• ASSAULT ON SCIENCEWhy a Study Claiming Vaccines Cause Chronic Illness Is Severely Flawed – a Biostatistician Explains the Biases and Unsupported Conclusions

    By Jeffrey Morris

    At a Senate hearing on Sept. 9, 2025, witnesses supporting HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign against vaccination, presented an unpublished study, claiming the study was never published because the authors feared being fired for finding evidence supporting the health risks of vaccines. This claim was false. The study has serious design problems that keep it from revealing much about whether vaccines affect children’s long-term health.

  • PUBLIC HEALTHAs Tensions Over RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Policy Mount, States Act to Secure Access to Vaccines

    In an effort to secure the health of their citizens, several states have acted quickly to preserve vaccine access through legislation, bills, executive orders, and regional collaborations that can issue independent recommendations and expand pharmacy-based administration of vaccines regardless of federal guidance. The action reflects a loss of confidence in the CDC and its vaccination committee which HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has stacked with vaccine skeptics.

  • CHINA WATCHPentagon Bans Tech Vendors from Using China-Based Personnel After ProPublica Investigation

    By Renee Dudley

    The Defense Department has tightened cybersecurity requirements for its cloud services providers. The changes come after ProPublica revealed how Microsoft’s use of China-based engineers left sensitive government data vulnerable to hacking.

  • ASSAULT ON SCIENCEHow RFK Jr.’s Misguided Science on mRNA Vaccines Is Shaping Policy − a Vaccine Expert Examines the False Claims

    By Deborah Fuller

    On Kennedy’s instructions, NIH is funneling money away from new mRNA technologies toward a single project developing universal vaccines based on traditional whole-virus vaccine technology. Kennedy justified the decision with a series of false assertions about vaccines and their underlying technology. Abandoning mRNA vaccine research may lead to lives needlessly lost, whether due to potential medicines untapped or to pandemic unpreparedness.

  • PUBLIC HEALTHKennedy Hearing Deepens Crisis Over Dismantling of CDC Leadership - Health Scholar Explains Why the Agency’s Ability to Protect Public Health Is Compromised

    By Jordan Miller

    CDC, long considered the nation’s –if not the world’s –premier public health organization, is unraveling. The reason: HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.’s effort to emasculate the agency, undermine its scientific foundations, replace scientists in the agency with unqualified anti-vaxxers, do away with its evidence-to-recommendations framework, and promote skepticism, if not rejection, of science and scientific methods. Public health professionals are now warning the public that vaccine recommendations coming from the CDC may not be trustworthy.

  • PUBLIC HEALTHHow Vaccines Changed the World

    By Mariel Ferragamo

    Vaccination campaigns have nearly eradicated some of the most deadly and transmissible diseases. However, against a backdrop of a rising tide of vaccine hesitancy, and U.S. leaders pulling global support, outbreaks are cropping up again.

  • PUBLIC HEALTHHealth Leaders, Medical Groups: CDC Leader Exodus Puts Nation's Health at Risk

    By Lisa Schnirring

    As news broke of the ouster of newly confirmed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Susan Monarez, PhD, and the resignations of some of the agency’s top scientists, reactions came fast and furious from public health leaders, professional groups, and lawmakers.

  • PUBLIC HEALTHChaos Continues at CDC

    RFK Jr. has replaced the scientists who served on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) with individuals who share his skepticism about the efficacy of vaccines in fighting disease. These vaccine-skeptics have formed a new working group to review the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, and named an operation research professor with no background in medicine, or in science more generally, to chair the working group. Chaos ensued.

  • COMMON-SENSE NOTES // By Idris B. OdunewuA Shining Star in a Contentious Legacy: Could Marty Makary Be the Saving Grace of a Divisive Presidency?

    While much of the Trump administration has sparked controversy, the FDA’s consumer-first reforms may be remembered as its brightest legacy. From AI-driven drug reviews to bans on artificial dyes, the FDA’s agenda resonates with the public in ways few Trump-era policies have.

  • IMMUNOLOGYImmunologic Study Shows Rebound of Other Viruses After COVID Measures Lifted

    By Lisa Schnirring

    The lifting of COVID-19 prevention measures such as masking and social distancing, which also tamped down the circulation of other respiratory viruses and left young children without immunity, may explain the rebound in non-COVID-related diseases.

  • ASSAULT ON SCIENCEHHS Scraps Further Work on Life-Saving mRNA Vaccine Platform

    By Mary Van Beusekom

    In what experts say will hobble pandemic preparedness, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the dismantling of the country’s mRNA vaccine-development programs—the same innovation that allowed rapid scale-up of COVID-19 vaccines during the public health emergency.

  • ASSAULT ON SCIENCERFK Jr Is Wrong About mRNA Vaccines – a Scientist Explains How They Make COVID Less Deadly

    By Deborah Dunn-Walters

    In announcing the cancellation of US government support for research into mRNA vaccines, Kennedy has claimed that mRNA vaccines “encourage new mutations and can actually prolong pandemics” – a misleading statement that contradicts the scientific consensus on viral evolution and effects of vaccination. The false assertions by RFK Jr. and other vaccine-skeptics notwithstanding, mRNA vaccines do not cause viruses to mutate. Mutations are part of viral evolution: a natural process that happens regardless of our intervention. What vaccines do is give us a fighting chance.

  • ASSAULT ON SCIENCEI’m a Physician Who Has Looked at Hundreds of Studies of Vaccine Safety, and Here’s Some of What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong

    By Jake Scott

    In the five months since he began serving as secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made many public statements about vaccines that have cast doubt on their safety and on the objectivity of long-standing processes established to evaluate them. Many of these statements are factually incorrect. The evidence is clear and publicly available: Vaccines have dramatically reduced childhood illness, disability and death on a historic scale.

  • TARGETING SCIENCEKennedy’s HHS Sent Congress ‘Junk Science’ To Defend Vaccine Changes, Experts Say

    By Jackie Fortiér

    A document the Department of Health and Human Services sent to lawmakers to support Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to change U.S. policy on covid vaccines cites scientific studies that are unpublished or under dispute and mischaracterizes others. One health expert called the document “willful medical disinformation,” adding: “It is so far out of left field that I find it insulting to our members of Congress that they would actually give them something like this.”

  • TARGETING SCIENCERFK Announces New ACIP Members, Including Vaccine Critics

    By Lisa Schnirring

    HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. removed all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine advisory committee, replacing them with a group of eight new members, some of whom are vaccine skeptics.