Trump Pushes Anti-Vaxxers as a New and Deadly Pandemic looms
More than 234,000 Americans died who could have lived had they been immunized against COVID-19, according to a 2022 analysis from the Peterson Center on Healthcare and Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF).
In total, the pandemic claimed the lives of more than 1.2 million Americans.
Experts say that the nation will likely face another pandemic and if it comes under trump’s rule and if trump has his way, the government’s response will largely be led by two people whose claims have been largely rejected by the public health community.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been at the forefront of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic but the agency would no longer make any vaccine recommendations, under a plan proposed by Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint intended to guide a second Trump administration.
The proposed leaders of the nation’s health programs include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a major anti-vaccination advocate and conspiracist, whose leadership would further undermine public trust in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. Trump has nominated Kennedy as director of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The other anti-vaccination candidate is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who was tabbed to run the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH awards funding grants to hundreds of thousands of researchers, oversees clinical trials on its Maryland campus and supports a variety of efforts to develop drugs and therapeutics. Bhattacharya holds a medical degree and PhD from Stanford, but has never held a senior government position, nor any role overseeing a large bureaucratic organization. At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bhattacharya called for efforts to battle the pandemic through “herd immunity,” a plan that was strongly rejected by much of the public health community.
Republicans, led by trump, have attacked the Biden administration’s COVID-19 pandemic health policies, including shutdowns and vaccine mandates.
Experts have warned that the next pandemic could be triggered by the H5N1 bird flu virus. The virus was detected in U.S. dairy cows for the first time this spring and quickly spread to more than 600 herds in 15 states. At least 55 people have been confirmed with H5N1 infections in the United States and all had contact with infected animals. Fears that the disease could spread between people were raised after two recent cases of a child in California and a teen in Canada. Neither had known contact with infected animals.
Kennedy has a long history of spreading misinformation as a vehement opponent of vaccines, with various claims that have been roundly disapproved.
In 2016, Kennedy called supporters of then presidential candidate trump, “belligerent idiots” and that some were “outright Nazis”. He called trump a “bully” and a “threat to democracy, comparing him to Adolf Hitler and George Wallace. In 2024, Kennedy briefly ran for president as a Democrat but dropped out of the race. After he was offered a post in a second trump administration, Kennedy endorsed trump for president at a campaign rally in Arizona.
Kennedy once wrote that coronavirus vaccines were a “crime against humanity.” That fact alone disqualifies Kennedy to run the gargantuan department with an annual $2 trillion budget. The agency also oversees the powerful Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Surgeon General’s office.
If Kennedy continues to make false claims about vaccine safety, it would undermine public trust in vaccines, with dire consequences. While there are some risks, vaccines have saved millions of lives, reducing disease and disability. A 2017 report found that immunization reduced the incidents of nine major diseases, including smallpox, measles and polio, by 90 percent or more.
If Kennedy’s junk science holds, he could move to limit vaccinations such as those for measles, mumps and rubella or hepatitis B. A CDC study found that routine childhood immunizations prevented 32 million hospitalizations and more than 1 million children’s deaths between 1994 and 2023.
The FDA with an annual budget of $7 billion, approves vaccines, drugs and devices; ensures the safety of the nation’s food supply; and regulates tobacco products. The CDC, with a budget of roughly $9 billion, was a key agency during the pandemic, offering recommendations on when Americans should wear masks, get vaccinated and engage in social distancing.
The surgeon general oversees the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, a team of more than 6,000 uniformed officers who deploy during disasters and disease outbreaks.
David Weldon, trump’s nominee for CDC chief, is a former congressman from Florida, and has been a strong critic of the CDC, especially its vaccine program. He also has led the long-debunked movement that claims that the preservative used in vaccines, thimerosol, is linked to autism. Thimerosal is mercury based and is not used in any of the COVID-19 vaccines. In 2010, the British journal, Lancet, retracted a controversial article that linked autism and MMR vaccines.
Weldon, as a congressman in the 2000s, sought to remove vaccine safety oversight from the CDC and transfer it to an independent agency, arguing that the CDC suffered from conflicts of interest.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, surgeon Martin Makary criticized the FDA, the agency which he would lead under trump. Makary faulted the FDA for considering overly harsh vaccination mandates and failing to consider alternative strategies, such as “natural immunity,” a position that has been rejected by many in the field. The FDA’s annual budget hovers around $7 billion.
Makary opposed broad COVID-19 vaccine mandates and, in late 2021 and early 2022, he supported non-pharmaceutical interventions meant to reduce transmission in schools and universities.
Trump also has nominated Janette Nesheiwat, a family and emergency medicine physician, to be the next U.S. surgeon general. Makary and Nesheiwat are both frequent Fox guests.
The thousands of unnecessary and avoidable pandemic deaths also could be laid at the feet of trump, who supported quackery to treat COVID-19, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga., Tucker Carlson and scores of other critics of the vaccines’ life-saving effectiveness.
It is not surprising that the 2022 analysis of COVID-19 deaths showed the broadest gaps in vaccinations by party. It was estimated that in 2021 the unvaccinated were three times as likely to be Republican as to be Democrats. During the period since September 2021, when the delta and omicron variants struck, it was consistently counties that voted for trump in 2020 that saw more per capita deaths.
Kennedy has claimed discredited links between vaccines and neurological disorders, including autism. He has been harshly critical of the CDC, which recommends the childhood vaccine schedule.
In 2015, Kennedy joined the Children’s Health Defense, formerly known as the World Mercury Project. The group is one of the country’s most prominent anti-vaccine groups. In 2017, Kennedy said the CDC is the “locus of most of the most serious problems with the vaccine program.” He called for a reexamination of whether there are financial conflicts around which vaccines get added to the agency’s childhood vaccine schedule.
The pandemic was a gold mine for Kennedy and the Children’s Health Defense, which received $23.5 million in contributions, grants and other revenue in 2022 alone. That was eight times what the group collected the year before the pandemic began.
Children’s Health Defense paid Kennedy more than $510,000 in 2022, double his 2019 salary. Del Bigtree, executive director of Consent Action Network, another anti-vaccination organization, was paid $284,000 in 2022, a 22 percent increase from 2019. Bigtree was communications director for Kennedy’s unsuccessful presidential campaign.
Children’s Health Defense worked closely with state attorneys general to protect off-label use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to prevent or treat covid. Both treatments were promoted by trump but were disavowed by health experts. The CDC has said there is no clinical data to support the use of ivermectin for flu and RSV. Merck, the manufacturer of ivermectin, said there is “no scientific basis” and “no meaningful evidence” to prescribe the drug for COVID.
Kennedy’s group helped fund a lawsuit filed against Maine physician Meryl Nass. The state medical board had alleged that Nass improperly prescribed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Her license has been suspended by the state medical board until April 2025.
Among its debunked claims, Children’s Health Defense alleged that exposure to certain chemicals and radiation has caused a wide range of conditions in many American children, including autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), food allergies, cancer, and autoimmune diseases. Children’s Health Defense has cited alleged dangers and campaigned against vaccines, fluoridation of drinking water, acetaminophen, aluminum and wireless communication.
Kennedy and Children’s Health Defense have falsely claimed that thimerosal in vaccines causes autism and other childhood ailments. Thimerosal has never been used in MMR, chickenpox, pneumococcal conjugate, or inactivated polio vaccines and in 2001 was removed from all other childhood (under 6 years old) vaccines except for a few versions of flu and hepatitis vaccines. No childhood vaccine now contains more than traces (1 microgram or less) of thimerosal, except for flu, which is also available without thimerosal in the U.S.
In April 2015, Kennedy promoted a film, “Trace Amounts,” which made the discredited claim of a link between autism and mercury in vaccinations. He called the increased cases of autism, an “autism epidemic” and a “holocaust.”
In February 2021, Kennedy’s Instagram account was deleted “for repeatedly sharing debunked claims” about COVID-19 vaccines. The following month, the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified Kennedy as one of 12 people responsible for up to 65 percent of anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter.
In June 2005, Kennedy wrote an article, “Deadly Immunity”, that ran in Rolling Stone and Salon.com and alleged a government conspiracy to conceal a connection between thimerosal and childhood neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism. Salon later issued five corrections of factual errors. Six years later Salon.com retracted the entire article.
Kennedy said that he began having severe short- and long-term memory loss and mental fog in 2010. In a 2012 divorce court deposition, he attributed neurological issues to “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”, in addition to mercury poisoning from eating large quantities of tuna.
Bhattacharya was described as “fringe” by the head of the NIH in October 2020 for being one of the authors of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” which said that it was time for coronavirus lockdowns to end. Bhattacharya has been supported by many who are skeptical of the strategies used during the COVID-19 pandemic. Among his supporters are Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; Silicon Valley billionaire and conservative megadonor Peter Thiel; billionaire trump advisor, Elon Musk, who claims Twitter suppressed Bhattacharya’s views before Musk bought the platform; and right wing podcaster Joe Rogan.
Bhattacharya said the NIH was wrong not to support alternative perspectives and that director Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, was too powerful.
Bhattacharya and a Stanford University colleague, Dr. Scott W. Atlas, began to study the fiscal and cultural impacts of fighting the pandemic. Atlas, who was later trump’s pandemic adviser, joined with Bhattacharya and a third author to write the so-called Great Barrington Declaration. The treatise called for allowing the coronavirus to spread naturally in order to achieve herd immunity. Herd immunity is the point at which enough people have been infected to stall transmission of the pathogen.
The goal of the declaration is to allow people who are not considered vulnerable to immediately resume life as normal” while those at high risk are protected from infection. It advocated for younger people to return to jobs, schools, shops and restaurants. Older more susceptible people would remain quarantined, receiving services like grocery deliveries and medical care.
The idea is that eventually so many younger people will have been exposed, and should have developed some immunity, that the virus will not be able to maintain its hold on the communities.
The declaration was crafted at a gathering hosted in Great Barrington, Mass., by the American Institute for Economic Research, think tank whose partners included the right wing, Charles Koch Institute.
Most experts believe some lockdowns are necessary but Bhattacharya and his supporters say that governments should not have imposed any lockdowns and should not have instituted coronavirus testing and contact-tracing. Instead, the groups says that trillions of dollars in economic aid approved by Congress should have been spent on programs to protect those at highest risk of illness and death.
The declaration does not explain how the strategy would work in practice. Fauci dismissed the declaration as unscientific, dangerous and “total nonsense.” Others have called it unethical, particularly for multigenerational families and communities of color.
The strategy includes keeping older people cloistered, with regular testing to detect possible outbreaks in nursing homes, and with groceries and other necessities delivered to anyone over 60 sheltering at home. Alternately, older people might move to other facilities for isolation or quarantine.
There would be no widespread surveillance for the coronavirus. People would be given information about testing, with an emphasis on those who have symptoms — but when and how to get tested, and whether to isolate if infected, would be left up to individuals.
A group of 80 experts published their own manifesto which said the Great Barrington approach would endanger people with have underlying conditions that put them at high risk from severe COVID-19. The group said that at least one-third of Americans have such underlying conditions and that as many as a half-million people could die under the Barrington scenario.
The risk of death from Covid-19 rises sharply with age, but about 37 percent of adults in America also are at significant risk because of obesity, diabetes or other underlying conditions.
Health-care leaders also warned that herd immunity — when a population is protected from an infectious disease through a combination of immunity from prior infections and vaccines — would be difficult to quickly achieve, given that vaccines were still months from being widely available.
“If followed, the recommendations in the Great Barrington Declaration would haphazardly and unnecessarily sacrifice lives,” 20 public health organizations wrote in a statement warning about the risk of widespread infections. “The declaration is not a strategy, it is a political statement.”
The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) mission is to “[educate] people on the value of personal freedom, free enterprise, property rights, limited government, and sound money.”
The organization has promoted climate change denial and has funded research on the comparative benefits that sweatshops supplying multinationals bring to the people working in them. Critics said the AIER has supported plans to neutralize the CDC and favors abolishing other federal bureaucracies, such as the Federal Reserve and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Kennedy’s former campaign spokesman Del Bigtree, who also has no medical training, produced the film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, based on the discredited opinions of British researcher Andrew Wakefield, and alleges an unsubstantiated connection between vaccines and autism.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bigtree propagated conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus and COVID vaccines, and advocated that his audience ignore the advice of health authorities.
Bigtree is the chief executive of the anti-vaccination group Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN). His salary in 2020 was $221,000. ICAN claims that government officials collude with the pharmaceutical industry to cover up harms from vaccines. Bigtree accused former National Institutes of Health director Anthony Fauci of leading a cabal of conspirators to vaccinate the world under false pretenses.
By 2023, Bigtree was calling for the imprisonment of public health officials and executives of pharmaceutical companies for favoring vaccinations against COVID-19 over the use of ineffective drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
In October 2020, Bigtree told anti-vaccination activists that the new COVID vaccines may cause diabetes, lupus and other autoimmune diseases. Bigtree spoke at the January 6, 2021, pro-trump rally preceding the riot by trump supporters at the Capitol. Bigtree hosts a regular stream webcast and frequently repeats anti-vaccination messages. The webcast is produced by ICAN and often features Kennedy.
In July 2020, YouTube closed Bigtree’s account and channel for violation of its community standards against pandemic misinformation, and Facebook removed selected videos from Bigtree’s account. Bigtree was among those who cheered for the nomination of Weldon as CDC director.
Weldon, a medical doctor, represented a Florida district in Congress from 1995 to 2009. He attracted national attention for his opposition to a call to remove feeding tubes and ending the life of Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged Florida woman. The issue attracted national attention and led Weldon to claim that removing the feeding tubes was a “grave injustice.” Weldon petitioned the woman’s family to personally review her case. Schiavo’s husband said his wife would not have wanted to be kept alive artificially.
Weldon failed in a political comeback this year, losing his quest for a seat in the Florida House. He campaigned on his “vaccine safety” record that championed the long-debunked notion that thimerosal, a vaccine preservative, is linked to autism. During his time in Congress, Weldon raised concerns about the safety of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines, as well as the safety of Gardasil, the vaccine that protects against the papillomavirus virus.
Nesheiwat, a family medicine doctor, is the sister-in-law of Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., trump’s nominee as national security advisor. Nesheiwat’s sister, Julia Nesheiwat, served as homeland security adviser in the first trump administration.
Her views contrast with Kennedy’s as she has defended vaccines that Kennedy has criticize. In February 2023, she said the MMR vaccine is “phenomenal in preventing disease and severe deadly or debilitating complications like blindness, deafness, inflammation of the brain.”
She has repeatedly praised Peter Hotez, a Texas scientist who has been vociferous in condemning Kennedy and vaccine disinformation.
Nesheiwat is a medical director at CityMD, a network of more than 150 urgent care centers in New York and New Jersey. In 2018, CityMD agreed to pay Medicare $6.6 million for billing fraud. The company also paid New York state another $883,000 to settle false claims allegations.
Nesheiwat also sells an a-natural, vitamin regimen she calls BC Boost, which includes high doses of B12 and C vitamins.
Makary, trump’s pick for the Food and Drug Administration, is a surgeon at Johns Hopkins University medical center in Baltimore, Md. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Makary advocated for universal masking and recommended vaccines for adults. He opposed the CDC’s broad vaccination mandates and the CDC’s aversion to alternative strategies, such as the protections conferred by infections, also known as “natural immunity.”
In February 2020, Makary said the U.S. the threat of COVID-19 must be taken seriously and that people should stop all non-essential travel. Makary called for a national lockdown to help slow the spread of the virus and enable the healthcare system to respond. In May 2020, Makary advocated for universal masking in an effort to enable businesses and schools to re-open to minimize economic and educational damage.
Makary drew criticism for his February 2021 contention that “at the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April [2021], allowing Americans to resume normal life.” The virus instead continued for months, particularly when its omicron variant emerged in November 2021 and led to record-high hospitalizations linked to the virus.
Makary was named one of the most influential people in healthcare by HealthLeader magazine in 2013. In 2018, Makary was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.