Over the past few weeks, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made numerous steps towards utterly ruining the established healthcare system in America. He has removed the CDC Director, put in a temporary CDC Director who has no medical background, limited who is able to get the COVID-19 vaccine and has replaced his CDC independent vaccine advisory panel members with people who have the same views as him.
Kennedy announced on Aug. 27 who is eligible to get the COVID-19 vaccine. He limited the recipients of the vaccine to only anyone over the age of 65 or anyone at risk of severe illness due to other health issues. Originally, it had been available to anyone over the age of six months.
The CDC also dropped all guidelines that called for all healthy pregnant women to get routinely vaccinated, although due to being considered at risk, they can still receive the COVID-19 vaccine. But the best way to keep newborn babies safe, especially since they are at such high risk, is to vaccinate women during pregnancy in order to pass antibodies to the fetus.
People who are not officially eligible for the vaccines may still get them off-label through a doctor’s prescription. But the vaccine can cost $140 or more without insurance, getting an appointment can take months and doctors can choose whether they will prescribe it.
Dr. Susan Monarez, who was the director of US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was removed from her position on Aug. 27. She had only been in the position since July 31.
Monarez had a dispute with Kennedy over the vaccine policy and refused to fire multiple CDC leaders: Dr. Debra Houry, the agency’s chief medical officer and deputy director of programs and science; Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; and Dr. Dan Jernigan, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. This angered Kennedy and happened right before Monarez’s removal.
Kennedy overstepped his authority — legally only the White House can fire her. Monarez’s attorneys, Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell, rejected the removal from her position.
“Dr. Monarez has neither resigned nor received notification from the White House that she has been fired, and as a person of integrity and devoted to science, she will not resign,” the pair said in a post on X, formally known as Twitter.
But shortly after Monarez’s refusal, the White House fired back by formally removing her from the position.
After hearing the news about this, four high level senior agency officials resigned from the CDC. These individuals included Dr. Debra Houry, the chief medical officer; Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; and Dr. Jen Layden, director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology.
“I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health….I am not sure who the Secretary is listening to, but it is quite certainly not to us,” Daskalakis said in his resignation letter on X, formally known as Twitter.
The White House picked a temporary replacement for Monarez, choosing Kennedy’s HHS Deputy, Jim O’Neill. He was a biotech investor and speechwriter for the health department during the George W. Bush administration. He has no training in medicine or infectious disease science, unlike Monarez who has a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology.
O’Neill can only serve as an interim leader of the CDC until an official director is chosen. This means that he will remain temporarily, but is still allowed to function as a normal director.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he voiced support for treatments that were not backed up by any scientific evidence. These consisted of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and vitamin D. He also posted numerous conspiracy theories about the virus on social media, such as that the #COVID symbol was chosen to “conceal the origin of the virus.”
Kennedy is also appointing seven members to the new CDC independent vaccine advisory panel. In June, Kennedy fired all 17 people who had originally been on the panel, and is now replacing them with people who share his similar views. Multiple of these members have been confirmed to share the same skepticism of the COVID-19 vaccine and the pharmaceutical industry. The list includes at least three people who have questioned the safety of messenger RNA vaccines against the coronavirus.
Some of the members include Dr. Raymond Pollak, a semiretired transplant surgeon with a background in immunology; Dr. Joseph Fraiman, an emergency medicine specialist; Dr. John Gaitanis, a pediatric neurologist; Catherine Stein, an epidemiology professor; Hillary Blackburn, a pharmacist; and Dr. Evelyn Griffin, an OB-GYN.
The panel will meet on Sept. 18 and 19 to vote on the recommendations for the COVID-19 vaccine and other immunizations.
Impact
Between the CDC being led by someone who isn’t a trained professional, a panel aligning with Kennedy’s views and the lack of the vaccines, America’s healthcare is going to continue on its plummet.
On top of that, even the leader of the HHS does not have any medical background. According to the HHS website, Kennedy has spent his entire career in public service, becoming an attorney and an environmentalist. Nowhere in his career does he specialize in medicine or any related field. So now both the temporary CDC director and the HHS Secretary both do not have any medical background. In addition, Kennedy has made the CDC so unbearable that he made some of the most important directors and officers leave, driving our healthcare further into the ground.
There has recently been a surge of COVID-19 cases, causing many children to be hospitalized, claiming more than 100 lives every week. In the past two weeks, there has been a 9.4% increase in positive cases and a 19.1% increase in emergency department visits. By limiting the amount of access healthy kids and young adults have to getting the vaccine, these numbers will only get worse with the expected winter surge of cases.
As of Dec. 31, 2023, 82% of Americans had gotten at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and 36% had completed the entire series and gotten at least one booster.
Although over ⅘ of the U.S. population has received at least one vaccine, the protections will eventually dwindle and another vaccine will need to be administered.
A research study from the National Institutes of Health found that COVID-19 vaccines’ protection dwindles over time due to its failure to develop strong antibody-producing cells in the bone marrow. Even if a large percentage of the population already has the COVID-19 vaccine, it will eventually not protect the population from contracting the illness or becoming deathly ill due to the need to get the shot every so often.
Even the CDC stated on their website that in about 65% of children that were 9 months to 4 years, protection from the coronavirus started to decrease over time in the first 2 months after vaccination. Then about 70% of children that were 5 to 17 years old had protection decrease over time in the first 2 months after vaccination. After four to six months, the vaccines reduced risk by about 50%.
Now, with the amount of vaccines available limited, these protections will continue to get less and less effective. Eventually, they will wear off and people will be due for a new one. But only people who are sick, over 65, or are able to convince their doctor to prescribe it to them can receive the vaccine. This is all because a person who is untrained in the medical field has wrongfully been given a position of power.
“It’s time for the president to fire the HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr … This secretary peddling conspiracy theories about vaccines threatens to unleash disease that otherwise would have been eradicated by vaccines we all took and that our children have taken,” said Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear in a video on his Instagram.
