Archive | September, 2025

Reportedly, Mark Blaxill is a CDC “Senior Advisor”. Remember, this is not The Onion.

28 Sep

How does one recapture trust in the public health system? I can tell you one way to make it worse. Put Mark Baxill to work at the CDC. Mr. Blaxill is a long time anti-vaccine activist who has done a lot of harm promoting the “vaccines cause autism” lie. We on this blog have been countering Mr. Blaxill’s misinformation for about two decades now.

According to Alt CDC, Mr. Blaxill now is in the Office of the Director. Once again: this is not The Onion. This is not April Fool’s day. This is life under Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy. Meritocracy is not a thing anymore. Fealty to the “vaccines are bad” campaign is. I’m open to counter arguments by those who feel Mr. Blaxill earned a spot at CDC. Go ahead. Point to his books and his papers, his writing on the Age of Autism blog and convince me he has the chops and, mostly, the integrity to serve as a public health “consultant” in what was once the premier public health agency in the world. I’m listening.

I don’t see Mr. Blaxill when I do a search on the HHS employee directory. But I am told he is a “senior advisor/consultant” reporting to Matt Buzzeli. Mr. Buzzelli is a political appointee, apparently assigned to CDC after the recent purge of qualified public health officials at CDC. So we have Mark Blaxill who, ignoring his anti-vaccine activism, is a businessman, and an apparently failed politician (he created his own political party which appears to have gone nowhere, and had a failed bid for a congressional seat). And he works for an attorney who “worked with the Family Office of Norm Miller to support the development of Interstate Batteries’ emerging retail and commercial operation.”

We’ve replaced people who were nonpolitical experts in their fields with these gentlemen. Feeling more confident about the CDC? Neither am I.

By Matt Carey

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Want the Nobel Prize for Warp Speed, Mr. Trump? Fire Kennedy.

6 Sep

The same people who might value your efforts with Operation Warp Speed will also be able to do the simple math in their heads that says Mr. Kennedy’s approach is going to kill people.

Mr. Trump, there is a lot of chatter about you wanting the Nobel Peace Prize. OK, I know you’ve publicly stated you don’t want it, but just in case that’s just you being modest, let’s assume you actually do.

Even Robert Kennedy, a man with few to no good words to offer on vaccines, stated publicly that he believes you should get the Prize. Which may make you think, “good guy, Bobby. He’s going to help me get that Prize!”

Well…not so much. You may be thinking that I’ll point out the fact that Mr. Kennedy, as Senator Cassidy pointed out, says things like, “the vaccine killed more people than COVID”. You may be thinking that I’ll point out that he is likely getting people to generate “gold-standard science” that will claim the vaccine doesn’t work and kills people. Which he probably is doing.

Nope. Here’s an even bigger point I want to make: Mr. Kennedy’s policies are taking America back to a time when children die of vaccine preventable diseases. For example, we just had a large outbreak of measles, and Mr. Kennedy’s response was so lackluster that it certainly was a factor in how long it lasted. Two American children died. Needlessly. I called that outbreak “large”. It is nothing compared to what is in store for America under Mr. Kennedy’s leadership. Florida is moving to removing vaccine mandates for schoolchildren. That will lead to larger outbreaks. And not just among children. Florida is a state with a large retiree population.

The same people who might value your efforts with Operation Warp Speed will also be able to do the simple math in their heads that says Mr. Kennedy’s approach is going to kill people.

My guess is that if Mr. Kennedy is already telling you in private: “Solving the ‘autism epidemic’ will be even bigger than Operation Warp Speed. They will have to give you the Nobel then.” He even has ‘studies’ by some really bad and unethical people he can use to support his idea that vaccines are the cause. And, no doubt, more are on the way from David Geier and others. This is one of those times you need advisors who are both competent and free to speak their mind. People who actually understand science which, frankly, Mr. Kennedy does not. Because he is playing with people’s lives. Children’s lives. And that’s a lot more important than the Nobel Prize.

I am the parent of a young autistic adult. My kid grew up during the time Mr. Kennedy has been running his campaign against vaccines. I am a scientist. A researcher. Not in medicine, but I understand the studies. Focus on that last–not in medicine. I have no conflicts of interest other than this topic is very important to me. I don’t want children to die because Mr. Kennedy used my kid as a weapon against vaccines. I just don’t want children to die needlessly. I have been speaking out to counter Mr. Kennedy for 20 years because I saw the danger he posed.

Mr. Trump, I think you don’t want children to die and that is probably a bigger motivation than the Prize. But, do the simple math. Anyone on the Peace Prize Committee who values public health to the point of considering you for your efforts with the COVID vaccine program will see the dangers your administration–with Robert Kennedy running HHS–poses.

Do it for the children. Do it for yourself. Fire Robert Kennedy.

By Matt Carey

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For Robert Kennedy “Restoring Trust” is not a goal. It’s a weapon.

3 Sep

We pay for the CDC. It isn’t there to support Mr. Kennedy’s agenda. It’s there to generate good information that Mr. Kennedy can use or, sadly, not use. He can’t ask them to sign off on dangerous vaccine policy and then cry “restore trust” to excuse firing the trusted experts who are, in his own words, world-leading experts who drive the science that serves us all.

Robert Kennedy (aka RFK Jr.) is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services*. He came to this job after his failed run for the office of President, but if you follow his social media you know: he still sounds like someone campaigning.

He loves slogans. Of course he has his “MAHA” (Make America Healthy Again) which not only brands his movement, but allows him to flatter Mr. Trump at the same time. Two more slogans are very important to him and are what I will focus on today: “Restoring Public Trust” and “Gold-Standard Science”. On first glance, they sound like good aspirational goals. But “restoring” public trust is a slam, where Mr. Kennedy makes people accept his premise that people don’t trust the CDC. Likewise, “Gold-Standard” science is a way of saying that results produced before his tenure are low quality.

Allow me to discuss Mr. Kennedy’s failure this last week with the CDC to highlight his use of “Public Trust” as a weapon.

What failure am I thinking of? Losing much of CDC’s leadership through mismanagement. That failure. Last week, Mr. Kennedy tried to pressure the head of the CDC into rubber-stamping his agenda on vaccines. The CDC Director, Dr. Susan Monarez, not only refused to approve Mr. Kennedy’s anything-but-gold-standard vaccine policy, she also refused to recognize Mr. Kennedy’s authority to fire her (Kennedy Sought to Fire C.D.C. Director Over Vaccine Policy) Eventually she was fired by the President.

At least four other senior CDC officials resigned over Mr. Kennedy’s actions with Dr. Monarez (CDC director is out after less than a month; other agency leaders resign). The list includes Dr. Debra Houry, the agency’s deputy director; Dr. Daniel Jernigan, head of the agency’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, head of its National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; and Dr. Jennifer Layden, director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology.

Losing so much expertise in one week in a huge blow to America. We all rely upon the CDC. We rely on expertise, experience and a nonpolitical agency. Make no mistake, all this is a huge blow to Mr. Kennedy. He not only lost experienced leaders who could provide him with quality information (which, he appears to be too arrogant to ask for), but also the reputation of the CDC and these staff. Mr. Kennedy wouldn’t have wouldn’t have pressured Dr. Monarez to rubber-stamp his policy if he didn’t want the credibility of the CDC behind his action.

If this wasn’t bad enough for Mr Kennedy’s claim to be restoring trust, nine (nine!) former CDC directors wrote a scathing (to use the New York Post’s word) editorial spelling out how dangerous Mr. Kennedy’s actions are: We Ran the CDC: RFK Jr. Is Endangering Every American’s Health. If it had been one, or only democrats, perhaps Mr. Kennedy could shrug this off. But it was nine former heads of the CDC. People who know how CDC works and know how important it is.

Clearly it was time for damage control. Mr. Kennedy took to the Wall Street Journal to defend himself. Instead of acknowledging that he severely damaged trust in the CDC, he spun his actions as “restoring public trust” (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: We’re Restoring Public Trust in the CDC). Of course, to “restore trust”. Mr. Kennedy states “First, the CDC must restore public trust—and that restoration has begun.” No, really, it hasn’t. When nine former CDC directors come out and not just disagree with you, but state that you are “endangering every American’s health”, you can’t claim to be restoring public trust.

Focus on how Mr. Kennedy uses “restoring trust”. “Restoring trust” isn’t a goal. It’s a weapon. Stand up for the health of Americans? You are out, because we need to “restore trust”. It’s an excuse. “Did I try to ram through a vaccine policy so dangerous that over a dozen leaders, past and present, of CDC protested? No! I was ‘restoring trust'”.

The final sentence of Mr. Kennedy’s opinion piece is a slam to the good people who stood up and resigned. Mr. Kennedy doesn’t have the guts to directly call them out, instead he simply states:

It won’t stop until America’s public-health institutions again serve the people with transparency, honesty and integrity.

Yep. Those good people were part of a system that doesn’t serve with “transparency, honesty and integrity”. As opposed to Mr. Kennedy, who fired most of the FOIA staff (so much for transparency) and, frankly has rarely shown integrity and honesty in the 20 years I’ve known of him.

Consider that just a few weeks ago, Mr. Kennedy responded to the shooting at the CDC campus by praising the very people he now accuses of lacking integrity and honesty and the “public’s trust”. How did he characterize the people who work at CDC then**?

Whether diseases start at home or abroad, are curable or preventable, chronic or acute, or from human activity or deliberate attack, CDC’s world-leading experts protect lives and livelihoods, national security and the U.S. economy by providing timely, commonsense information, and rapidly identifying and responding to diseases, including outbreaks and illnesses. CDC drives science, public health research, and data innovation in communities across the country by investing in local initiatives to protect everyone’s health.

Yes. In a couple of weeks, they went from “world-leading experts” who “drive science” to people who lack “transparency, honesty and integrity”.

Mr. Kennedy is a politician. He’s not a doctor or a health expert. As a researcher who has followed Mr. Kennedy for 20 years, I can say he is not in any way the expert on reading science that he claims to be. He’s a politician. One week it serves him to praise CDC and the people there. The next he needs to slam them to excuse his own inexcusable behavior.

We pay for the CDC. It isn’t there to support Mr. Kennedy’s agenda. It’s there to generate good information that Mr. Kennedy can use or, sadly, not use. He can’t ask them to sign off on dangerous vaccine policy and then cry “restore trust” to excuse firing the trusted experts who are, in his own words, world-leading experts who drive the science that serves us all.

By Matt Carey

*It’s been six months, but it is still mind boggling to read, much less type, that sentence. After 20 years of following Mr. Kennedy’s action, much of that chronicled on this blog, it would be hard to imagine someone worse for the job that Mr. Kennedy.

** One might argue that since Mr. Kennedy didn’t sign that statement, these aren’t his words. He’s the Secretary of HHS. The quote is from a “Statement from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services“. If one wants to argue whether these are his words or just words he approved of, go ahead with the semantics. The end result is the same.

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