He has now hijacked the CDC website -- and the CDC itself.
Whooping cough cases are on the rise, with Kentucky reporting its third infant death since the start of the year.
The Kentucky Department for Public Health reported in a Nov. 24 notice that the "highly contagious" respiratory infection, also known as pertussis, has become more prevalent in communities across the U.S. "in part due to declining vaccination rates."
"KDPH confirmed none of the infants who died of pertussis in Kentucky over the past 12 months had been vaccinated, nor had their mothers," the department said in a statement. "Kentucky’s three infant deaths from whooping cough are the commonwealth’s first whooping cough deaths reported since 2018."
Erin Garcia de Jesús at Science News:
A measles outbreak in Canada began in October 2024. Continuous transmission more than a year later signifies that the virus is no longer eliminated, the Public Health Agency of Canada announced November 10.
Now, the United States has until January 20, 2026 — one year after an outbreak began in West Texas — to bring measles cases under control without losing its elimination status. In 2025, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has documented 1,753 measles cases and three deaths across 42 states. More than 90 percent of those cases were in people who were not vaccinated.
Measles has been eliminated from the United States since 2000, and such a reversal would be “a source of great embarrassment,” Schaffner says. “To those of us who were involved early on in demonstrating that measles could be eliminated from large land areas, to have to seemingly turn back the clock and start all over in trying to convince parents that vaccinating their children is very, very important is very disheartening.”
Two weeks ago, by inserting what must be the most notorious asterisk in modern public health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention caveated its long-standing position that vaccines do not cause autism. Under the direction of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a C.D.C. web page now contends that this is “not an evidence-based claim” and that research linking vaccines to autism has been “ignored by health authorities.” The fact that the original statement remains at all is due to an agreement with Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician and the chair of the Senate health committee, who disregarded decades of Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism to advance his confirmation after extracting a set of flimsy commitments that Kennedy is now betraying. The Autism Science Foundation said that it is “appalled” by the C.D.C.’s new stance; the American Medical Association warned of “dangerous consequences.”
The Department of Health and Human Services maintains that it is hewing to “gold standard, evidence-based science”—a piece of doublespeak so thick that it might unsettle Orwell. Discounting dozens of rigorous studies that have analyzed millions of patients and failed to connect vaccines to autism, the C.D.C. website claims that about half of parents of children with autism believe vaccines contributed to that autism. It cited a decades-old paper that surveyed a few dozen parents who strongly embraced alternative medicine, at two private practices in the Northeast. The web page points out that autism rates have risen in recent decades and so has the number of infant vaccinations—an observation that might also be made about prestige TV shows and pumpkin-spice lattes. The H.H.S. will now provide “appropriate funding” for studies on vaccines and autism, and last week it appointed a physician with a history of vaccine skepticism as the second-in-command at the C.D.C. The episode puts to rest any doubts about whether Americans can still trust information from the nation’s top health agency.
