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RFK Jr. Ripped Over 'Reckless and Deadly' Halt on US Support for Global Child Vaccine Program
"Kennedy is either misinformed or lying," said one critical physician, "but either way, children will die as a result."
Jun 25, 2025
In an incendiary stunner delivered via a prerecorded video statement played Wednesday to attendees of the global vaccine summit in Brussels, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the United States is suspending financial contributions to the lifesaving organization as it aims to vaccinate hundreds of millions of children around the world.
Kennedy—described by a coalition of green groups during his quixotic 2024 presidential campaign as "a dangerous conspiracy theorist and science denier whose agenda would be a disaster for our communities and the planet"—accused Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance of having "ignored the science" on childhood vaccination.
"The U.S. is turning its back on women and children at risk of death and disability."
"When vaccine safety issues have come before Gavi, Gavi has treated them not as a patient health problem, but as a public relations problem," Kennedy alleged in his video message, without providing any evidence to support his claim. "In its zeal to promote universal vaccination, it has neglected the key issue of vaccine safety."
"I'll tell you how to start taking vaccine safety seriously: Consider the best science available, even when the science contradicts established paradigms," he added. "Until that happens, the United States won't contribute more to Gavi."
Gavi responded to Kennedy's allegations in a statement asserting that the organization's "utmost concern is the health and safety of children."
"Any decision made by Gavi with regards to its vaccine portfolio is made in alignment with recommendations by [the World Health Organization's] Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE), a group of independent experts that reviews all available data through a rigorous, transparent, and independent process," Gavi added. "This ensures Gavi investments are grounded in the best available science and public health priorities."
@drneilstone.bsky.social
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— Physicians for a Healthy Democracy (@physiciandemocracy.medsky.social) June 25, 2025 at 9:15 AM
Gavi's Health and Prosperity through Immunization summit—which is co-hosted by the European Union and the Gates Foundation, with Global Citizen as a key partner—seeks to secure $9 billion to fund the immunization of 500 million more children, a move Gavi says will prevent 8-9 million deaths over the next five years.
"Over the past 25 years, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance has helped to immunize more than a billion children, meaning one-eighth of humanity has received a vaccine funded by Gavi," the organization said. "Today we help give half the world's children access to vaccines every single year."
"The scale is massive, and so is the impact," Gavi added. "Since we were founded in 2000 child mortality in the lower-income countries we work with has halved, with Gavi's vaccines averting more than 18 million deaths."
Since taking office in January, Kennedy—a prolific purveyor of conspiracy theories including one that vaccines cause autism—has restricted Covid-19 vaccine access and fired everyone on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) vaccine advisory panel and replaced them with his own controversial picks.
On Wednesday, Kennedy announced that the panel will review the long-standing U.S. childhood vaccination schedule, raising concerns about possible ideology-driven revisions. This, as a new study published in the peer-reviewed British medical journal The Lancet sounded the alarm over flagging global childhood vaccination rates driven by inequality, Covid-era disruptions, and misinformation.
Dr. Tom Frieden, who led the CDC during the Obama administration, said on the social media site Bluesky that "Secretary Kennedy's statement to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is literally sickening."
"Sickening because millions of children's lives are in the balance because of Mr. Kennedy's fringe beliefs and misinformation on vaccines," Frieden added. "Sickening because the U.S. is turning its back on women and children at risk of death and disability. And sickening because it reflects the invasion of anti-vaccination falsehoods into life-and-death programs."
Dr. Ashish Jha, former President Joe Biden's coronavirus response coordinator, slammed Kennedy's decision as "terrible but totally predictable."
"Gavi helps poor kids around the world get vaccinated against polio and measles and other life-threatening diseases," Jha said. "This is just mind-bogglingly awful."
Gavi works in close partnership (operationally and financially) with governments around the world to distribute life-saving vaccines to children. Their work has saved nearly 20 million lives since 2000.Kennedy is either misinformed or lying, but either way children will die as a result.
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— Dr. Stephanie Psaki (@spsaki.bsky.social) June 25, 2025 at 8:17 AM
Canadian health law and policy expert Timothy Caulfield said on the social media site X: "Just horrible. Sickening. Evil."
"This decision will kill children," Caulfield added. "We all knew RFK Jr. was the worst person for this job. He's lived up to the hype. The f*cking worst."
Liza Barrie, director of Public Citizen's Global Vaccines Access Campaign, called Kennedy's suspension of Gavi funding "reckless and deadly."Barrie continued:
The Trump administration is turning its back on a program that has helped vaccinate more than a billion children and save over 17 million lives—while Kennedy spreads lies about science, safety, and one of the world's most effective public health efforts. The facts are clear. Gavi exists to get vaccines to children who need them most. It works with governments in lower-income countries, health workers, and communities to stop deadly diseases. Because of Gavi, millions of children who would have died are alive today.
Kennedy claims that Gavi ignored science are entirely false. Gavi's recommendations are grounded in global evidence and reviewed by independent experts. His suggestion otherwise fuels the same disinformation that has already led to deadly measles outbreaks and the resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases, including polio.
"This isn't about protecting children. It's about abandoning them," Barrie added. "Choosing to walk away from a program that saves lives—knowing full well what the consequences will be—isn't just reckless. It's cruel."
Barrie urged Congress to protect the funding for Gavi already allocated in this year's federal budget, "which the Trump administration is now trying to claw back through its rescission proposal."
"The United States must not walk away from global vaccine access," Barrie stressed. "Not now, not ever. Turning away would be a choice to let disease spread and let children die."
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Trump’s Attack on Science Will Leave Us All Sicker
Budget cuts and layoffs at major U.S. public health agencies threaten our health and well-being and will hobble scientific progress and innovation.
Jun 22, 2025
The Trump administration’s evisceration of the federal agencies that protect our health and environment is a full-throttled attack on science that will set our nation back for years, if not decades to come.
The illegal firings of thousands of employees across Health and Human Services’ (HHS) 13 divisions, the freezing of government contracts, attacks on universities, and cuts to billions in research dollars will have profound effects on our health and well-being, economic competitiveness, and standing as a world leader in science.
And the wrecking ball has just begun swinging. HHS is slated to shed 20,000 employees, or one-quarter of its dedicated workforce, and see its budget cut by 26%.
At its worst, the dismantling of federal agencies like the CDC, the NIH, and the Food and Drug Administration is cruelly calculated to hurt those most vulnerable in our society—the poor, the disabled, and the elderly.
A disdain for independent science and expertise is seemingly a root cause of the actions. As Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher, Science journals said at this year’s annual meeting in Boston, “Science and engineering and medicine are searches for truth, facts, and objectivity. We live in a time when that seems under threat, and we need to be able to say that.”
To his point, a May 23 Executive Order puts science under the control of politicians by giving presidential appointees broad latitude to police scientific research and conduct and punish alleged violations of its Orwellian “Gold Standard Science.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of HHS, has already acted on the EO by firing the entire advisery committee that helps guide vaccine policy for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Seventeen highly qualified, evidence-based physicians and researchers, many with decades of expertise, are to be replaced with individuals aligned with Kennedy’s anti-vaccination ideology.
The president’s appointment of Kennedy, a lawyer with no scientific training, to lead the HHS is itself an attack on expertise and truth. In four short months, Kennedy has made ill-informed decisions from announcing a change in Covid-19 vaccine policy without notifying the CDC, to offering a Florida sanctuary for Canadian ostriches exposed to bird flu, to ending the development of a vaccine for the H5N1 virus, even as researchers demonstrate its ability to rapidly spread through airborne transmission.
Science is clearly taking a backseat to grandstanding, and the consequences could be deadly.
At its best, the demolition of our public health and research institutions shows an indifference to the pain and suffering that may fall on Americans when the agencies that keep our food safe, water clean, and protect us from deadly diseases are kneecapped. At its worst, the dismantling of federal agencies like the CDC, the NIH, and the Food and Drug Administration is cruelly calculated to hurt those most vulnerable in our society—the poor, the disabled, and the elderly.
Americans are already sicker and die younger in comparison with other wealthy nations, according to a 2024 report by the Commonwealth Fund. Life expectancy is 4.1 years shorter in the U.S. compared with our peer nations, and maternal mortality, for instance, is more than three times higher than in Europe. The Trump administration’s attacks on science and medicine will only worsen these gaps.
Lawsuits challenging the legality of the administration’s executive orders are moving through the court system, but we do not yet know how all of this will play out.
Already the damages are taking a toll, with NIH being especially hard hit. With an annual budget of $47 billion, the NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research and development. It’s no coincidence that the world’s leading medical labs are located in the U.S., or that our research benefits people across the globe.
The Trump administration plans to cut NIH’s budget by $18 billion, or about 40%, and to consolidate its 27 institutes and centers into just eight. At least 2,100 NIH research grants have been terminated thus far, totaling $9.5 billion.
With at least 1,200 staff laid off all at once, and thousands more voluntarily resigning, the loss of institutional knowledge and medical expertise is staggering. The full extent of the brain drain is unknown because NIH Director Jayanta Bhattacharya has yet to report the total number of staff losses.
One of NIH’s critical roles is to fund the basic science research that underpins development of drugs and therapeutics, long before the private sector takes an interest. Companies take that basic science and further develop and commercialize vaccines, drugs, and therapies that save lives. Funding for the grants that the NIH provides these labs, universities, and institutions has largely been frozen for the past month, as part of the administration’s war on universities, even though a federal judge ordered a release of the money. Billions of biomedical research dollars allocated to Harvard, Cornell, Northwestern, Brown, Columbia, and Princeton are being withheld.
The agency has reportedly stopped vetting future studies on cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and other illnesses and slashed the programs for cancer and Alzheimer’s research.
The Trump administration also cut the overhead rate that NIH pays to research universities to keep the lights on, computers running, and lab equipment maintained from between 40% and 70% to 15%. Such deep cuts will lead to even more layoffs, and research could grind to a halt.
While a U.S. District Court ruled the change was “arbitrary and capricious,” it’s unclear whether the Trump administration will reverse the policy.
Halting research will have profound impacts on the American health system and on our health.
It will disrupt local economies and hurt our overall competitiveness. Every dollar that NIH spends on research generates more than two dollars in economic activity, not to mention the patents and biomedical startups that ensue.
Some U.S. universities are reducing or halting their PhD admissions as a consequence. Doctoral students—our scientific future—are watching their dreams die.
“Many are right now questioning the viability of being a scientist in the U.S. going forward,” Carole Labonne, developmental and stem cell biologist at Northwestern University, said in a PBS interview. We could see a brain drain in the U.S., as young scientists choose a different career path or choose another country in which to build their career.
And NIH is but one federal agency that the Trump administration is taking a chain saw to. Cuts at the Food and Drug Administration could have immediate impacts on our food safety, at a time when food contamination outbreaks are on the rise. Staff with technical expertise in nutrition, infant formula, and food safety response have been cut.
Similarly, at the CDC, staff cuts and contract freezes are coming at a time when the nation is experiencing an H5N1 outbreak in poultry and dairy cattle that may well lead to another pandemic, an unprecedented spread of measles in 33 states, and a tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas. The CDC plays a vital role, working with states and communities to understand where disease is, how to prevent it, and how to react. Simply put, we are losing people on the front lines of keeping people healthy.
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Trump Administration Slammed for Slashing $12 Billion in Funding for State Health Services
"These are not people who want to make America healthy," said one advocate for people with disabilities. "They want to make the sick disappear."
Mar 26, 2025
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services canceled more than $12 billion in federal funding for state health departments across the nation, money that is used to track infectious diseases and provide mental health services, addiction treatment, and other critical care.
NBC News reported Wednesday that $11.4 billion of the canceled grants were earmarked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for state and community health departments, nongovernmental organizations, and international recipients following the Covid-19 pandemic. Around $1 billion worth of grants are being pulled from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
"The Covid-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a nonexistent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago," Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement. "HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President [Donald] Trump's mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again."
This is just stunning. HHS has abruptly canceled more than $12 billion in federal grants to states that were being used for tracking infectious diseases, mental health services, addiction treatment and other urgent health issues.
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— Charles Ornstein ( @charlesornstein.bsky.social) March 26, 2025 at 1:36 PM
However, experts point to the certainty of future pandemics—like an avian flu strain that mutates to pass between humans—in urging public health policy planners to maintain or even increase preparedness and response funding.
NBC News reported that the 13 agencies overseen by HHS were sent notices starting Monday, which informed them that they have 30 days to reconcile their expenditures.
For some state and community healthcare providers, the effects of the cuts were immediate.
There was an abrupt $11B cut to local/state public health (PH) infrastructure yesterday. I don't think people realize what this means: -Want an updated system to check your immunizations instead of digging through docs? PH no longer able to carry out upgrades to immunization information systems
— Katelyn Jetelina ( @kkjetelina.bsky.social) March 26, 2025 at 11:34 AM
As The New York Times reported:
In Lubbock, Texas, public health officials have received orders to stop work supported by three grants that helped fund the response to the widening measles outbreak there, according to Katherine Wells, the city's director of public health.
On Tuesday, some state health departments were preparing to lay off dozens of epidemiologists and data scientists. Others, including Texas, Maine, and Rhode Island, were still scrambling to understand the impact of the cuts before taking any action.
In interviews, state health officials predicted that thousands of health department employees and contract workers could lose their jobs nationwide. Some predicted the loss of as much as 90% of staff from some infectious disease teams.
"We learned yesterday that the federal government has unilaterally terminated approximately $226 million in grants to Minnesota Department of Health related to the Covid-19 pandemic," Minnesota Commissioner of Health Dr. Brooke Cunningham said in a statement. "This termination is effective immediately and impacts ongoing work and contracts. This action was sudden and unexpected."
Lori Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, told CBS News that much of the funding would have expired soon anyway.
"It's ending in the next six months," she said. "There's no reason—why rescind it now? It's just cruel and unusual behavior."
Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment communications director Kristina Iodice told NBC News, "We are concerned that this sudden loss of federal funding threatens Colorado's ability to track Covid-19 trends and other emerging diseases, modernize disease data systems, respond to outbreaks, and provide critical immunization access, outreach, and education—leaving communities more vulnerable to future public health crises."
The first Trump administration was widely criticized for shortcomings in these fields. A congressional panel issued a 2022 report accusing top administration officials of "failed stewardship" and a "persistent pattern of political interference" that undermined the nation's response to Covid-19, which to date has killed more than 1.2 million people in the United States and is still claiming hundreds of lives each week, according to CDC figures.
Wednesday's reportingd came as HHS, CDC, and other critical agencies braced for more cuts and layoffs ordered by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his aides are also "nearing their final decisions on a sweeping restructuring of the department," CBS News reported last week.
Last month, Senate Democrats demanded answers from Kennedy regarding the purge of more than 5,000 HHS workers after the agency "blindly followed" a "baseless directive" by Trump and DOGE that the lawmakers said is "blatantly undermining Americans' health and safety."
As Common Dreams reported Wednesday, public health experts have also condemned the administration's decision to terminate funding for Gavi, the global vaccine alliance—a move critics warned could result in the deaths of over 1 million children in the Global South.
"Investing in Gavi brings other benefits for our world and the American people," the alliance said. "Here's why: By maintaining global stockpiles of vaccines against deadly diseases like Ebola, mpox, and yellow fever, we help keep America safe. These diseases do not respect borders, they can cross continents in hours and cost billions of dollars."
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