RFK Jr.leaves CDC in turmoil after “unilaterally” changing COVID vaccine guidance

“It’s a continued war against vaccines by our secretary of Health and Human Services,” one vaccine expert said.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sidestepped long-established scientific protocol last week and announced via social media that the nation’s leading health authority is dropping the COVID-19 vaccine from the list of recommended immunizations for healthy children and pregnant women.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had previously recommended vaccinations for anybody over 6 months of age, including pregnant women, until Kennedy “unilaterally” decided to change the guidance last week — a move that reportedly left CDC officials “blindsided.”

Under normal circumstances, the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) would convene a meeting to vote on any changes to the vaccine schedule or recommendations on who should get vaccinated, then provide that guidance to the CDC director — one of many key government positions that is currently vacant.

When Kennedy was going through the nomination process to become HHS secretary, he won key support from moderate Republican senators by pledging to work within the decades-old federal system for approval and use of vaccinations. It took him less than four months to break that promise by operating totally outside of the existing system that was created to ensure safety, accountability, and scientific rigor.

Speaking to The Washington Post, federal health officials at the CDC said they didn’t find out about the changes to current vaccine guidance until Kennedy posted the video announcement on social media. Kennedy appeared in the short clip alongside National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner Marty Makary, M.D., Ph.D.

This, apparently, is how hugely significant changes to federal health guidelines will be delivered in the Trump era. (Video Source: U.S.Department of Health and Human Services).

For the next several hours, CDC officials were reportedly left scrambling trying to figure out what Kennedy was doing and who the new guidelines even applied to, as the recommendations he announced on camera conflicted with the guidance on the agency’s own website. It wasn’t until fives hours after the social media post went up that Kennedy sent out a one-page “secretarial directive” to agency employees, but that did little to clear up the confusion — instead, it appears to have actually made things worse, as details contained in the written directive didn’t line up with what Kennedy said in the video, and even contradicted other information in the same document.

For example, according to The Post, the directive referred to both ”healthy children” and “all children,” the latter of which would include vulnerable groups at high risk of severe COVID complications.

In the video, Kennedy also said federal health officials had removed the previous recommendations from the agency website. Yet on the CDC’s website, the agency was still recommending (as late as Friday) an annual COVID vaccine for everyone 6 months and older.

An archived copy of the CDC‘s COVID immunization guidelines shows how the page appeared late last week, days after Secretary Kennedy said the existing recommendations had been removed from the website, when they clearly had not been. (Source: Caroline Orr Bueno/Screenshot).

The website was updated at some point late Friday or early Saturday, and a section was added announcing that the vaccine recommendations have changed — but when you scroll down, the recommendations are unchanged.

Another archived copy of the CDC‘s vaccination guidelines made one day later shows an announcement that the recommendations have been updated, yet further down on the page, the existing recommendations remain unchanged. (Source: Caroline Orr Bueno/Screenshot)

The same is true on the CDC’s vaccination website for children and adolescents, where the current guidance recommends that anyone aged 6 months and older get the shot. The website for pregnant women also still recommends an updated COVID shot for anyone who is breastfeeding, pregnant, or trying to become pregnant.

Kennedy’s statements in the video also contradict federal immunization guidance given just last week. In an announcement laying out plans to limit COVID shots to seniors and people with conditions that put them at higher risk of serious infections, FDA officials cited pregnancy as a risk factor for developing severe COVID-19. But just days later, Kennedy said the federal government will no longer be recommending the vaccine for pregnant women.

Besides causing confusion, the fumbled rollout of new vaccine guidance is likely to have major consequences for millions of people, since health insurance plans often look to CDC’s guidance and the recommendations from their independent panels of experts to guide their coverage decisions.

“They’ve made [the vaccine] much less insurable, and therefore this could make it much less available for people,” Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a prominent pediatric infectious-diseases physician, told The Washington Post.

“It’s a continued war against vaccines by our secretary of health and human services,” he added.

This unfolded just as news broke about the so-called “MAHA” (Make America Healthy Again) report containing errors that seem consistent with the use of artificial intelligence. The report, published by Kennedy’s MAHA Commission, contains numerous substantive problems, including citing studies that don’t exist.

I have personally found this type of error repeatedly in published papers, and every single time it has involved the use of AI by the author(s). While the use of AI in and of itself is not inherently bad, the fact that the nation's leading health authority – with all of the resources available to the federal government, including essentially boundless opportunities to convene expert panels of scientists from across the country and around the globe — chose to rely on AI rather than teams of actual scientists, and then failed to do even the most basic due diligence by checking their sources, suggests that HHS leadership lacks even the most basic understanding of science and the rigor involved in producing solid scientific research and using it to guide policy.

As the head of HHS, Kennedy has pushed for a number of scientifically unsound practices, such as insisting that federal health agencies include wording in their vaccine recommendations indicating that vaccination is a matter of personal choice — a directive that diverges sharply from how federal health agencies have historically talked about vaccination, which is as a public health issue, not a personal one.

These aren’t just differences of opinion, nor are they areas where the science is unclear or unsettled. These aren’t misunderstandings or even mistakes. These are the deliberate actions of an authoritarian administration waging war on one of the core building blocks of democracy because it challenges their ability to control the narrative about the state of the world.

Throughout history, science has consistently been among the first targets of authoritarian regimes, and it’s not hard to see why. Scientific inquiry, independent thought, and evidence-based policymaking pose direct threats to their control over truth and narrative. The very nature of science — which operates through processes such as peer review, international collaboration, and the free flow of ideas and information — contradicts the insular, top-down, and loyalty-based model of authoritarian rule.

From the Nazi party’s rejection of theoretical physics, which they referred to as “Jewish physics”, to Stalin’s promotion of Lysenkoism over genetics, the corrosion and dismissal of science by authoritarian regimes often comes at a great cost to society. For example, of the approximately 1,500 scientists who were expelled from Germany during Hitler’s rise to power, 15 of them went on to win Nobel Prizes for their work in other countries, one of them co-developed penicillin, and several were involved in key discoveries that revolutionized the field of nuclear physics and ultimately prevented Hitler’s Germany from being the first country to build an atomic bomb.

Although the war on science often manifests as disagreements over particular facts and issues like vaccine guidelines, ultimately it isn’t really about facts or evidence — it’s about monopolizing the authority to define reality. Just look at the debate we’re having right now: Rather than asking why Secretary Kennedy is unilaterally making decisions on behalf of multiple government agencies or why the administration is making any changes at all to the vaccine recommendations — especially at a time when a new and more contagious COVID variant is spreading around the world — we are being pushed into the weeds instead, trying to piece together little bits of information that may or may not be true, are almost contradictory, could very well be out of date, and are subject to being modified, rescinded, or memory-holed by the administration at any point. And consider how that information is being delivered to us: from different people working for different agencies; at any time of day or night; in videos posted on social media, interviews with the press, official government statements, and a little box added to a government website on a Friday evening. Sometimes there’s no information available at all; at other times, we find ourselves bombarded by a flood of information, with no rhyme or reason for the timing.

The chaos is intentional. This is how they seize control of the narrative.

There’s a big picture here that the administration doesn’t want you to see, so they’re hoping you’ll miss it if they keep your field of vision clouded by chaos and unpredictability. They want you to feel overwhelmed, confused, and exhausted, obecause it’s a lot harder to mount an effective response when you’re living in a state of constant cognitive overload. That’s the essence of cognitive warfare, and yes, that’s what you’re experiencing right now. While institutions like the CDC (and Columbia, Harvard, etc) may be the most prominent and public targets of the war on science, the real battle here is the one for control of your mind.