“COVID-19 vaccines and boosters have proved to be highly effective in preventing severe cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.”
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“A September 2024 review in the journal NPJ Vaccines reports that the risk of myocarditis is about six times greater for those who are infected with COVID-19 than for those who are vaccinated. A February 2025 article in the European Heart Journal compared patients who experienced post-vaccine myocarditis to those who experienced post-COVID-19 and conventional myocarditis. The researchers found that post-vaccine myocarditis patients were less likely to be hospitalized and experienced fewer cardiovascular events.”
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“The most comprehensive analysis of the safety of COVID-19 vaccines is the cohort study of 99 million vaccinated individuals published in April 2024 in Vaccine. The researchers confirmed that the incidences of previously identified rare safety signals following COVID-19 vaccination were quite low.”
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“By March 2022, Fauci and his colleagues acknowledged “the concept of classical herd immunity may not apply to COVID-19” in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. “Living with COVID-19 is best considered not as reaching a numerical threshold of immunity, but as optimizing population protection without prohibitive restrictions on our daily lives,” they concluded. Population protection, among other things, now involves inoculations updated much like seasonal flu vaccines to boost waning antibodies and to counter emerging variants of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Ultimately, Biden’s 2021 “summer of freedom” turns out to have been a fond but illusory hope of a permanent respite from COVID-19. Given this reality, current COVID-19 vaccines are now primarily designed to prevent severe disease and death rather than infection.”
“Five months later, federal health officials, industry executives and the public health community say they’re more worried than ever.
Kennedy in his first seven weeks atop the Department and Health and Human Services has dramatically reshaped the U.S. health apparatus, eliminating entire agency divisions, abruptly shifting policy priorities and leaving the sprawling department in what six current and former employees described as an unprecedented state of upheaval.
The health secretary and his team forced out top scientists in charge of developing new vaccines and evaluating the safety of medicines, stripping away centuries of collective expertise and institutional knowledge. Government offices that manage key functions like ensuring safe drinking water and alerting Americans to contaminated drugs have been decimated.
In the meantime, Kennedy appointees have sought greater control over scientific decision-making in agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration — going against longstanding norms and roiling a health sector that accounts for nearly one-fifth of the U.S. economy.
“It’s a mess,” said one former senior HHS official granted anonymity to discuss internal matters. “What was once a very robust place to work, that was trying to lead on innovation, is gone. It’s just gone.”
The rapid overhaul, punctuated by last week’s mass firing of 10,000 employees, has left the HHS workforce traumatized and the broader health community in deep distress, according to interviews with nine current and former health officials, as well as five other public health experts and industry officials, most of whom were granted anonymity for fear of retribution.”
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““They got rid of all the people who made the place work,” said one health official. “It doesn’t seem to be achieving their aims. Unless their aim was just to cause chaos and torpedo morale.””
“Experts say they see peaks and valleys with these kinds of illnesses over the years, but there have been about 6,600 cases already in 2025, almost four times the number at this point last year.”
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“Concerned about increasing cases, experts are urging vaccination.
The US had more than 200,000 cases of whooping cough every year before the vaccine was introduced. By 1948, the vaccine was widely used, and infection rates began to drop.”
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“Boosters are recommended because protection from the vaccine can fade over time, which may be one reason for the ongoing outbreaks.
Declining vaccination rates are another reason. The percentage of US kindergartners who received the DTaP vaccine has steadily declined over the past five years, leaving thousands vulnerable to infection.
Organizers within the state say that although many people have become hesitant about vaccinations, another issue is a lack of access.”
“President Donald Trump’s administration plans to end U.S. funding for Gavi, an organization that helps buy vaccines for children in poor countries, and will scale back efforts to combat malaria, among thousands of cuts revealed in a document prepared by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The administration will continue to fund some grants that pay for drugs that treat HIV and tuberculosis and provide food aid to nations where civil wars and natural disasters are occurring, according to the document, which was first reported by the New York Times.
The document, reviewed by Reuters on Wednesday, lists international aid programs that will be dismantled as well as those that will be retained.”
““He could be misinterpreted that vitamin A will save your suffocating suffering child,” Brett Giroir, a first-term Trump health official now advising Kennedy on infectious disease policy, wrote in a post on X. “It will not.”
In Texas, some local officials have grown concerned that Kennedy’s messaging risks diluting their own communication efforts. They warn that his equivocations could undermine their only hope of ending the outbreak: persuading people to get the measles vaccine.
“We don’t want to diminish the primary message,” Phil Huang, director of health and human services in Dallas County, Texas, said in an interview. “It’s the vaccines that are the most important.”
Katherine Wells, director of public health for the city of Lubbock, Texas, echoed that sentiment.
“We need to make sure that we’re all talking about the importance of vaccination, and although there’s some focus on treatment, preventing the disease in the first place is really what public health works on.”
Since President Donald Trump nominated him to run HHS late last year, Kennedy has labored to convince skeptics that he is not anti-vaccine, despite his past as an activist who repeatedly raised doubts about the safety and effectiveness of various immunizations.
As recently as 2021, Kennedy suggested without evidence that measles outbreaks may have been fabricated to “inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children.” But now confronted with a high-risk, real-world opportunity to demonstrate whether his views have changed, the HHS secretary has instead appeared to seek a middle ground — calling the measles vaccine protective for individuals and broader communities, yet stopping well short of the full-throated endorsement public health experts say is necessary from the nation’s top health official.
“What he should be saying is that these kinds of outbreaks are fully preventable and unacceptable, and that as secretary he will do everything in his power to ensure the public that it never happens again,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. “It’s the first major public health crisis that he’s had to face, and he hasn’t reassured doubters about his ability to get on top of it.””
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“Most importantly, health experts said, Kennedy could simply hit the bar already set by health officials in Texas: Declaring unequivocally that vaccination is the central way to contain the outbreak.”
“The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) upcoming Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee meeting on March 13 was abruptly canceled via email on Wednesday. The committee was to consider the selection of strains to be included in the influenza virus vaccines for the 2025–2026 flu season. This is the second vaccine-related advisory meeting canceled since Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. took over at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
No reason for the cancellation was given, and the committee members were warned against forwarding the email. It suggested that members decline to answer questions from media.
So much for Kennedy’s pledge earlier this month of “radical transparency.” He added, “We will make our data and our policy process so transparent that people won’t even have to file a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request.”
In addition to suggesting members of the FDA’s vaccine committee stifle themselves, the HHS will publish a notice next week in the Federal Register to eliminate public comment on that agency’s plans and decisions. While past meetings have been open to public scrutiny and participation, it is not clear if the new limits will apply to future meetings of the committee.”
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“Noting that the U.S. is currently experiencing one of the worst flu seasons in a decade, Infectious Diseases Society of America president Tina Tan warns that “cancelling a critically important Food and Drug Administration meeting that is vital to the development of effective flu vaccines for next flu season is irresponsible.” She adds, “Cancelling this meeting means vaccine makers may not have the vital information and time they need to produce and distribute targeted vaccines before the next flu season. If the FDA meeting is not immediately rescheduled, many lives that could be saved by vaccination will be lost.”
RFK, Jr.’s HHS promises that the FDA “will make public its recommendations to manufacturers in time for updated vaccines to be available for the 2025-2026 influenza season.”
“The first death has been reported in the ongoing measles outbreak in West Texas, according to a press release sent out by the Texas Department of State Health Services Wednesday.
The victim was an unvaccinated child who was hospitalized in Lubbock last week.
The outbreak, starting in late January, has 124 confirmed cases, the majority of which are either children, unvaccinated people, or both. Eighteen people have been hospitalized, the state health department said.”
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“According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the last measles death in the United States was reported a decade ago in 2015. Measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, which the CDC attributes to its vaccination program.
Vaccination rates for the MMR vaccine in Texas have dropped slightly in recent years following the Covid-19 pandemic.”
“Measles, mumps, and polio are supposed to be diseases of the past. In the early to mid-20th century, scientists developed vaccines that effectively eliminated the risk of anyone getting sick or dying from illnesses that had killed millions over millennia of human history.
Vaccines, alongside sanitized water and antibiotics, have marked the epoch of modern medicine. The US was at the cutting edge of eliminating these diseases, which helped propel life expectancy and economic growth in the postwar era.”
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“As long-accepted, lifesaving public health measures increasingly become politically polarized, routine vaccination rates are rapidly declining in much of the US. In the 2019–2020 school year, three states had less than 90 percent of K–12 students vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella. By the 2023–2024 school year, 14 states had fallen below that threshold. The number of states with more than 95 percent of schoolchildren vaccinated — the preferred level of coverage to prevent outbreaks — dropped from 20 to 11 during that same period.
It is no surprise then that the number of US measles cases more than quadrupled from 2023 to 2024. Nobody has died of measles in the US since 2015, but if vaccination rates continue to decline, this highly contagious disease (one person can infect more than a dozen other people) will spread with increasing ease, which raises the risk that American kids could die.
We know how to prevent that. We’ve had remarkably safe, effective shots for decades. We just need to keep using them.”
“Lutnick is right that autism diagnoses have risen substantially. If not childhood vaccinations, what accounts for this increase? First, greater awareness means that many people with autism spectrum disorder who in the past would have been missed by clinicians are now being identified. However, a 2020 review article in Molecular Psychiatry reports that changes in diagnostic criteria “has been accompanied by a 20-fold increase in the reported prevalence of ASD over the last 30 years, reaching a current prevalence of more than 2% in the United States.” This contributes to the likelihood of over-diagnosis and a shift toward autism diagnoses in place of other mental health conditions.”
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“the liability system was unable to properly balance the public benefits of vaccines against their private harms. The result of this imbalance was killing off vaccine innovation and production. So Congress a year later chose to change the liability system with respect to vaccines in 1986 with the adoption of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which provides compensation to people who are injured by certain vaccines.
And the benefits of vaccines are enormous. A 2024 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention review finds that “among children born during 1994–2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1,129,000 deaths, resulting in direct savings of $540 billion and societal savings of $2.7 trillion.””