Since riding Donald Trump’s coattails to power, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has taken his haphazard anti-vaccine views and enshrined them as a core tenet of US health policy.
According to 16 current and former health officials who spoke to Reuters, RFK Jr has taken much more drastic measures to push his anti-vaccine agenda than was previously known.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, two officials told the news agency that RFK approached National Institute of Health director Jay Bhattacharya earlier this year with a proposal to spend up to $5 billion in tax dollars to establish links between vaccines and autism.
As Reuters notes, that kind of spending would encompass ten percent of the NIH’s annual budget, a massive waste that would fly in the face of decades of established science showing vaccines definitively don’t cause autism.
“He’s an anti-vaccine activist. That’s who he is. That’s who he’s been for 20 years,” Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia told Reuters. “To expect that as secretary of Health and Human Services he’d be anything other than that is wishful thinking.”
It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time RFK Jr attempted to twist the science to link vaccines with autism. Earlier this year, the US Department of Health and Human Services was caught spending $1.6 million funding a study on hepatitis B vaccines conducted by controversial Danish researchers Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn.
Had the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention — the public health arm of the Africa Union — not stepped in to stop the RFK-backed study, researchers would have withheld inoculations from thousands of newborn infants in Guinea-Bissau.
The situation drew notable comparisons to the Tuskegee Experiment, a highly unethical medical experiment that used hundreds of Black men as guinea pigs to study the long-term effects of syphilis. Despite the fact that effective treatment was available, nearly 400 men spent decades without treatment, suffering life-long consequences at the hands of manipulative researchers.
Though the Tuskegee Experiment may not have produced any medical breakthroughs or scientific discoveries, its cruel legacy seemingly lives on as inspiration for RFK and his HHS cronies.
The immune system, the body's defense network against infections and injuries, can sometimes become too active. In these cases, it can produce too many immune mediators, fragments of genetic material or proteins that regulate immune responses.
The next time you’re checking into a hospital, it’s possible that your nurse may actually be 8,000 miles away.
That’s the reality at a growing number of hospitals throughout the US and the world, which are turning to low-paid telehealth workers in the Philippines to help fill in the duty roster. As it is for remote driving and AI data labeling, the Philippines has become a wellspring of cheap labor for transnational healthcare companies, which are more than happy to exploit a country where millions of people live in poverty.
Stunning reporting by Rest of World detailed the lives of some of the 210,000 full-time Filipino workers employed in remote healthcare. This new class of workers makes up for a massive shortage of almost 80,000 registered nurses in the US.
One of the workers, Alice, is a licensed nurse working in Quezon City, a city of three million people in the Philippines. In 2019, she signed on with a telehealth company providing mental health and substance abuse treatment to US-based patients in California and New Mexico. Alice told RoW she earns $5 an hour, five times as much as the hospital job she left behind.
“We have this virtual clinic that functions like a lobby where patients check in,” Alice explained, “and then we traffic or triage them and send them to each of the providers’ personal Zoom room.”
To get a job communing with US patients through a screen, a Filipino worker simply needs to have a medical degree — it doesn’t matter what kind. While it’s likely that many telehealth recruits come from healthcare administration backgrounds, RoW notes that about 30 percent of the people employed in these jobs are trained nurses or other medical professionals.
The result is a scenario where tens of thousands of healthcare workers are physically present in their communities, but spend their days caring for patients half a world away in a desperate bid to pay the bills. Already facing a mounting shortage of trained healthcare professionals, the Filipino people have watched as telehealth corporations court the remaining hospital workers to oversee care for patients in the US.
“If they can’t go abroad, remote nursing is the next best thing because local wages are so low,” Nico Uba, secretary general of the group Filipino Nurses United told RoW. “Then local hospitals are left understaffed and overworked.”
The companies running this insidious scheme prey on two sets of healthcare workers on opposite ends of the world: the underpaid Filipino, for whom a wage of $5 an hour is much higher than the national average, and the overworked American, for whom a 50-hour work week is practically a vacation.
The remote healthcare industry is well aware of this tension, and is happy to take advantage. As JL Botor, president of the Healthcare Information Management Association of the Philippines told RoW, US hospitals can save up to 70 percent of their overhead costs by hiring Filipino workers instead.
In all, Botor notes that the country is a “clinical process outsourcing powerhouse,” as well as “a premier global hub for supporting overstressed international healthcare systems.”
On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had linked the outbreak of cyclosporiasis, an infection notorious for inducing explosive diarrhea, to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms that was supplied to Taco Bell.
Per the reporting, Taco Bell said it was voluntarily pulling the lettuce from select states where it received the contaminated produce: Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia. An announcement from the CDC warned the public not to eat food items with shredded lettuce from Taco Bell, but hasn’t identified Taylor Farms as the source.
But while Taco Bell may have served the tainted lettuce, it would be remiss to lay all of the blame on the fast food chain (although one aggrieved customer is already suing it after contracting the illness).
The contamination occurred at the farms or facilities where the food was processed, from a single supplier in Mexico, Food and Drug Administration officials said. The supplier, Taylor Farms, has been involved in previous outbreaks, including another outbreak of cyclosporiasis in a salad mix in 2013.
Taco Bell, to its credit, also immediately pulled its ingredients from some of its locations last week as soon as it learned about the situation, according to local reports.
And then there’s the broader political context that many experts are drawing attention to: how the Trump administration has slashed funding to the CDC and paralyzed the nation’s food safety bodies.
Last February, shortly after Trump took office, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) dissolved its National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which provided scientific guidance on food safety policy. Ryan Cooper at The Prospect notes that the committee was working on advice for foodborne illness outbreaks before being terminated. The FDA also shut down its National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection.
Not spared during the wave of cuts that wreaked the federal government, the USDA lost over 20,000 workers last year, with 913 of them coming from its Food Safety Inspection Service.
Last year, the CDC — which has lost some 3,000 employees under Trump — scaled back its food surveillance program called FoodNet that monitored eight common foodborne pathogens, changing it so that surveillance of the cyclospora parasite that causes cyclosporiasis was optional.
Dan Jernigan, a former director of CDC’s Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, told the Washington Post that the decision was made because funding for food safety had not been maintained over the past few years. That the US is now on track to have more cyclospora cases this year than any previous year in history is likely no coincidence.
Jernigan left the agency last August in protest of Trump ousting its then director Susan Monarez and the policies of health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. But he said that the Trump cuts would have little impact on the ongoing outbreak, adding that FoodNet wasn’t designed for real-time outbreak detection or response.
As the WaPo reporting notes, federal and state health authorities have insisted that the cyclosporiasis investigation hasn’t been impeded because the parasite is still reportable to a separate national database. Still, Jernigan said that scaling back FoodNet wasn’t inconsequential.
“Routine outbreak investigators are the firefighters responding to a specific blaze. FoodNet is the citywide system that tracks how often fires occur and whether the overall risk is rising,” he told WaPo. “Removing cyclosporiasis from FoodNet does not take the firefighters away from the current outbreak, but it does remove part of the system that tells us how large the problem is and whether it is getting worse over time.”
Cyclosporiasis is a particularly tough illness to track. Symptoms can take weeks to present, making it difficult for health officials to trace back where sufferers were infected. A recent Wired piece drew attention to how many people may be wrongly misdiagnosing themselves as news of the diarrhea dilemma spread across social media.
Linda Yancey, an infectious disease specialist at Memorial Hermann Health System in Texas, warned that large outbreaks like this could become more common.
“Unfortunately with so many budget cuts, every federal agency is hurting for personnel and resources,” she told Time Magazine earlier this month. “We could be at greater risk of foodborne infections because the FDA is so understaffed and underfunded right now.”
So far, Michigan, the epicenter of the outbreak, has alone tallied over 4,300 cases of infection, while nationwide there could be 7,000 cases, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has only confirmed 1,600 of them.
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