RFK Jr. fires entire vaccine panel.

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Quick hits.

1. BREAKING: The month-over-month consumer price index (CPI) rose 0.1% in May, lower than economists’ expectations. Annual CPI increased 2.4%, roughly in line with expectations. (The numbers)
2. The United States and China reached an agreement on a plan to implement a trade deal. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping must each approve the deal before it goes into effect. (The agreement)
3. The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to begin transferring noncitizens in the U.S. illegally to the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The transfers could begin as early as this week. (The report)
4. Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered U.S. embassies to proceed with firing all remaining staffers with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and said the State Department will assume control of USAID’s foreign assistance programs by Monday. (The order)
5. U.S. Attorney Alina Habba announced federal charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) for allegedly obstructing Homeland Security agents during a protest outside a Newark immigration detention facility in May. (The charges)
6. A man in Austria killed 10 people and injured at least 12 others in a shooting at a secondary school, where the shooter was a former student. The attack is the deadliest mass shooting in Austria's recent history. (The shooting)

Today’s topic.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the CDC. On Monday, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. removed all 17 members of the independent Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The panel is responsible for developing recommendations for safe vaccine use and the U.S. adult and childhood immunization schedules, and the HHS secretary appoints its members to serve four-year terms. Kennedy says the move will allow the Trump administration to appoint its own members and restore public trust in vaccines. 

Kennedy’s decision follows other reforms recently announced by agencies overseen by HHS. In February, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) canceled a meeting of an expert committee on vaccines scheduled for March to decide which influenza strains should be included in the next flu shot. In April, Kennedy announced significant layoffs at the CDC and FDA. Then, in May, the FDA announced it would only recommend annual Covid-19 vaccine boosters for adults over 65 and people with a chronic health condition.

“The problem isn’t necessarily that ACIP members are corrupt,” Kennedy said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Most likely aim to serve the public interest as they understand it. The problem is their immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy. The new members won’t directly work for the vaccine industry. They will exercise independent judgment, refuse to serve as a rubber stamp, and foster a culture of critical inquiry—unafraid to ask hard questions.”

Kennedy has yet to propose individuals to replace those he fired from the panel. The ACIP is scheduled to meet next on June 25, but it is unclear if its new members will be announced by that time.

Many public health leaders expressed concern over Kennedy’s decision. “With an ongoing measles outbreak and routine child vaccination rates declining, this move will further fuel the spread of vaccine-preventable illnesses,” Dr. Bruce Scott, the president of the American Medical Association, said. Others disputed Kennedy’s claim of widespread conflicts of interest among the panel.

Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a licensed physician who cast a critical vote to confirm Secretary Kennedy in February, also expressed worries about the move. “Of course, now the fear is that the ACIP will now be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion,” Cassidy wrote.

Today, we’ll get into what the left and right are saying about the ACIP firings, then my take.

What the left is saying.

• The left sharply criticizes the move, suggesting that it’s transparently anti-vaccine.
• Some say that Kennedy clearly lied to senators when he said he wouldn’t take actions like this. 
• Others say the move will endanger public health. 

The Washington Post editorial board wrote “RFK Jr.’s purge is about reducing access to vaccines.”

“Kennedy is targeting the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices because he sees it not as the independent scientific body that has helped tame multiple infectious diseases over the past half-century but as a political instrument to control… Kennedy criticizes the committee for having served as a ‘rubber stamp’ for vaccines. He complains that it ‘has never recommended against a vaccine — even those later withdrawn for safety reasons,’” the board said. “These attacks are unfair. The purpose of ACIP is to develop recommendations for vaccines the Food and Drug Administration has already approved as safe and effective. Committee guidelines affect insurance coverage.”

“No one argues that vaccines are perfect. Some of them inevitably come with side effects that even sophisticated trials fail to capture, even if those studies recruit thousands of participants. Calling for more testing often sounds good. But FDA trial requirements are already time-consuming and expensive, driving up the cost of drugs and curbing the availability of lifesaving treatments,” the board wrote. “Only one person can stop Kennedy from making the country much less healthy: President Donald Trump… Republican officials who understand the stakes should try to convince Trump that reducing access to vaccines now would endanger the public and, by extension, his legacy.”

In MSNBC, Steve Benen argued Kennedy is “doing the opposite” of what he told senators during his confirmation hearing. 

“In early February, when there was still some question as to whether or not the Senate would confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Sen. Bill Cassidy delivered a closely watched speech on the Senate floor. The Louisiana Republican, a physician by trade, not only endorsed the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist during his remarks, he offered assurances about the future,” Benen said. “Four months later… Cassidy has been proven wrong.”

“Complicating matters is the degree to which these new developments add to a radical and dangerous pattern. Indeed, Kennedy’s announcement came just days after pediatric infectious disease expert Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos resigned from her position as the co-leader of a CDC working group that advises outside experts on Covid vaccines,” Benen wrote. “As unsettling as the news has been, none of it is surprising. RFK Jr.’s anti-science reputation was well established long before Trump nominated him. That an unqualified, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is behaving like an unqualified, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is painfully predictable.”

In STAT, Richard Besser said the move “endangers every American.”

“Like countless other physicians, I relied on the independent, evidence-based recommendations of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to support the patients in my care,” Besser wrote. “For more than 60 years, ACIP has informed vaccine recommendations that physicians provide to patients, saving lives and improving health. Yet ACIP’s pivotal role in our nation’s vaccine system has now been upended due to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision on Monday to indiscriminately fire the entire committee. This misguided decision sends a devastating message: Our nation’s top health official cannot be trusted to protect America’s children and their families.”

“Kennedy has accused ACIP members of serving industry interests over public health. Nothing could be further from the truth. ACIP meetings are live-streamed. All votes and records are fully accessible to the public, and every meeting has a public comment period. Members must disclose conflicts of interest and recuse themselves from votes if any conflicts arise,” Besser said. “Rates of routine vaccination are falling and outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases are becoming more common. Yet Kennedy is intentionally pursuing policies to exacerbate both trends — at a time when the administration and Republicans in Congress are also pushing legislation that would cause millions of people to lose health insurance coverage.”

What the right is saying.

• The right is mixed on the decision, though many praise Kennedy for reorganizing a committee they see as deeply biased.
• Some argue that Kennedy distorts the ACIP’s flaws. 
• Others say Kennedy rightly called out issues with the ACIP, but his solution carries significant risks. 

In PJ Media, Catherine Salgado called the move a “shot of sanity.”

“Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is inoculating America against false scientism. His latest move? Canning the entire CDC vaccine advisory panel,” Salgado wrote. “After the COVID-19 debacle, when experimental vaccines without tests for efficacy and safety were forced on many Americans and recommended to pregnant women, vulnerable seniors, and children (despite kids being in almost no danger from the virus), reform was clearly necessary… And for those leftists about to have a heart attack over Kennedy’s firings, the HHS clarified that all of the 17 members of ACIP now removed were appointed by the Biden administration, with a whopping 13 of them appointed just last year.

“It would seem clear that the Biden administration was trying to rig the panel as much as possible ahead of a potential election defeat to undermine any reforms under a new president. The press release explained that, if the Trump administration had accepted all of these appointments, no chance for a less biased majority would’ve been possible until 2028,” Salgado said. “Fortunately, RFK wasn’t about to be daunted by such dishonest manipulation. ‘A clean sweep is necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science,’ the secretary declared… Imagine trying to prioritize transparency, objective science, and the American public over big pharma profits and political ideology.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote “RFK Jr. conducts his vaccine purge.”

“The HHS Secretary has broad discretion over the panel’s remit and composition. There might be a constitutional argument for eliminating the committee and other outside advisory panels because they can weaken executive accountability. Agency leaders have sometimes shifted political responsibility for controversial decisions to advisory panels,” the board said. “But Mr. Kennedy’s beef seems to be that the committee’s members know something about vaccines and may have been involved in their research and development.”

“Mr. Kennedy this year posted members’ self-identified perceived or potential conflicts on the CDC website. They show that the members have properly recused themselves from decisions that involve products for which they served as trial investigators, as well as those of their competitors, or if they held stock in companies. In other words, the conflicts of interest were honestly handled,” the board wrote. “The secretary says the new members ‘will refuse to serve as a rubber stamp,’ but ACIP doesn’t automatically approve what industry wants. The committee has often recommended narrower applications for vaccines, including for RSV, HPV and Covid booster shots.”

In Reason, Liz Wolfe explored “RFK Jr.'s big shakeup.”

“Kennedy cites the Rotashield incident as an example [of conflicts of interest at the ACIP]: ‘Committee members regularly participated in deliberations and advocated products in which they had a financial stake,’ he argues in the Journal,” Wolfe said. “Like with so much of what RFK Jr. peddles, there's a grain of truth within: The Rotashield incident was disturbing, and increased transparency into advisory committee actions would be good; but an incident from 30 years ago (that was subsequently investigated and rectified) doesn't necessarily mean the whole advisory board should be thrown out or that all of their decision making is invalidated.”

“It's hard to say how much this actually changes things or how worried you should be: ACIP reviews new vaccines but is also tasked with evaluating existing vaccines. Lots of families already make the choice to deviate from the standard vaccination schedule, mostly in minor ways that don't really cause significant issues with herd immunity,” Wolfe wrote. “It will probably take a long time for school immunization schedules to drastically change, and parents' decisions will probably continue to roughly track those requirements; but it is also possible that a new ACIP could overhaul all of this, give parents worse recommendations for how to vaccinate their children that lead to cyclical outbreaks (like measles).”

My take.

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• Kennedy’s move is incredibly significant, and could have major — and dangerous — consequences.
• A lot of things about Kennedy are innately appealing, especially the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
• Firing all the ACIP panel members is potentially catastrophic, but today it feels ordinary.

One of the people I really trust on issues of public health is Katelyn Jetelina, who writes the newsletter “Your Local Epidemiologist.” Over the years (including through Covid), Jetelina has taken level-headed, nuanced approaches to public health issues, rarely issuing sensational or over-the-top warnings. And for the last few months, she has been making a concerted effort to engage with the “Make America Healthy Again” movement to better understand why medical professionals like her are losing public trust. She makes a good-faith effort to explain her perspective through data, but also to meet people where they are and address the experiences that drive skepticism of public health recommendations. Here is how she started her newsletter yesterday:

In an unprecedented and deeply alarming move, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has removed every single member of the nation’s vaccine policy committee—the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—and announced plans to handpick their replacements.

In other words, someone with an established track record of ignoring reality made the unilateral, ideological decision to gut one of the most trusted and effective pillars of America’s vaccine infrastructure. A system that helped eliminate smallpox, drastically reduce childhood diseases, safeguard schools, expand insurance coverage, and save millions of lives. A system that empowered 90% of Americans to protect their children and families confidently. It’s now becoming unrecognizable.

The impact of Kennedy’s move is hard to overstate. As many writers above have noted, Kennedy made a promise to Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy to “maintain” the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices “without changes.” He had to make this promise because Cassidy understood that tearing down the ACIP would be a five-alarm fire; Kennedy is now most of the way toward completely breaking that promise. All he has left to do is stack the committee with ideologues. 

Here’s just one example of why gutting the panel is a huge deal: ACIP is responsible for making recommendations that provide the basis for what vaccines insurers are required to cover. If Kennedy stacks the decision-making group with like-minded or inexperienced officials (i.e., vaccine skeptics or outright adversaries), their recommendations could lead insurers to stop covering important vaccines. Without insurance coverage, vaccination rates could plummet quickly. Insurance aside, nearly half of all children in the U.S. are covered by the Vaccines for Children program, which provides free vaccinations. ACIP determines what vaccines that program includes, and if certain vaccines are no longer available for free, then you can guess what that will do to childhood vaccination rates.

Since Kennedy first started musing about a presidential run, I’ve tried to give him a fair shake. I’ve criticized the corporate media who framed him as little more than a rabid anti-vaxxer, seen the appeal of his discussion of health issues, and empathized with his reproval of modern American life. But I was very critical of Kennedy’s nomination to lead HHS, the federal government’s biggest agency by budget, in large part because he does believe a lot of nonsense. The first few months of his term have not assuaged my doubts:

He’s already wasting untold time and resources hunting for a link between autism and vaccines that we know doesn’t exist. The “MAHA report” he issued on life expectancy was riddled with errors and made-up studies because his team apparently used AI to put it together, a disqualifying and fireable offense in any normal administration. He ended public comment periods for HHS policies, a direct violation of his promise to promote transparency. He cut off funding for bird-flu vaccine development, a valuable initiative to protect our livestock (and limit the risk of transmission to humans). 

And now, this.

Even in his Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing that he was gutting ACIP, Kennedy’s words were rife with misleading claims and outright falsehoods. For instance, he claimed ACIP “has never recommended against a vaccine—even those later withdrawn for safety reasons.” 

This is both bizarre and false. It’s bizarre because ACIP’s job isn’t to authorize new vaccines for public use; that job belongs to the Food and Drug Administration. Here is a helpful image from Jetelina’s newsletter on where ACIP sits in the process:

Kennedy’s claim is false because the ACIP has, on several occasions, recommended against or pulled their approval of vaccines. In both the 2016–2017 and 2017–2018 flu seasons, the ACIP recommended against the use of the live attenuated flu vaccine because of its low effectiveness. In 1999, ACIP withdrew its recommendation for RotaShield, citing an association between the vaccine and bowel obstruction in infants. In 2021, the ACIP recommended mRNA vaccines over Johnson & Johnson vaccines for Covid, citing the risk of blood clots from the Johnson & Johnson product. It has also recommended restrictions on Dengvaxia, the only vaccine approved in the United States for dengue fever, limiting its use to specific age groups in specific situations.

(For what it’s worth, I have no idea how this line made it through the Wall Street Journal’s fact-checking process, which applies even for op-eds, and I emailed their editors requesting a correction, something I rarely do). 

It also isn’t true that ACIP has “been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.” Kennedy backs up this assertion with the claim that 97% of ACIP members’ conflict-of-interest disclosures had omissions, which is misleadingly taken from a 2009 report finding that these forms had missing dates or information in the wrong section (not grievous withholdings of financial stakes). The claim is also contradicted by the full review of the current committee’s disclosures that Kennedy called for, which found no significant conflicts of interest. Also, in March, the journal Science launched its own investigation into the committee’s conflicts of interest and similarly reported no troubling findings.

As has been common with Kennedy, he has diagnosed a real problem and prescribed for it entirely the wrong medicine. True, ACIP’s appointment process is less than stellar in its transparency; but its members are vetted for conflicts of interest, its meetings are live-streamed, it posts evidence for its recommendations online, and it provides a legally required public-comment period for those findings.

This entire story is a nice encapsulation of why I’ve been so disappointed with Kennedy since his appointment, despite doing my best to temper my skepticism. It’s a classic example of him pushing seemingly positive and innocuous ideals (Transparency! No conflicts of interest! Public trust!) in a totally backward and broken way that undermines the very goals he says he is trying to accomplish. His job is to protect the country’s health, and — barring a shocking turn of events where Kennedy stacks ACIP with highly qualified experts who do not predominantly share his own views — this move will unambiguously make us less healthy and make our children less safe. 

In normal times, the combination of these actions would lead to someone like him getting fired; but in 2025, it’s just another Tuesday. 

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Your questions, answered.

Q: What's the deal with George Soros? As a person leaning to the left, I hear very little about him, except as the target of right leaning anger and what I've assumed to be conspiracies. From my perspective, Musk is doing the very thing that Soros is regularly accused of. Am I just in a bubble?

— Brian from Oakland, California

Tangle: Some of the statements you might hear about George Soros are definitely conspiratorial (or antisemitic), but he is more than just a regular billionaire political donor.

Soros is a Democratic megadonor, and in that way he’s pretty comparable to Republican megadonor Elon Musk. However, Soros has been involved with politics for much longer. Musk donated hundreds of millions to conservative causes in 2024, not just to Donald Trump’s campaign but to other Republican candidates, through individual contributions and super PACs. Conversely, Soros donated much less in 2024 but was the largest individual donor in the 2022 midterms and has been making political contributions for decades. 

In terms of his donations, Soros is more comparable to the Koch brothers. Both have donated hundreds of millions of dollars through various super PACs over the past decades, with Soros primarily using the Democracy PAC II to donate to left-leaning politicians and initiatives and the Koch brothers primarily using the Americans for Prosperity Action PAC to support conservatives. This year in particular, Soros is preparing to put a small fortune into backing Democrats in Texas. Those kinds of donations are uncomfortably large and invite the possibility of quid pro quo corruption, but as you say, they also aren’t that unusual — or even that outsized — compared to checks from other megadonors.

Where Soros stands out, however, is with his Open Society University Network, a global nonprofit through which he has donated over $32 billion. The nonprofit funds more than two dozen colleges and research projects through its Democracy Institute, among other projects and initiatives, which makes the money much harder to track. Soros’s efforts sometimes overlap with government spending through organizations like USAID, which further muddies the waters over what exactly the Hungarian-born billionaire is financing. 

In short: Soros is absolutely an impactful and influential megadonor, but what makes him unique is that his reach goes far beyond just the U.S. or political campaigns — it is global, multifaceted and often hard to track, which invites more suspicion and interest.  

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Under the radar.

On Tuesday, the World Bank cut its forecast for global growth in 2025 from 2.7% to 2.3%, noting that the 2020s are on pace for the slowest decade of growth since the 1960s. The group’s Global Economic Prospects report lowered 2025 growth forecasts for almost 70% of economies, including approximately 60% of all developing economies. It identified trade tensions and heightened government borrowing as drivers of the projections, suggesting that a focus on job creation could help improve the outlook. “The world economy today is once more running into turbulence. Without a swift course correction, the harm to living standards could be deep,” Indermit Gill, the World Bank’s chief economist, said. Bloomberg has the story.

Numbers.

• 1964. The year the U.S. Surgeon General established the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). 
• 19. The maximum number of voting members on the ACIP. 
• 59%. The percentage of U.S. adults who say they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to provide reliable information about vaccines, according to an April 2025 KFF poll.
• 41%. The percentage of U.S. adults who say they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to provide reliable information about vaccines.
• –18%. The change in the percentage of Democrats who say they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the CDC to provide reliable information about vaccines between September 2023 and April 2025. 
• +11%. The change in the percentage of Republicans who say they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the CDC to provide reliable information about vaccines between September 2023 and April 2025. 
• 36% and 43%. The percentage of Americans who say they approve and disapprove, respectively, of Kennedy’s performance as Health secretary, according to an April–May 2025 Pew Research poll.
• 66% and 9%. The percentage of Republicans and Democrats, respectively, who approve of Kennedy’s job performance.

The extras.

• One year ago today we covered New York’s congestion pricing plan.
• The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was the ad in the free newsletter for the Christian newsletter The Pour Over.
• Nothing to do with politics: The computer keyboard version of Dance, Dance, Revolution is overwhelmingly challenging.
• Yesterday’s survey: 2,791 readers answered our survey on the charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia with 41% saying they don’t care if he’s guilty or not. “The outrage I’ve had regarding Garcia has nothing to do with his guilt and everything to do with the government’s obligation to prove it in court,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

After feeling like she was falling behind as a mom and in her career, Britt Riley decided to create an all-in-one support system to address this common experience. Riley’s business, Haven, now has three locations across Rhode Island, each stocked with gyms, fully licensed daycare facilities and coworking spaces, aiming to help families prioritize their mental and physical health while still feeling connected to each other and their communities. “I feel like it’s critically important that every member of the family is supported,” Riley said. “Because if we want to show up for children, we need to support everybody who takes care of them, right?” Nice News has the story.

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