escalating anxiety over the spread of a potentially life-threatening illness that was declared eliminated in the United States more than two decades ago. Ninety cases of measles — the majority affecting children under 17 — were detected in Texas’s South Plains, a sprawling region in the state’s northwest, the Texas Department of State Health Services said Friday. The spread marks a significant jump from the 24 cases reported earlier this month. The DSHS said “additional cases are likely to occur in the outbreak area and the surrounding communities.”
The Guardian: Alarm as bird flu now ‘endemic in cows’ while Trump cuts staff and funding A newer variant of H5N1 bird flu has spilled over into dairy cows separately in Nevada and Arizona, prompting new theories about how the virus is spread and leading to questions about containing the ongoing outbreaks. The news comes amid a purge of experts at federal agencies, including employees who were responding to the highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Department of Agriculture.
The Hill: Trump moves hamper bird flu response as egg prices spike The Trump administration’s efforts to impose its will on the federal workforce through mass firings, funding freezes and communication blackouts is hampering the ability of public health professionals to respond to the growing threat of avian flu. As egg prices continue to rise and more cases are detected, state and local health officials say there is no clear plan of action from the administration. Dozens of people in the U.S. have also contracted the disease, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reporting the first human death from H5N1 last month.
New York Times: Trump Administration Has Fired Health Inspectors at Some Border Stations At the nation’s borders, federal workers keep the country safe in many ways: Some investigate sick passengers. Some examine animals for dangerous pathogens. And some inspect plants for infestations that could spread in this country. Late last week, the Trump administration dispatched hundreds of those federal employees with the same message that colleagues at other agencies received: Their services were no longer needed. The absence of these federal officers at the borders leaves Americans vulnerable to pathogens carried by plants, animals and people, experts warned. The firings come even as the Trump administration is said to be readying plans to turn back migrants on the grounds that they might bring diseases like tuberculosis and measles into the country.
Washington Post: U.S. reverses plan to shut down free covid test program The Trump administration reversed a plan late Tuesday to shut down the government website that ships free coronavirus tests to households, after The Washington Post reported that the administration was preparing to end the program and was evaluating the costs of destroying or disposing of tens of millions of tests. The Post reported Tuesday afternoon that the administration was looking into the costs of destroying tests that would otherwise be provided free to Americans, citing two officials at a federal public health preparedness agency and internal documents reviewed by The Post. A half-hour before the planned shutdown, Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon sent a statement to The Post confirming that COVIDtests.gov would shut down at 8 p.m. Tuesday. But he said the tests would not be destroyed and “will remain in inventory until they meet their expiration date.”
Opinion and Commentary
Wall Street Journal (Editorial): RFK Jr. Makes His First Anti-Vaccine Move Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been Health and Human Services secretary for all of a week, but he’s already pressing what looks like an anti-vaccine agenda. Mr. Kennedy never did disavow his vaccine views in the runup to Senate confirmation. He merely said he wouldn’t take away anyone’s vaccines. But the HHS secretary has many tools to undermine vaccines, and his early moves are revealing.
New York Post (David Harsanyi): Misinformation alert — RFK Jr. keeps peddling his detestable autism lies Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spread many detestable theories in his life, but none is more detestable than his scaremongering over autism and vaccines. It’s not merely that the new Health and Human Services secretary has convinced thousands of Americans that they’re partially responsible for their children’s autism — a trend he once compared to a “holocaust.” It’s that he’s ensuring thousands more will put their children in needless danger for absolutely no scientific or rational reason.