Tag: health
Too Little, Too Late: RFK Jr. Suddenly Is Promoting Measles Vaccination

Too Little, Too Late: RFK Jr. Suddenly Is Promoting Measles Vaccination

In the wake of the growing measles outbreak in Texas, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published an op-ed on Fox News’ website over the weekend, urging Americans to … get vaccinated.

With the subhead “MMR vaccine is crucial to avoiding potentially deadly disease,” the infamous anti-vaxxer wrote, “Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.”

Texas Health and Human Services first reported the outbreak in mid-January. The disease rapidly spread, reaching nearly 150 confirmed cases. The majority (if not almost all) of those cases are among children who have not received the MMR vaccine. Texas officials say the outbreak is the worst in almost three decades.

Last week, during Donald Trump’s bizarre Cabinet meeting, Kennedy glibly dismissed a measles-related death of a school-aged child as “not unusual.” It was the first measles fatality recorded in the U.S. in over a decade.

Kennedy has spent much of his career promoting anti-vaccine misinformation, notably amplifying debunked bad science connecting the MMR vaccine to autism rates in children. Kennedy, along with others in the anti-vaxx movement have contributed to declining vaccination rates, resulting in outbreaks like the one in Texas.

The Texas outbreak, which began in Gaines County and has now spread to eight more counties, had alarmingly low vaccination rates among its cases of school-aged children. This is not just by chance; It has been fomented by Mr. Measles and his anti-science allies for decades.

At the same time, the Children's Health Defense, the organization Kennedy founded and previously chaired, continues to promote false information about the Texas outbreak. On February 20, its official social media account blamed the outbreak on the MMR vaccine itself. Their claims have the same amount of evidence they have always had—zero.

Kennedy can write as many toothless op-eds as he likes, but as cases pile up Kennedy’s first order of business at the HHS was to gut the agency tasked with educating the public and preventing outbreaks like this one. Kennedy even abruptly canceled the FDA’s planned meeting for next flu season and paused multimillion-dollar efforts to develop a new COVID-19 vaccine to deal with new strains.

With the Trump administration’s history of mismanaging public health, and Elon Musk’s focus on destroying our government agencies, the future is only going to get more dangerous for Americans.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Bobby Lied: Violating Senate Commitments, RFK Jr. Seeks To Thwart Vaccines

Bobby Lied: Violating Senate Commitments, RFK Jr. Seeks To Thwart Vaccines

One week after being sworn into office, President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is reportedly preparing to make significant changes to the vaccine approval process—actions that critics say violate the “commitment” he made to several Republican senators. These assurances, senators claim, were key conditions for their votes to confirm the Kennedy, an attorney known for his “role in legitimizing anti-vaccine activism.”

Secretary Kennedy “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,” Politico reported Thursday. “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.”

The apparent most likely target is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which “plays a key role in setting vaccine policy. Kennedy and his top aides are also scrutinizing a host of other outside panels, including those that advise the Food and Drug Administration,” according to Politico.

In anticipation of this possibility, before leaving office, President Joe Biden and his HHS Secretary, Xavier Becerra, “approved the appointments of eight new candidates” to ACIP, STAT News reported in January. The medical news outlet called it “a burst of activity within a matter of a few months that could, in theory, make it more difficult for the Trump administration to shape the panel with its own appointees.”

But experts believe that “any attempt to protect the status quo at the ACIP will prove to have been futile. People who sit on this committee have at-will appointments,” they noted.

Multiple news outlets on Thursday reported that ACIP’s first scheduled meeting of the year, slated for next week, has now been postposed, a development raising concerns.

Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a noted virologist, responded on social media to the rescheduling, remarking: “This is how RFK Jr will administratively destroy vaccination programs.”

U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy is a Louisiana Republican and a medical doctor who “co-founded the Greater Baton Rouge Community Clinic, a clinic providing free dental and health care to the working uninsured,” his Senate bio reads. “Bill also created a private-public partnership to vaccinate 36,000 greater Baton Rouge area children against Hepatitis B at no cost to the schools or parents. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Bill led a group of health care volunteers to convert an abandoned K-Mart building into an emergency health care facility, providing basic health care to hurricane evacuees.”

Politico reports that the assurances RFK Jr. “provided helped clinch his confirmation, after Senate HELP Committee Chair Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said he received commitments that changes would not be made to the CDC’s vaccine committee.”

On February 4, standing on the floor of the Senate, Dr. Cassidy delivered a speech detailing those commitments.

“After seeing patients die from vaccine preventable diseases, I dedicated much of my time to vaccine research and immunization programs. Personally witnessing the safety monitoring, and the effectiveness of immunization. But simply, vaccines save lives,” Cassidy said (archived).

“This is the context that informed me when considering Robert F. Kennedy Jr as the nominee to be Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services,” Cassidy continued, explaining why he was choosing to vote to confirm RFK Jr. “Regarding vaccines, Mr. Kennedy has been insistent that he just wants good science and to ensure safety. But on this topic, the science is good, the science is credible. Vaccines save lives. They are safe. They do not cause autism. There are multiple studies that show this. They are a crucial part of our nation’s public health response.”

Crucially, Senator Cassidy said that Kennedy “committed that he would work within the current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems, and not establish parallel systems. If confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices [ACIP] without changes.”

Cassidy was not the only Republican who voted to confirm Kennedy based on commitments he personally made to them.

Defending her vote to confirm Kennedy, widely recognized as one of the least qualified among all of President Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees, U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) issued a lengthy statement repeatedly explaining that RFK Jr. had made “commitments” to her, personally, that were sufficiently satisfying to earn her vote — despite his lengthy reported history of anti-vaccine activism, his statement that, in his opinion, “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective,” and what has been recorded as his documented history of promoting conspiracy theories.

“I continue to have concerns about Mr. Kennedy’s views on vaccines and his selective interpretation of scientific studies, which initially caused my misgivings about his nomination,” declared Senator Murkowski. “Vaccines have saved millions of lives, and I sought assurance that, as HHS Secretary, he would do nothing to make it difficult for people to take vaccines or discourage vaccination efforts. He has made numerous commitments to me and my colleagues, promising to work with Congress to ensure public access to information and to base vaccine recommendations on data-driven, evidence-based, and medically sound research. These commitments are important to me and, on balance, provide assurance for my vote.”

One week ago CNN’s Manu Raju reported, “Asked Lisa Murkowski if she trusts RFK Jr on vaccines, and she said: ‘We are going to hold him accountable and that’s how we will get the trust.'”

Thursday afternoon, the nonprofit Protect Our Care, issued a statement strongly criticizing Senator Cassidy.

“Just one week in, RFK Jr. has already begun enacting some of the most radical parts of his conspiracy theory-filled agenda, breaking promises he made to on-the-fence Senators during his confirmation process. Coverage confirms that RFK Jr. will be removing members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee after canceling a critical meeting on vaccine approvals,” the group charged.

“RFK Jr. played Bill Cassidy like a fiddle,” the group’s president, Brad Woodhouse, added. “It hasn’t even been a week and he is already breaking his promises. After saying anything to on-the-fence senators to get confirmed, RFK Jr. is now showing his true colors as the anti-science, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist he always has been. The consequences of RFK Jr.’s broken promises, which were always bull—, will be more sick and dead Americans, including children, and Senator Cassidy and his colleagues who bought what Kennedy was selling will bear responsibility.”

Earlier this week, the Associated Press reported on another commitment RFK Jr. made to Senator Cassidy, one he appears to be preparing to rescind.

“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,” the AP reported. “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.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Federal Judge Angrily Orders Trump To Restore Health Agency Websites

Federal Judge Angrily Orders Trump To Restore Health Agency Websites

A federal judge has directed harsh criticism at the Trump administration for removing countless public health web pages and websites, ordering them restored by midnight, and suggesting their deletion may have risked violating federal law.

U.S. District Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, “ordered federal health agencies Tuesday to restore pages they removed from their websites last month to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order on ‘gender ideology and extremism,’ saying the decision to pull them down could be detrimental to public health,” Politico reported. The order extends to the CDC, HHS, and the FDA.

“In his opinion,” Politico added, “Bates said the agencies’ decisions to take down certain webpages ‘likely’ constitute an ‘order’ that’s reviewable under federal administrative law.”

The Trump administration’s claims that the removal was necessary to review their contents and amounted to mere “maintenance” were not arguments the judge appeared willing to accept. Judge Bates instead denounced the “widespread disruption that defendants’ abrupt removal of these critical healthcare materials has caused.”

Bates blasted the Trump administration, writing, “it bears emphasizing who ultimately bears the harm of defendants’ actions: everyday Americans, and most acutely, underprivileged Americans, seeking healthcare. These individuals rely on the care of doctors… If those doctors cannot provide these individuals the care they need (and deserve) within the scheduled and often limited time frame, there is a chance that some individuals will not receive treatment, including for severe, life-threatening conditions. The public thus has a strong interest in avoiding these serious injuries to the public health.”

In his opinion granting Doctors for America a temporary stay, Bates offered several examples of “irreparable harm” the government’s actions have already caused.

Doctors for America “has shown its members are already suffering such harm. To start, [one doctor] serves the students of ‘one of the most underserved high schools in Chicago.'”

“In this work, she ‘regularly’ relies on CDC’s resources on sexually transmitted diseases (‘STDs’)… The harm she has suffered since CDC removed those pages is neither hypothetical nor far off. The high school ‘recently had an outbreak of Chlamydia,’ and now that she is ‘[w]ithout t[he] crucial CDC resources,’ she is ‘not able to do [her] job to help address this urgent situation.'”

Bates also cited a statement from a leading physicians’ group, and wrote that “the lost materials are more than ‘academic references—they are vital for real-time clinical decision-making in hospitals, clinics and emergency departments across the country.'”

“Without them, health care providers and researchers are left ‘without up-to-date recommendations on managing infectious diseases, public health threats, essential preventive care and chronic conditions.'”

Politico reports Doctors for America had sued “the Office of Personnel Management, the CDC, the FDA and HHS last week, claiming the missing information ‘deprives’ doctors and researchers of ready access to data that’s critical to treating patients and addressing public health emergencies.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Drugs Are Top US Import -- And Tariffs Will Drive Up Their Cost

Drugs Are Top US Import -- And Tariffs Will Drive Up Their Cost

I was stunned this morning when I looked at the data. Drugs — the legal kind — are the U.S.’s single largest import category.

The U.S. in the first 11 months of 2024 imported over $222 billion in pharmaceutical products, which includes both finished drugs and the chemicals used to make drugs domestically. That’s $25 billion more than the value of all imported cars, the next largest category, and larger still than imports of crude oil; car parts; computers; and cell phones, the next four.

China is the single largest exporter of drugs and drug chemicals to the U.S. Yet China was only subjected to a 10 percent across-the-board tariff under the Trump edict, which, as of this writing, is still slated to go into effect tomorrow. That will be in addition to targeted tariffs on specific Chinese goods (steel, solar cells, EVs) imposed by the first Trump and Biden administrations.

Mexico and Canada, on the other hand, were slated for a 25 percent tariff on all its U.S. exports. This morning, the Mexican tariff was postponed for at least a month after a phone call between Trump and Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was also in telephone contact with Trump (which led to a similar postponement). Both neighbors’ economies would be devastated by 25 percent tariffs since they are far more dependent on exports than the U.S.

Both countries are major suppliers of medical devices (knees, hips, heart values, stents, etc.) and medical equipment (imaging equipment, bioreactors, microscopes, etc.), which accounted for $57 billion in U.S. imports in the first 11 months of 2024, according to the Commerce Department. Medical equipment was the 13th largest category among all U.S. imports.

The ostensible reason for imposing high tariffs on our neighbors is to stop the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. Seeing fewer dangerous street drugs is the least likely outcome of any trade war. Interdiction efforts like tariffs that fail to focus on eliminating demand (i.e., getting U.S. drug addicts into treatment programs) wind up doing nothing more than enriching drug cartels and harming Americans. How? By raising the street price of illegal opioids and increasing the level of crime needed to pay for those higher-priced drugs.

The opacity of chaos

Speculation is rife as to why Trump went soft on China but hard on our northern and southern neighbors. A Paul Krugman post over the weekend suggested it might be due to the influence of Trump whisperer Elon Musk, who has extensive business dealings with China. He also noted news reports that 40 unnamed “whales” bought 94 percent of the $Trump and $Melania tokens, a personal grift worth tens of millions of dollars to the Trumps since the tokens “clearly have no intrinsic value.” Were they Chinese? he wondered.

Tim Noah in The New Republic suggested the huge tariffs are part of the president’s obsession with eliminating the income tax and returning to 19th century government financing that relied on tariffs. Unless Trump plans to completely eviscerate non-defense federal spending with huge cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, that’s fiscally absurd.

Noah also raised the specter that a bankrupt Trump may simply be running a grift on his newfound billionaire friends, many of whom have corporate interests and stock market holdings that will be severely damaged by the new tariff regime. They will ask Trump to reverse or at least moderate the tariffs, which he might do for a price. “These whales, whoever they are, want something in return,” Noah wrote. “They’ve created a path for other influence-buyers to follow.”

The big losers from Trump’s tariff games will be those who joined the administration hoping to use tariffs strategically as part of an industrial policy aimed at restoring long-lost domestic manufacturing capacity. There was some hope Trump might move in that direction when he appointed Jamieson Greer to be the next U.S. Trade Representative (USTR).

Greer was chief of staff to Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s first-term USTR. In Lighthizer’s most recent book, reviewed by American Prospect founding editor Robert Kuttner in a hopeful essay in the December issue of The New York Review Books, the former USTR called for a 25 percent across-the-board tariff on Chinese-made goods. Trump also appointed Peter Navarro, his former trade adviser and an avowed China hawk, to be his senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.

While expressing hopes that there might be a positive rethinking of trade policy during a second Trump term, Kuttner issued this prescient warning:

“Several other Trump appointees, who span a right-wing spectrum that runs from poorly informed nativists to Wall Street globalists, suggest that trade policy in Trump’s second administration is likely to display the same kind of internal conflicts as his first. Xi will again be looking for ways to undermine US anti-China policy by personally enriching Trump, his family, and his close advisers, such as Elon Musk, with their own financial interests in China.”

It seems clear that Lighthizer and his acolytes inside the new administration had little input into the weekend’s tariff announcement. Rather than imposing strategic tariffs to promote domestic manufacturing, the main economic impact will be higher prices.

Drug and device makers’ price card

Why are higher prices a given in health care? The drug and device companies in health care that will be subjected to the new tariffs have an almost unlimited power to raise prices to cover their increased costs because their products are patent protected. Moreover, manufacturers in both sectors have been outsourcing their manufacturing for decades. Even if they wanted to, it would take years for them to shift production back to the U.S.

“You can’t expand capacity overnight,” said Mark Hendrickson, director of supply chain policy for Premier Inc., a hospital group purchasing organization. “That takes year and millions of dollars.”

The drug and device makers are already signaling that their likely response will be price increases. “We have shared with the Administration our concerns about the potential impact tariffs could have on the medical technology supply chain that American patients depend on for their care,” said Scott Whitaker, CEO of Advamed, which represents device and equipment makers, in a statement to StatNews over the weekend.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association was more circumspect in its statement when I reached out this morning. “We are eager to work with the Trump Administration to find solutions that reduce costs for patients and improve access,” their statement said. “However, policymakers have historically excluded medicines from tariffs because they increase costs and reduce access.”

Not this time, at least not so far. Perhaps if they buy a hefty bag of $Trump tokens, whose price dropped precipitously over the weekend and during today’s trading, things might change.

Reprinted with permission from Gooz News. Please consider subscribing.

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