📰 RFK Jr. Shakes Up U.S. Vaccine Policy: Childhood Immunizations Under Review

In a stunning overhaul of America’s vaccine advisory structure, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has purged and replaced the CDC’s immunization panel — and ordered a full review of the childhood vaccine schedule, including hepatitis B shots given at birth.

💭 “Vaccines are not all good or bad. We will use evidence-based medicine.”

— Martin Kulldorff, new ACIP Chair and longtime vaccine critic

📊 What’s Changing
– ACIP, the panel guiding U.S. vaccine policy, now includes former anti-vaccine activists
– A new working group will reassess long-standing childhood immunization schedules
– The hepatitis B vaccine — given to newborns — is a primary target of reevaluation
– Thimerosal, long debunked as a health risk, is back on the table for debate

💼 Institutional Fallout
– Former CDC experts have resigned in protest, citing a collapse of scientific standards
– Lyn Redwood, ex-head of Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense, is now at the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Office
– Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are raising concerns about bias and qualifications
– One newly appointed ACIP member, Dr. Michael Ross, resigned hours before the first meeting

🤔 When a vaccine skeptic takes control of national immunization policy, what happens to science — and to trust?

#RFKJr #Vaccines #PublicHealth #CDC #ACIP #Immunization

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Trump Fires His Way to Absolute Power

Seven months into his return, Trump has turned Washington into an HR experiment in authoritarianism. This week alone, he fired a Federal Reserve governor, the CDC director, and a rail regulator — all positions historically shielded from presidential whims. His rationale? Loyalty first, expertise last.

💭 “We will no longer have an administrative state in which you have decision makers who are insulated from naked political pressure,”

warned Fordham law professor Jane Manners.

📊 The fallout:
• Federal Reserve: Lisa Cook ousted on dubious fraud claims. Trump openly bragged he’ll soon control rate decisions.
• CDC: Susan Monarez pushed out after resisting Trump’s vaccine policy tweaks.
• Rail regulator: Robert Primus axed over social posts critical of Trump.
• The message: Institutions once designed to outlast politics are now expected to function like Trump Org subsidiaries.

💼 Trump isn’t hiding it — he’s boasting. “I have the right to do anything I want,” he said this week, floating troop deployments to Chicago while bullying Cracker Barrel into killing a logo redesign. Meanwhile, Congress is mute, the Supreme Court nods along, and markets are left guessing whether monetary policy now depends on Trump’s Twitter feed.

🤔 If the Fed, the CDC, and regulators fall to presidential purges, what’s left of “independent” America? Or is the new rule simple: agencies exist only until they stop clapping?

#Trump #USA #Fed #CDC #power #authoritarianism

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

🏥 Trump Picks a Mainstream Face for the CDC

Donald Trump has formally named Erica Schwartz to lead the CDC. The choice signals a turn away from vaccine politics and toward someone who can look credible to the public after months of turmoil inside the agency.

Schwartz is not coming in to sell a new ideology. She is coming in to clean up a mess. The CDC has been battered by political fights, legal challenges, staff losses, and Kennedy’s unpopular vaccine agenda, and the agency now needs basic authority more than another round of messaging theater.

That is a political reversal, even if the White House will not say it that way. The administration is trying to blunt the damage before the midterms, calm the public-health establishment, and stop the CDC from looking like a culture war machine with a lab coat on.

Schwartz will still have a hard job. She would be taking over an agency where trust has eroded, staff morale is badly damaged, and vaccine policy has become a battlefield instead of a public health tool. The real test is whether she can restore some discipline before the next crisis arrives.

#cdc #trump #health #vaccines #kennedy #publichealth

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

The CDC’s Managed Decline

The CDC has gone from 9,279 employees in March 2025 to 6,683 in May 2026: a 28 percent fall in 14 months.

Washington did not merely cut a public-health agency. It kept the agency’s logo, stripped out its capacity and placed political supervision where scientific judgment used to sit.

The first Trump administration cuts removed 18 percent of the workforce. Retirements, resignations and continuing hiring limits pushed the loss further.

The National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion fell from 968 employees to 501, a 48 percent reduction.

Centers responsible for emerging and zoonotic diseases, respiratory disease, HIV and sexually transmitted infections, workplace safety and injury prevention all lost staff.

The management structure followed the same logic. Of the 11 CDC center directors in place in March 2025, only one remained by September 2026, according to the New York Times.

Acting directors fill positions that once belonged to senior public-health leaders. The agency has deployed roughly 100 staff members to the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of Congo. During the 2014 West Africa outbreak, it sent about 2,000.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s political appointees now review communications and direct scientists toward projects outside ordinary CDC practice.

A no-bid contract worth $362,000 went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to examine whether vaccination during pregnancy causes autism, using money from a program that supplies free vaccines to roughly half of U.S. children. The premise has been rejected by numerous studies.

The consequence is visible before the next emergency arrives. State and local health departments once received answers from CDC grant officers in less than a day.

The response time has risen to more than 10 days after staffing cuts left three project officers where there had been 20.

Vaccine advisers have not met since December because of litigation, and the agency has not issued updated respiratory-vaccine recommendations for the coming season.

Kennedy talks about rebuilding trust in public health while the institution that produces public-health guidance is hollowed out, politically screened and sent to investigate his preferred theories.

That is not a reform program. It is a controlled demolition with a wellness slogan.

#CDC #PublicHealth #RFKJr #UnitedStates

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸