The Cost of Lies: Part I
A two-part series on past and the current unprecedented CDC turmoil, what it means for US public health, and why RFK Jr. should resign
Image from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (US CDC) Public Health Image Library
In her Op-Ed piece published yesterday, September 4th, 2025, 29-day US CDC director Dr. Susan Monarez wrote:
During my first week as CDC director, a gunman opened fire on our Atlanta headquarters on Aug. 8. Investigators recovered more than 500 shell casings at the scene and more than 180 rounds struck CDC campus buildings. Officer David Rose was killed.
Investigators found documents in which the gunman expressed his discontent with Covid [sic] vaccines, indicating his actions were driven by vaccine distrust. Amid the trauma, hundreds of CDC employees told me the same thing: We need to take immediate steps to rebuild public trust. That’s the CDC I know: service before self.
Just as we began to recover, I was confronted with another challenge—pressure to compromise science itself.
Dr. Monarez reveals in the Op-Ed that, in Washington meeting requested by her boss, US Health and Human Services (US HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. directed her to preapprove the recommendations of CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). In early June, Kennedy removed all 17 sitting members of the panel, stating in his own Op-Ed that ACIP was “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest,” and that “[f]ew committee members completed full conflict-of-interest forms—97% had omissions.”
This statement is contrary to a recent analysis of COIs on federal vaccine committees, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) by researchers from University of Southern California (USC) and the Center for Science in the Public Interest. On average, 6.2% of CDC ACIP members have reported a COI at any given meeting since 2016. An even lower percentage was reported among members of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA’s) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), which is the committee that recommends whether vaccines should be approved by the FDA — only 1.9% of members reported COIs at any given meeting since 2016. A co-author of the letter, Peter Lure, MD, MPH, a former FDA commissioner, said in a USC press release: "Secretary Kennedy is right that conflict of interest is an important issue, but he is wrong that it is present at substantial levels on HHS vaccine advisory committees.” For those reading who do not have full access to JAMA, University of Minnesota’s Center for Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) provides a good overview of the authors’ methods here.
Notably, the analysis included COIs that may not have even met the level of COI that is defined by ACIP or CDC, including COIs related to research support from CDC or National Institutes of Health (NIH), which holds intellectual property rights to the vaccines it licenses. The most frequently reported COI was research support at 10.1%. Personal income from vaccine makers accounted for less than 1% of COIs among ACIP members since 2016. The average rates of recusal were 1.3% and 7.4% for CDC ACIP and FDA VRBPAC, respectively.
Overall, significant progress has been made regarding COIs on vaccine committees since the early 2000s, due in part to policy changes, but also due to increased public scrutiny. Although it is important to remain vigilant of COIs, it is a fact that they have been reported at historically low rates on both committees for years.
In spite of the facts, Kennedy used this rationale to fire all 17 members of ACIP just two hours after publishing his Op-Ed — and then started to replace them with his own cast of characters.
“Not anti-vaxxers,” but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…
Before announcing his picks, Kennedy said: “We’re going to bring great people into the ACIP panel — not anti-vaxxers — bringing people on who are credentialed scientists.” To refute this claim and demonstrate the gaslighting occurring here, I wanted to provide readers with the first in-depth article on the backgrounds of three of these new ACIP members. Here are some of the people who are issuing vaccine guidance at the highest level of our government:
1 — An activist nurse, doctorate in public health who argues vaccines caused her son’s autism
One of the new appointees is Dr. Vicky Pebsworth, a regional director for the National Association of Catholic Nurses and a board member and volunteer director for the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a group that is widely criticized to be a leading source of vaccine mis- and disinformation and fearmongering. The Center advocates for vaccine exemptions and argues that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines should not be recommended for anyone. NVIC is not affiliated with HHS’ National Vaccine Advisory Committee (NVAC), despite the similarity in their names.
Dr. Pebsworth has argued for decades that her son’s autism was caused by vaccination — a causal assumption that decades of large-scale studies and systematic reviews refute. Experts on the anti-vaccine movement report that her anti-vaccine stance “probably” outdates Kennedy’s. Pebsworth spoke at a 2020 meeting of FDA’s VRBPAC, where she identified herself as the “research director” for NVIC and “mother of a child injured by his 15-month well-baby shots in 1998.” In the meeting, she stated that NVIC’s position is that any “coercion and sanctions to persuade adults to take an experimental vaccine, or to give it to their children, is unethical and unlawful.”
Pebsworth was also part of a 2020 lawsuit against COVID-19 vaccine mandates, aligning with Kennedy’s agenda. Pebsworth made a declaration to the federal court, stating that “increases in the number of vaccines in the CDC schedule may be causally related to increases in the rates of chronic illness.” Pebsworth signed this legal declaration seemingly on behalf of a group (“The Control Group,” as they call themselves, headed by self-described “patriotic grandmother” Joy Garner) and its study (a survey motivated by litigation, similar to the infamous, heavily-retracted Andrew Wakefield Lancet study, who personally played a significant part in Pebsworth’s radicalization) which surveyed nearly 1,500 “holistic” and “vaccine awareness” families asking them about the health of fully unvaccinated people in comparison to vaccinated people (assumed “99%+ vaccinated population” from CDC Chronic Diseases data), in an attempt to prove that those who are unvaccinated are healthier than those who are vaccinated. It is unclear whether Pebsworth received financial compensation for her declaration. (Author’s note: While not inherently “bad” per se, scientific studies motivated by litigation carry significant risks of bias and other issues and should require more scrutiny than other research. I will discuss this and more in a later piece, “How to read and understand scientific studies, by someone who probably paid way too much money to learn how to.”)
Pebsworth acknowledges in her declaration that the TCG American Survey was an informal pilot survey, “suitable to generate testable hypotheses” - particularly, the working hypothesis that vaccines are “a responsible suspect in the Nation’s pandemic of chronic diseases, disabilities, and disorders, and result in injured and dysfunctional immune systems” (Author’s note: Definitionally not what a pandemic is) — and goes through the survey’s strengths and limitations, but overstates the implications of its statistical analyses and findings. If you’re interested in the exact reasons why I am saying that, here is a more scathing analysis/debunking of the survey by surgical oncologist Dr. David Gorski. Regardless of valid criticism, this study is still often used as a talking point by members of the anti-vaccine movement.
Through her association with NVIC, Dr. Pebsworth represents a voice from the oldest prominent anti-vaccine organization in the US on ACIP.
2 — Anti-mRNA vaccine professor of operations management, former IDF intelligence official, author of a study which was debunked by his own former government’s health ministry
Meet Dr. Retsef Levi, another new ACIP member and now head of ACIP’s COVID-19 workgroup (COVID-19 WG), which no longer allows CDC staff or other external non-voting liaisons to be members, only allows them to be invited consultants to the WG “to provide data and presentations…and answer questions…on an ad hoc basis” (a significant change from the past structure: CDC staff used to co-led this group as voting members, while external experts were non-voting liaisons but still part of discussions). Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, a CDC Medical Officer, co-led the COVID-19 WG before resigning in June 2025.
Dr. Levi is a professor of operations management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Sloan School of Management and faculty leader for Food Chain Supply Analytics. He does not have a health or epidemiology degree.
According to multiple sources, Levi has claimed that mRNA vaccines can cause harm and even death, and called for them to be removed from the market in a previously pinned X (formerly Twitter) 2023 post. In the video embedded in the post, Dr. Levi cites his own study on “[i]ncreased emergency cardiovascular events among under-40 population in Israel during vaccine rollout and third COVID-19 wave,” which Israel’s Health Ministry (MOH) refutes in another X post from 2022. The Israel MOH refutes the study’s claims of a link between COVID-19 vaccines and increased cardiac arrest calls in the 16-39 age group, emphasizing that 59% of cases involved unvaccinated individuals, while only 17% of cases were vaccinated within 30 days prior (Author’s note: this post is in Hebrew, so feel free to correct me in the comments if I got the translation wrong). The MOH writes that an analysis of emergency medical services (EMS) data showed that the “cardiac arrest” labels by paramedics lacked medical confirmation and that there was a 63% rise in these calls in Israel since 2019 unrelated to vaccines (related to causes like chronic illness and suicide), which is supported by peer-reviewed critiques of EMS data accuracy in studies. The MOH debunking post also references evidence from a 2022 CDC MMWR study, a 2021 Nature study, and a 2022 UK study that all highlight the fact that COVID-19 itself poses a greater cardiac risk (persistent for up to a year post-infection) than vaccines, concluding the thread by stating this. An independent fact check concurs with these criticisms of the study. Overall, observational studies like Levi’s can be misleading because, while they may show two things happening simultaneously, they do not establish that one causes the other — especially when relying on incomplete or unreliable data. Levi has kept this post up, despite studies showing that mRNA COVID vaccines are safe and effective and have saved millions of lives.
In the most recent (as of writing this) June ACIP meeting, Levi represented his vaccine skepticism in discussions on COVID-19 vaccination guidelines (in this meeting, ACIP was supposed to vote on those guidelines, but ultimately did not — more on that later). When presented with evidence showing that vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal (one of the items members did vote on in that meeting, endorsing removal, which is a more symbolic than scientific decision) are safe, Levi disagreed — stating that although evidence indicates that individual vaccines containing thimerosal are not harmful, concluding that they haven’t caused harm “is a tricky notion” and opined that there may be harm based on cumulative exposure (ACIP June 25th Meeting timestamp: starts around 3:01:53). (Author’s note: Outdated information that ignores decades of evidence affirming the safety of thimerosal as a preservative in vaccines was also officially presented to the committee during this session by new HHS employee Lyn Redwood, former president of the Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy). In this meeting, Levi was also one of two committee members to vote against recommending Merck’s FDA-approved respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) antibody, Enflonsia, for use in infants, a recommendation that was endorsed in this meeting.
According to his faculty description at MIT, Levi spent nearly 12 years in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), as an intelligence officer. After leaving the military, Levi joined an “emerging new Israel hi-tech company as a Business Development Consultant.” His “industry-based” collaborative research seems to be contradictory to the self-proclaimed original anti-industry sentiment of Kennedy (which he has thus far betrayed, particularly regarding stricter regulation of pesticides — including four pesticide ingredients that may definitionally be PFAS), although some of his research seems to focus on moderating the purely economic motives of industry through risk management. However, according to his description, it appears Levi currently leads a multi-year US-China collaborative effort to develop “new predictive risk analytics tools and testing technologies and platforms to address core food safety challenges in China” — using a multi-million dollar award from the Walmart Foundation (Author’s note: which, unfortunately, has done some good work, probably in an attempt to absolve for Walmart’s low wages, labor practices that have caused concern, past alleged use of overseas sweatshops, and selling of food produced by prison labor).
I will preface this next part by saying that my own political opinions have no influence on my application of the scientific method. When I started my largest social media profile in 2023, focused on criticizing Israel for its genocide of the Palestinian people, I included the statement: "Opinions expressed are my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer” — a standard practice for federal employees expressing opinions online. Although not full-time federal employees (FTEs), ACIP members are Special Government Employees (SGEs). I would imagine that SGEs would want to put this disclaimer on their social media profiles. Levi does not do this. Recently, he retweeted a post from his colleague Talia Khan about the FIRE Org giving MIT an “F” in political tolerance. The post suggested that “universities are radicalizing students. If they do not act, more violence will follow” after commenting on the recent murder of controversial conservative debater and Turning Point USA co-founder, Charlie Kirk, who he has also retweeted in the past (in addition to NY Post opinion, billionaire Bill Ackman, and other right-wing voices).
In another post, Levi states that “MIT trains woke minds that fail to see the only genocidal entity in Gaza is Hamas is known [sic],” suggesting that the valedictorian speech in the video in the post “[called] for genocide” (it did not: it called for supporting aid efforts, an arms embargo, and for MIT to “cut ties,” presumably with Israeli weapons manufacturers). His stances on this have nothing to do with his bad science, but not distinguishing that his social media does not represent the views of his employer makes me wonder whether Kennedy is doing what he accused the preceding version of the CDC of doing: elevating “political ideologues who pose as scientific experts” to key posts in vaccine guidance.
3 — Joe Rogan guest (now-removed video, by YouTube, but the episode is still made available by Rogan on Spotify) who likened US vaccine uptake to the “mass formation psychosis of Nazi Germany”, horse breeder, medical doctor/biochemist and self-proclaimed “inventor” of mRNA vaccines
Buckle up for this one.
I will preface this section by saying that there was an interesting phenomenon of formerly credible scientists who went off the rails during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I have many theories as to why I think this happened, (sneak peak: crazy-making from incorrect information being disseminated by respected institutions — which sometimes happens in science as we learn new information in an unprecedented situation, but is often inexcusable, especially depending on the magnitude of and intent behind the error and the role of the institution; the arguably unprecedented aspects of this pandemic and its responsible pathogen; pure bigotry; an attention-seeking/“pick-me” attitude in a conspiratorial, scientifically-illiterate, fear-mongering media environment; a desire to profit off of the pandemic; and personal, ego-driven vendettas against and/or valid grievances with others in the field), and perhaps I could write another piece about it if you are interested, but feel free to put your own theories in the replies.
Dr. Malone is an American physician and biochemist, known for his early work on mRNA technology and drug repurposing (investigating novel therapeutic applications of known drugs). Malone is credited for the first successful transfection (published 1989) of designed mRNA packaged within a liposomal nanoparticle, a major feat in molecular biology — a bunch of fancy words meaning that he and his team artificially introduced a lab-created mRNA (mRNA that encoded for luciferase, which translates into a light-producing protein) into eukaryotic cells (in this case, human, rat, mouse, frog and fly cells) using an also specially-designed delivery particle. A year later, he also contributed to a paper (published 1990) with Dr. Jon A. Wolff, Dr. Dennis A. Carson, and others, which first suggested the possibility of synthesizing mRNA in-lab to trigger desired protein production (Author’s note: I had trouble finding this exact paper for some reason). Since 2021, Malone has promoted himself as the inventor of mRNA vaccines, a statement that is repeated online despite the fact that this invention is more often attributed to the lead authors on the pioneering papers he contributed to (such as Wolff and Dr. Philip Felgner) and to the significant following mRNA vaccine technology advancements by Drs Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, as well as Dr. Derrick Rossi, the co-founder of Moderna. Like many scientific inventions, mRNA vaccines are the result of decades of contributions from hundreds of scientists, including Malone. Anonymous COVID-19 experts and researchers, including those who worked closely with Malone, support the claim that “[w]hile he was involved in some early research into [mRNA] technology, his role in its creation was minimal at best.”
Under the Trump administration (early 2020), Malone was involved in research out of Defense Threat Reduction Agency (US DTRA), a defense agency and a combat support agency within US Department of Defense (US DOD) for countering weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and the US Nuclear Security Enterprise. Malone was part of research out of DTRA’s DOMANE program — Discovery of MCMs (medical countermeasures) Against Novel Entities. Malone was involved in DOMANE’s research into the heartburn medicine famotidine (Pepcid) as a possible COVID-19 treatment. Malone’s interest in the drug candidate was sparked by his own early observational data which suggested that use may be associated with higher COVID-19 survival (published 2021). In late February of 2020, Malone was so convinced of famotidine’s efficacy for COVID-19 treatment that he took it himself when he got the disease. He posted on LinkedIn that he had figured out the proper dose and was the first to take the drug to treat COVID-19.
While employed by Alchem Laboratories as Chief Medical Officer, Malone then posited that famotidine may target an enzyme that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus causing COVID-19) uses to reproduce. He recruited a computational chemist to help design a 3D-model of the enzyme based on SARS-CoV-2’s genome and comparisons to the 2003 SARS virus (SARS-CoV-1). After seeing encouraging preliminary results, Alchem and New York’s Northwell Health initiated a clinical trial on famotidine and hydroxychloroquine (April 2020), also supported by US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). Malone resigned from Alchem shortly after the trial started, citing a “difficult work environment” (a spokesperson for Northwell also described him as “difficult to work with” as plans for the trial progressed). Here’s what allegedly went down leading to a $21 million study crashing and burning: approximately two weeks after the contract was awarded, Science Magazine released an article describing the deal. In the article, Dr. Michael Callahan, a study collaborator of Malone’s and a well-connected infectious disease expert at Massachusetts General Hospital who worked in Wuhan in late 2019 and advisor to Dr. Robert Kadlec, a retired Air Force colonel who served as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response (Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, ASPR, agency executive) at the time, was credited as the “first to call attention to [famotidine] in the United States.” The piece briefly mentioned Malone’s work, but the majority of the credit went to Callahan and Dr. Kevin Tracey from Northwell. Malone did not like this.
In an email to Science Magazine’s editors, Malone challenged Callahan’s story of data he had collected in China, where Callahan said that 600 severely ill COVID-19 patients took famotidine antacids and their disease was observed to be milder than patients of a similar age and health status who had never taken the drugs. Callahan has never published these data. Malone wrote: “No one that I am aware of has or had ever seen the data from Wuhan that Michael [Callahan] alludes to. He promised to show me these data, but never did.” A senior Science editor responded that, although the magazine also could not independently confirm Callahan’s account, it would not issue a correction because the magazine considered Callahan’s version of the story to be anecdotal (Author’s note: I do not like that response. In my opinion, many involved here gave way too much credence — and MONEY — to the famotidine idea with little robust evidence). Shortly after Science published the piece, the FDA reported a national shortage of Pepcid AC and other antacids containing famotidine.
To Malone, the reply from Science meant war. In more LinkedIn posts, Malone reportedly accused Tracey and another doctor of inappropriately demanding to be included as authors on a new famotidine and COVID-19 study (Author’s note: it is unclear whether this refers to the trial here and I cannot find Malone’s LinkedIn to verify). A Northwell official advised Tracey to ignore Malone and Malone promptly received cease-and-desist letters to stop disparaging them. Northwell’s official email to Tracey said that “[Malone] just wants back into the discussion and primary credit for the discovery, such as it is at this stage.” In the end, Northwell also paused the trial, apparently because of a shortage of hospitalized patients. A $21 million flop — how’s that, DOGE?
Malone and a collaborator later proposed a special issue to Frontiers in Pharmacology publishers, which would focus on early observational studies on the use of existing medications as treatment for COVID-19, but the publishers ultimately rejected two of the papers selected (one on famotidine, one on ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug, due to “a series of strong, unsupported claims” and found it did not “offer an objective nor balanced scientific contribution”) and removed a rework of the ivermectin paper and this entire special issue from its website.
Malone started receiving criticism in mid-2021 for propagating COVID-19 conspiracy theories and misinformation, including: making dangerous and false claims about the toxicity of spike proteins generated by some COVID-19 vaccines, promoting the unevidenced efficacy of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as COVID-19 treatment, and tweeting a later retracted study that questioned vaccine safety. Malone has falsely claimed that Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccines could “worsen COVID-19 infections,” and that the FDA had not granted full approval to the Pfizer vaccine in August 2021. Despite all of this, Malone admitted in a July 2021 interview that he got the Moderna mRNA COVID vaccine, stating that he got it because he was suffering from long COVID, that “the data at the time suggested it improved outcomes,” and because he and his wife “needed to travel.”
Malone also shared a deceptive video on Twitter falsely linking athlete deaths to COVID-19 vaccines, specifically suggesting a 17-year-old Indiana high school football player, who died in 2013 from sudden cardiac arrest resulting from an undiagnosed heart condition, had died from COVID-19 vaccination. He deleted the video from his Twitter after receiving a cease-and-desist (a pattern for Malone) letter from the child’s family, later stating he did not know the video was doctored. He was permanently suspended from Twitter in December 2021 for his repeated sharing of COVID-19 misinformation. He sued the site for this. His account was allowed to return when Elon Musk bought the site, now sitting at 1.3 million followers.
In a 2022 interview, Malone stated the unsupported claim that COVID-19 vaccines are “damaging T-cell responses and causing a form of AIDS,” saying he had “lots of scientific data” for this claim, but not citing any of it. Representing perhaps his most public lie, Malone claimed on a December 2021 episode of the the Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) podcast that “mass formation psychosis” was developing in American society as a reaction to COVID-19, comparing it to the rise of Nazi Germany. The term “mass formation psychosis” is not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and usually not recognized as a medical term by mental health practitioners. YouTube removed the interview from its platform, but Joe Rogan keeps the episode up on Spotify, despite the fact that Spotify received an open letter from 270 scientists, nurses, physicians, and academics about the content in the podcast. Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX) enter a full transcript of the episode into the Congressional Record.
Dr. Malone was also the Chief Medical Officer of a group called The Unity Project, a group against COVID-19 vaccine mandates. He has spoken at large anti-vaccine rallies and now runs a Substack, where has 355,000 subscribers and posts dank memes. Malone does put the disclaimer that I criticized Levi for not using on this Substack, but not on his much larger twitter account.
His most recent Substack post is about the role of ACIP as a committee that issues guidance to advise the CDC Director (or the HHS Secretary when there is no CDC Director), which is correct, but then argues that the regulation of vaccine policy is the responsibility of states and “is a states rights issue” (Author’s note: I’ll debate this next) and that ACIP’s official reported COIs are not the only form of “COI,” but that the committee has historically been “captured” by CDC bureaucracy (ACIP has always comprised of independent non-CDC members and CDC members, as stated in Levi’s section) and claimed that CDC bureaucrats have controlled the committee’s “agenda, scope, information sources, and membership,” presenting little concrete evidence of this. That is not the definition of a COI and it can be an opinion, but it is not a fact. Additionally, given Dr. Monarez’ account of Kennedy pressuring her to rubber-stamp the new committee’s recommendations, it seems Kennedy exhibited this alleged control himself.
Again, part of what he writes is correct: “In sum, ACIP absolutely does not have either authority nor mission to ‘set vaccine policy for the United States’”. Setting policy and standard of care involves an interaction between the US Federal Government, State Government, and state authorized health care practitioners (which may include pharmacists in some states),” but he also oddly says “[f]rom the perspective of the Federal Government, this role is specifically the responsibility of the Executive branch (POTUS and/or designee).” This seems to simultaneously suggest that vaccine policy is the authority of the states, yet also up to the President.
Returning to the “states’ rights” argument, this article seems to advocate for what I have argued is the balkanization of public health, a process involving the fragmentation of a country or region into multiple smaller, hostile independent states that are considered to be governed quite differently, rooted in the depiction of events from the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars and incidents occurring in the Balkan Peninsula during War War I. Malone cites Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) to make this point, pulling this quote from Justice Alito’s majority opinion: “only legitimate unenumerated rights — that is, rights not explicitly stated in the Constitution — are those ‘deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition’ and ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,’” a subjective judgement that Malone is using to argue public health policy is not something that ‘the Nation’s history and tradition’ gives federal control over. In contrast to this opinion, I would point to the Interstate Commerce Clause in Article I of the US constitution, which grants the federal government the power to regulate trade and transportation between US states, thereby preventing state-imposed trade barriers (something that emerged under the failure of the Articles of Confederation), and fostering a national free market. This clause has been expanded over the centuries and now applies to a multitude of things crossing states. Thinking of a pop culture example, in the cult classic television show, Twin Peaks, Officer Dale Cooper from the Federal Bureau of Investigation is called in because victim Ronette Pulaski wanders across a railroad bridge out of Washington into Idaho (across state lines). Diseases do not know state borders and therefore, a central (See: “Centers of Disease Control and Prevention”) federal agency to control and prevent them is in the public interest. The CDC’s collaboration with states, local, tribal agencies and governments has led to many success stories regarding interstate and intercountry (for the sovereign tribes) outbreaks. Foodborne illness outbreaks are a prominent example for this, as food consumed in one state may have been produced and transported from another.
These are just some of the ACIP members Kennedy selected in June, not to mention Dr. Martin Kulldorff, who co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the new Trump-appointed NIH director. The Great Barrington Declaration is a letter that questioned lockdowns and other public health measures early in the COVID-19 pandemic advocating for low-risk groups to develop herd immunity through exposure to the virus (somehow also arguing that vulnerable people could simultaneously be protected and I guess ignoring the risk of chronic effects of infection, long COVID) and Dr. Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at Dartmouth College's Geisel School of Medicine, and previous member of ACIP who made 12 COI disclosures during this time on committee from 2008 to 2012 according to a CDC database, criticized recommendations to mask children in an Op-Ed co-written with the current FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, and indicated support for Kennedy’s decision to remove healthy children and pregnant women from the COVID-19 vaccine schedule (Author’s note: before some chud starts to argue that they did not remove them and it says you can use “shared clinical decision-making” — the messaging on this was completely incoherent); and Dr. James Pangano who seems to have also signed the Great Barrington Declaration.
As of September 15th, more members of ACIP have been announced, such as: Dr. Catherine Stein, who downplayed COVID-19’s severity during the height of the pandemic in early 2021 and argued that Ohio Department of Health’s COVID-19 dashboard inflated the number of deaths; Dr. Kirk Milhoan of the Independent Medical Alliance, an organization that reportedly stated on its website to be “dedicated to treating patients affected by… vaccine-related cardiovascular toxicity due to the spike protein” and has promoted ivermectin use for COVID-19, published a paper claiming the mRNA vaccines led to more cases of the heart condition myocarditis than the virus itself, called for the shot to be removed from the market, joined Representative Majorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on a vaccine-injury panel; and Dr. Evelyn Griffin an obstetrician/gynecologist (OBGYN) who spoke a 2024 Louisiana “Health Freedom Day” promoting a removal of vaccine mandates.
I will note that some new members seem to be less noncontroversial, to my current knowledge: Dr. Joseph R. Hibbeln, Dr. Hillary Blackburn, and Dr. Raymond Pollack (Author’s note: Fired but Fighting, an organizing effort among HHS workers who were fired by DOGE, reports Dr. Blackburn is a vaccine skeptic, but I have not found corroborating evidence for this quite yet. Notably, she is also the daughter-in-law of Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). Additionally, Dr. Hibbeln is a psychiatrist who is reported by Fired but Fighting to think that diet is the cure for most diseases). Overall, I personally do not feel confident in the membership of this new board and their ability to make unbiased decisions on the vaccine recommendations they will be voting on — and neither should you.
CDC director fired for refusing to rubber-stamp this committee’s recommendations, as allegedly requested by Kennedy — and the CDC leaders who resigned in solidarity
Dr. Monarez goes on to write in her Op-Ed:
Reporters have focused on the Aug. 25 meeting where my boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., pressured me to resign or face termination. But that meeting revealed that it wasn’t about one person or my job. It was one of the more public aspects of a deliberate effort to weaken America’s public-health system and vaccine protections.
I’m gone now, but that effort continues. One of the troubling directives from that meeting more than a week ago: I was told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric. That panel’s next meeting is scheduled for Sept. 18-19. It is imperative that the panel’s recommendations aren’t rubber-stamped but instead are rigorously and scientifically reviewed before being accepted or rejected…
Those seeking to undermine vaccines use a familiar playbook: discredit research, weaken advisory committees, and use manipulated outcomes to unravel protections that generations of families have relied on to keep deadly diseases at bay. Once trusted experts are removed and advisory bodies are stacked, the results are predetermined. That isn’t reform. It is sabotage.
Public health shouldn’t be partisan. Vaccines have saved millions of lives under administrations of both parties. Parents deserve a CDC they can trust to put children above politics, evidence above ideology and facts above fear.
I was fired for holding that line. But the line doesn’t disappear with me. It runs through every parent deciding whether to vaccinate a child, every physician counseling patients, and every American who demands accountability.
If we stay silent, preventable diseases will return—as we saw with the largest measles outbreak in more than 30 years, which tragically killed two children. If we act, the facts can still prevail.
I could not have said this better myself. I completely agree — I once stated something similar to the third paragraph. And others agreed as well — three major CDC leaders resigned the day of her firing: Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, former Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Practices (NCIRD), Dr. Daniel Jernigan, former Director of the National Center for Emerging Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID), and Dr. Debra Houry, former Chief Medical Officer and previously Deputy Director of the CDC. These are heavy-hitters at CDC and Dr. Debra Houry, for example, is an extremely cautious, apolitical person. I got quite sick (ironically) the day this happened. Although there are still thousands of amazing scientists at CDC and ATSDR working hard to maintain its mission, to me, these leaders leaving indicates the beginning of the end of the US CDC as we once knew it.
This firing and resignation followed the FDA narrowing its approval of the updated COVID-19 mRNA booster vaccine for only those who are 65 years and older or had a qualifying (high-risk) condition and the presumption that CDC’s ACIP would recommend the same. Now, on the eve of their September 18th and 19th meeting, the committee is considering narrowing the age recommendation, moving it up from 65 to 75 years-old. The committee also reportedly plans to review unverified (anyone, patients and providers, can submit adverse events for additional review and to generate hypotheses/more study in the mentioned database) Vaccine Adverse Event Report (VAERS) data in a FDA presentation on “children who died after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine.” The FDA is also allegedly scouring datasets for case reports of congenital deformities in babies after their mothers received the COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy. This, in conjunction with Dr. Monarez being asked to pre-approve recommendations, indicates that ACIP is not interested in honest, scientific, and democratic discussions and voting, but rather creating a spectacle, a façade of honest deliberation that hides their true intent: to restrict access to or outright not recommend, stigmatize, and influence the removal/ban vaccines from the market entirely.
Topics covered in Part II: the recommendations of the next ACIP meeting and why these recommendations are misguided, CDC problems during past Democratic *and* Republican administrations, the CDC shooting, an argument for universal healthcare, the cost of decreased vaccine access, how to resist lies, and an official call for RFK Jr.’s resignation
I hope you enjoyed (as much as you could!) today’s article. Please consider supporting Officer David Rose’s, the first responder killed in the August 8th, 2025 US CDC shooting, GoFundMe here.
Publication: The Nightingale is a reader-supported publication named after English statistician and the founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale. Nightingale championed public health (specifically, sanitation and hygiene), which significantly reduced death rates from infection during the Crimean War. She was a pioneering statistician who used data visualization to advocate for public health policy and healthcare reform, and established the first professional nursing school in London. You may see her famous coxcomb chart/Nightingale rose diagram used in this publication (and the logo!). The Nightingale will cover emerging public health topics in the US and globally, aiming to resist Trump’s anti-science agenda and provide credible health information during the current “information blackout” caused by government and academic funding cuts.
Author: Miranda Mitchell, MPH (“Roo McGuire”) is an environmental health scientist. Opinions are her own and do not represent the institutions she was previously affiliated with. She is a graduate of Emory University and Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, as well as former intern at the Office of Children’s Health at US EPA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., graduate work-study at US CDC Headquarters at its Roybal Campus in the National Center for Emerging Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID), Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) fellow and full-time employee at US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) at US CDC’s Chamblee Campus. Her Master’s thesis, published in Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID), investigated the potential transmission dynamics and genetic diversity of a bacteria in bats and their ectoparasites. Her areas of expertise are health risk assessment, environmental health science, molecular biology, and infectious disease epidemiology. She currently makes public health and political educational content here and on Twitch.tv/roomcguire, while she awaits her first child and hopes to pursue a doctorate sometime after 2028. She has never received any money from pharmaceutical companies and declares no conflicts of interest. She apologizes for the HBO “Chernobyl” quote, but not really, that show is awesome. Real quotes from chemist Valery Legasov’s tapes are available here.
Let's gooooo Roo article