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robert f. kennedy jr
In 'Anti-Science Move,' FDA Expected to Broadly Restrict Access to Covid Vaccines
"I think that changes like this will lead to more unnecessary deaths," said one doctor.
May 21, 2025
Public health experts on Tuesday warned Tuesday that forthcoming Food and Drug Administration guidance on the Covid-19 vaccine would "cause confusion" and result in fewer people getting inoculated against the virus that killed 350,000 people in the U.S. before the shots became available.
Dr. Vinay Prasad, head of the agency's vaccine division, and Dr. Martin Makary, the FDA commissioner, wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that the vaccine "booster" doses that have been available for the last several years to anyone aged six months and older carry "uncertain" benefits for much of the population.
The officials said the next round of shots will be available only for adults over 65 and those with certain medical conditions.
They said that before a new round of updated vaccines are made available in the fall, the FDA "anticipates the need" for new clinical trials for many patients under 65. Participants in the trial would be given either the new shots or a placebo and followed by vaccine manufacturers for at least six months to determine if the vaccines continued to provide them with protection from Covid.
Both Prasad and Makary were vocal skeptics of vaccine mandates and other public health measures during the coronavirus pandemic, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—who oversees the FDA—has spread baseless misinformation about the Covid shots and other vaccines.
Kennedy said in 2021 that the shots were the "deadliest ever made"; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found the vaccines reduce people's risk of developing serious illness, long-term symptoms, and hospitalization.
Dr. Daniel Griffin, a physician in New York, toldThe New York Times that the FDA's plan will ultimately "very slowly [reduce] vaccination in the country."
"I think that changes like this will lead to more unnecessary deaths," said Griffin.
Makary and Prasad made their announcement days before scientific advisers to the FDA are set to decide on the composition of the Covid vaccines that will be offered this fall.
Dr. Lucky Tran, director of science communication and media relations at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, emphasized that many Americans have conditions that raise the risk of severe illness when they get Covid—including asthma, pregnancy, diabetes, obesity, and some mental health conditions.
"However, limiting Covid vaccines to people with specific conditions only causes confusions and decreases uptake," said Tran. "Most are unaware they have a condition that puts them at risk, so many who would want to get vaccinated may not try because they think they don't qualify."
About 74% of people in the U.S. have at least one condition that puts them at higher risk for severe disease, according to the CDC.
For people without medical conditions who are under age 65, it was unclear Wednesday whether they will be able to get vaccinated in the fall—and if shots are available to them, whether insurers will cover the costs.
William Schaffner, an infectious disease physician who is on the CDC's vaccine advisory panel—which recommends who should get FDA-approved vaccines—toldThe Washington Post that the panel could include in this year's recommendations that health people under 65 can still get a shot to protect themselves.
"They could add that line... and it would allow those people very focused on prevention who would like to get the vaccine and have it paid for by their insurance," Schaffner told the Post.
But Prasad said the FDA could still limit access because the agency "can only approve products if it concludes, based on the available scientific evidence, the benefit-to-harm balance is favorable."
Pediatricians expressed concern for children's safety if vaccines become unavailable to them; the CDC reported 150 pediatric deaths from Covid over the 12-month period that ended last August.
"I think there is strong data to suggest Covid should be part of routine childhood vaccinations," Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician, toldSTAT News. "We vaccinate kids for things that have less morbidity and mortality than Covid, like chickenpox for example."
Tran denounced the anticipated guidance as "an anti-science move that will kill more Americans."
"The FDA is being led by people who have consistently spread misinformation about Covid and vaccines," said Tran. "Their record indicates that they cannot be trusted to implement evidence-based guidance for vaccines, and their policies will kill people and make them sicker."
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Republicans Are Trying, But They Can’t Stop Abortion Pills
Despite RFK Jr.’s review of mifepristone, two things will remain true: Abortions pills will still be extremely safe, and abortion pills will still be available—everywhere.
May 20, 2025
In a disturbing advancement of the Project 2025 playbook for eradicating abortion, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is using the release of a new pseudo-study as a pretense for the Food and Drug Administration to review mifepristone’s safety and efficacy. The use of this widely discredited self-published report is a clear political maneuver by the Trump administration and anti-abortion extremists to curb access to telehealth abortion and end access to mifepristone more widely, against the scientific evidence and the will of the American public.
I am a public health researcher and abortion access advocate and have been tracking access to the abortion pill since it was first approved in France in 1988. I feel confident that, regardless of the outcome of this illegitimate review, two things will remain true: Abortions pills will still be extremely safe, and abortion pills will still be available—everywhere.
Abortion pills are safe. Period. The fact that Secretary Kennedy has asked the FDA to reevaluate the medications based on a single, unpublished junk science report is absurd. We have mountains of data and decades of clinical experience documenting their safety, whether provided through an in-person visit at a clinic or, since 2020, via telehealth. The World Health Organization has also said that abortion pills are safe even when taken without medical supervision, also known as self-managed abortion. Data support the safety of all of these forms of access.
As activists and clinicians expand these new routes of access to abortion pills, we are providing an immediate, practical solution for people who need abortion access, and thereby reducing the harm that abortion bans create.
Abortion pills are everywhere. As courts and legislatures have been systematically blocking access to abortion across the country, clinicians and activists—myself included—have been setting up and illuminating innovative routes of access that reach people where they are with safe abortion access, including in states with restrictions. As a result of our collective efforts, abortion pills are now readily available by mail for $150 or less—and free for those who can’t afford any amount—in all 50 states, even states with bans. Access routes currently include telehealth from U.S. providers operating from states with laws that shield them from prosecution, international telehealth services that mail pills to the U.S., community networks that send pills by mail for free, and e-commerce vendors that mail pills to all states.
An organization I co-founded, Plan C, tracks these different services to learn about their offerings, including whether they do a medical screening, what type of pills they offer, and how much they cost. Our ongoing investigations—which include mystery shopping and laboratory testing to verify that the pills are real—document a rich ecosystem of abortion pill access. These are real services providing practical, affordable, medically-safe abortion access, even in states with bans. They are all discoverable online. We index and share this information through our Guide to Pills so that people can learn about this ecosystem, and those who are seeking abortions know that they still have options.
These routes of access, combined with the clinic-based care options that exist in states that still allow it, have been so successful in reaching people that there are now even more abortions occurring in the United States than prior to the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Guttmacher, a leading abortion research organization, reports that clinician-provided abortions in the United States rose by more than 100,000 between 2020 and 2024, and that figure does not even include self-managed abortions or abortions facilitated by telehealth shield providers prescribing across state lines into states with bans. The Society of Family Planning also has been documenting abortion post-Roe and reports that these shield providers are serving approximately 10,000 people per month in states that totally or partially ban access to care.
As activists and clinicians expand these new routes of access to abortion pills, we are providing an immediate, practical solution for people who need abortion access, and thereby reducing the harm that abortion bans create, particularly for populations underserved by healthcare systems. We are also showing a new way forward for modern abortion access and laying the groundwork for eventual policy change (which will likely only be possible after our U.S. democracy is restored).
This scenario has already played out in other countries, with resulting improvements in abortion access. For instance, it was largely based on the experiences of patients in Ireland who received abortion pills by mail from Women on Web to safely terminate their pregnancies that parliament liberalized abortion access. In Mexico, the widespread grassroots sharing of information about how to use misoprostol—a widely available ulcer medication—for abortion, ultimately paved the way to policy reform, with abortion pills now officially registered in the country.
For decades, abortion pills have been so severely restricted by politics and overregulation that envisioning a radically different future in which the pills are universally available by mail—or even over the counter—is difficult for most. But this future is coming. Many would say it is largely already here. And, what is particularly notable, given the current FDA safety review based on fabricated claims about the “dangers” of abortion pills, is that these new, modern routes of access are possible precisely because abortion pills are so safe. They are safer than Tylenol, safer than Viagra, and research has demonstrated time and again that they are absolutely safe enough to put directly in the hands of the person who needs them.
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Bobby Kennedy Jr. Makes Eugenics Great Again at Health and Human Services
RFK Jr. has embarked on policies that frighteningly resemble those of eugenicists: They seek to identify and disempower the underprivileged, they serve anti-immigrant and racist sentiment, and they embrace pseudoscience.
May 17, 2025
Charles Fremont Dight has been reincarnated in the worm-gnawed brain of Bobby Kennedy, Jr. A medical professor at the University of Minnesota, Dight hoped to rid society of its unfit members. Dight, an eccentric who lived for a time in a treehouse, wrote about these unfit people in such publications as "Increase of the Unfit, A Social Menace," and "A Proper Function of Society is to Control Reproduction." Like other eugenicists, Dight believed in stronger immigration laws to keep the unfit aliens, but emphatically not people of Anglo-Saxon "stock," out of the country. In 1933, Dight wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler praising the Fuhrer's efforts to "stamp out mental inferiority."
Eugenics, a mainstream science in the early 20th century, sought restrictive marriage laws, isolation of the "unfit" in special colonies for the "feeble minded," and forced sterilization to shield society from the cost of caring for its most vulnerable citizens. Recent immigrants with poor English, children who had what are now recognized as learning disabilities, Down syndrome Americans, and many others were at risk of being paraded before eugenics courts for summary judgment and sent off to isolation colonies. Once removed from society, the eugenicists claimed, those with better bloodlines would be freed of their burden to care for them.
A Registry of Eugenic Discrimination
Bobby Kennedy, Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has embarked on policies that frighteningly resemble those of eugenicists: They seek to identify and disempower the underprivileged, they serve anti-immigrant and racist sentiment, and they embrace pseudoscience. Bobby Jr. wants to identify citizens with autism and place them in some kind of registry. He ordered the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to build "a real-world data platform enabling advanced research across claims data, electronic medical records, and consumer wearables," to determine the root causes of autism spectrum disorder, and to give Bobby and his team of autism falsifiers data drawn from public and private sources in violation of federal privacy and security rules. (Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker recently signed an executive order to block the federal government from collecting these data related to autism and to protect "dignity, privacy, and the freedom to live without fear of surveillance or discrimination" of Illinois residents.
Bobby's eugenics registry will succeed in stigmatizing people, especially young people, the way that eugenics surveyors stigmatized the "feeble-minded."
The HSS database, like those of the eugenicists, will be subjective and impressionistic. U.S. eugenicists built a registry for the unfit at the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in Cold Spring Harbor, New York under director Harry Laughlin. Laughlin and his poorly trained minions assembled index cards about American families, often from a cursory glance at a person's face and carriage, to create genetic family trees. The ERO believed they had proved a huge number of people carrying hereditary disease who could be identified to be isolated or sterilized; 80,000 Americans were sterilized.
Racism and Pseudoscience in HHS
Bobby Jr. shares the eccentricities and racism of the eugenists. He cut up whale skull found on the beach near the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, apparently because he likes to study animal skulls and skeletons, tied it to the roof of the family car, and drove it back to New York, while the rank "whale juice" poured into the car and onto his children. Bobby's interest in skulls may have been kindled by the work of craniologist Samuel Morton (1799-1851). In his Crania Americana Morton set forth a hierarchy of intelligence with Native Americans and Blacks at the bottom to justify their enslavement, removal, and other disturbing acts of violence against them.
Building on Morton's thesis, racist scientists and eugenicists documented lack of mental acuity among African Americans. They assigned Blacks special diseases and susceptibilities, one of which, drapetomania, led slaves to run away from cruel owners; another ordained syphilis as a "Negro disease." These racists believed that Blacks have a higher pain tolerance and weaker lungs that could be strengthened through hard labor (slavery). Bobby Jr. claims that Black people have a stronger immune system than white people and thus should receive vaccines on a different schedule. He observed that "to particular antigens, Blacks have a much stronger reaction." Bobby Jr. has said that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS, and he reiterates the fiction that HIV does not cause AIDS.
Another leg in the eugenicists' program was anti-immigration laws. ERO director Laughlin testified before the U.S. Congress in support of the Immigration Act of 1924 and its restrictions on admission to the U.S. of "races" considered inferior to the Anglo stock. On the basis of flawed data, Laughlin told Congress that recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were "socially inadequate," and tended to "degeneracy, shiftlessness, alcoholism, and insubordination," all of which were supposedly genetic traits. The 1924 act was easily passed signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge who believed that "America must be kept American" and that "biological laws show that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races."
No wonder Donald Trump selected Bobby Jr. to head HHS. Trump began his first presidential campaign commenting with conviction that Mexican immigrants were drug dealers and rapists. Trump draws on the work of criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso and the racial hygienists of Nazi Germany where a person's genes or bloodline determine his or her capacity for success or violence. Trump said, "You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it's in their genes." But the Trump family has good genes, although his convictions for sex and financial crimes might offer counter evidence: "We're smart people… We're like racehorses." During his ongoing campaign against undocumented aliens and citizens with foreign-sounding names, Trump ordered white South Africans to be given asylum in the U.S., but pointedly not Afghans who fought for freedom against the Taliban, Mexicans, or any other "races."
The Pseudoscience of Mercury-Caused Autism
The entire premise of Bobby's registry is the fully discredited assertion that vaccinations cause autism which is based on a retracted and discredited 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that linked the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. Wakefield combed his data, weeded out some children who didn't fit, and carefully included others. Further, his research was funded by lawyers acting for parents who were involved in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.
Like Dight, Laughlin, and other eugenicists, Bobby lies and misinterprets data to fit his predetermined and erroneous conclusions that vaccines cause autism. In one article Bobby "claimed that the amount of ethyl mercury in vaccines was 187 times greater than the recommended limit, when it was only 1.4 times greater." He cited one study to contend that tuna sandwiches laced with mercury being fed to two-month-old babies. There is nothing of the sort in the study.
Eugenics and the Decline of Public Health
Bobby's strange mix of false science will exacerbate such public health crises as the ongoing measles epidemic as confused parents deny their children life-saving vaccinations. Bobby Jr. hates vaccines. He referred to the Covid-19 vaccine as "the deadliest vaccine ever made." The vaccine saved perhaps as many as 20 million lives. Kennedy has said that he only drinks raw milk. Doing so puts people at risk of foodborne illness, since pasteurization kills off pathogens. Drinking it may increase the risk of the spread of bird flu. Bobby wants to remove fluoride from drinking water and claims bone cancer, IQ loss, thyroid disease, and other things may result from its use. This is untrue. Fluoride prevents cavities.
Kennedy's fabrications about autism, mercury, and other topics recall the misguided work of eugenicist Henry Goddard. Goodard was the director of research at New Jersey's Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys. He opened an early clinical laboratory to study intellectual disabilities. Tracing the lineage of one of his young patients and building her family tree back to the Revolutionary War, Goddard concluded that intelligence, sanity, and morality were hereditary, and every effort should be undertaken to keep the "feeble-minded" from procreating to eliminate them from the breeding pool. His study on the "Kallikaks" (1912) used touched-up photos to show the Kallikaks as inferior creatures.
Always lurking in the minds of this MAGA government are racist scientific ideas about breeding and innate intelligence; about the evils of immigrants; and about the need to revitalize science away from rigorous hypothesis and testing toward conspiracy, pseudoscience, and eugenics. Bobby's eugenics registry will succeed in stigmatizing people, especially young people, the way that eugenics surveyors stigmatized the "feeble-minded." Perhaps the registry will confirm what is well known: that increasing numbers of people identified with autism is largely to do with increased screening for and greater identification of people with autism. There is no epidemic. But, like a good eugenicist, he has determined his conclusions before the study begins.
Happy measles, everyone! Or, as Donald Trump says, he only hires the best people.
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