Yves here. This example of the CDC clearly bending to the anti-vax beliefs of HHS chief RFK, Jr. is yet another example of how our putative leaders think they can turn their world of make-believe into reality. We saw it with the old mainstream liberals with Ukraine, simply refusing to accept that Russia was not flattened by shock and awe sanctions or that its military was not just competent, but winning the war, and now with extreme libertarian ideologues believing that their fantasies are superior to decades of experience about disease spread.
The new recommendation to use Vitamin A as opposed to getting vaccinated is very worrisome. Vitamin A is toxic at not all that high doses, to the degree that doctors recommend strongly against the idea of using 0.1% Retin-A generic name tretinoin, (this concentration is available only by Rx; the now OTC versions of retinol are 50% or lower active ingredient concentration) of topical Vitamin A on more than the face and neck, even though it is a very effective wrinkle-reducer over time. See for instance:
Exactly what doctors predicted after RFKjr went on Fox claiming large doses of Vitamin A were an alternative to the measles vaccine.
Vitamin A overdose is highly toxic overall & in pregnancy teratogenic – it can even cause limb defects much like thalidomide. pic.twitter.com/8Nnnmo0VjS— ObsAnaesthetist (@DrNickB_ObAnaes) March 28, 2025
By Patricia Callahan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter exploring how federal policies affect the health of vulnerable people. Originally published at ProPublica; cross posted from Undark
Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff last week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.
In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that has spread to 19 states, the records show.
A CDC spokesperson told ProPublica in a written statement that the agency decided against releasing the assessment “because it does not say anything that the public doesn’t already know.” She added that the CDC continues to recommend vaccines as “the best way to protect against measles.”
But what the nation’s top public health agency said next shows a shift in its long-standing messaging about vaccines, a sign that it may be falling in line under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccines:
“The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” the statement said, echoing a line from a column Kennedy wrote for the Fox News website. “People should consult with their health care provider to understand their options to get a vaccine and should be informed about the potential risks and benefits associated with vaccines.”
ProPublica shared the new CDC statement about personal choice and risk with Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. To her, the shift in messaging, and the squelching of this routine announcement, is alarming.
“I’m a bit stunned by that language,” Nuzzo said. “No vaccine is without risk, but that makes it sound like it’s a very active coin toss of a decision. We’ve already had more cases of measles in 2025 than we had in 2024, and it’s spread to multiple states. It is not a coin toss at this point.”
For many years, the CDC hasn’t minced words on vaccines. It promoted them with confidence. One campaign was called “Get My Flu Shot.” The agency’s website told medical providers they play a critical role in helping parents choose vaccines for their children: “Instead of saying ‘What do you want to do about shots?,’ say ‘Your child needs three shots today.’”
Nuzzo wishes the CDC’s forecasters would put out more details of their data and evidence on the spread of measles, not less. “The growing scale and severity of this measles outbreak and the urgent need for more data to guide the response underscores why we need a fully staffed and functional CDC and more resources for state and local health departments,” she said.
Kennedy’s agency oversees the CDC and last Thursday announced it was poised to eliminate 2,400 jobs there.
When asked what role, if any, Kennedy played in the decision to not release the risk assessment, HHS’ communications director said the aborted announcement “was part of an ongoing process to improve communication processes — nothing more, nothing less.” The CDC, he reiterated, continues to recommend vaccination “as the best way to protect against measles.”
“Secretary Kennedy believes that the decision to vaccinate is a personal one and that people should consult with their health care provider to understand their options to get a vaccine,” Andrew G. Nixon said. “It is important that the American people have radical transparency and be informed to make personal health care decisions.”
Responding to questions about criticism of the decision among some CDC staff, Nixon wrote, “Some individuals at the CDC seem more interested in protecting their own status or agenda rather than aligning with this Administration and the true mission of public health.”
The CDC’s risk assessment was carried out by its Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, which relied, in part, on new disease data from the outbreak in Texas. The CDC created the center to address a major shortcoming laid bare during the Covid-19 pandemic. It functions like a National Weather Service for infectious diseases, harnessing data and expertise to predict the course of outbreaks like a meteorologist warns of storms.
Other risk assessments by the center have been posted by the CDC even though their conclusions might seem obvious.
In late February, for example, forecasters analyzing the spread of H5N1 bird flu said people who come “in contact with potentially infected animals or contaminated surfaces or fluids” faced a moderate to high risk of contracting the disease. The risk to the general U.S. population, they said, was low.
In the case of the measles assessment, modelers at the center determined the risk of the disease for the general public in the U.S. is low, but they found the risk is high in communities with low vaccination rates that are near outbreaks or share close social ties to those areas with outbreaks. The CDC had moderate confidence in the assessment, according to an internal Q&A that explained the findings. The agency, it said, lacks detailed data about the onset of the illness for all patients in West Texas and is still learning about the vaccination rates in affected communities as well as travel and social contact among those infected. (The H5N1 assessment was also made with moderate confidence.)
The internal plan to roll out the news of the forecast called for the expert physician who’s leading the CDC’s response to measles to be the chief spokesperson answering questions. “It is important to note that at local levels, vaccine coverage rates may vary considerably, and pockets of unvaccinated people can exist even in areas with high vaccination coverage overall,” the plan said. “The best way to protect against measles is to get the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.”
Last week, though, as the number of confirmed cases rose to 483, more than 30 agency staff were told in an email that after a discussion in the CDC director’s office, “leadership does not want to pursue putting this on the website.”
The cancellation was “not normal at all,” said a CDC staff member who spoke anonymously for fear of reprisal with layoffs looming. “I’ve never seen a rollout plan that was canceled at that far along in the process.”
Anxiety among CDC staff has been building over whether the agency will bend its public health messages to match those of Kennedy, a lawyer who founded an anti-vaccine group and referred clients to a law firm suing a vaccine manufacturer.
During Kennedy’s first week on the job, HHS halted the CDC campaign that encouraged people to get flu shots during a ferocious flu season. On the night that the Trump administration began firing probationary employees across the federal government, some key CDC flu webpages were taken down. Remnants of some of the campaign webpages were restored after NPR reported this.
But some at the agency felt like the new leadership had sent a message loud and clear: When next to nobody was paying attention, long-standing public health messages could be silenced.
On the day in February that the world learned that an unvaccinated child had died of measles in Texas, the first such death in the U.S. since 2015, the HHS secretary downplayed the seriousness of the outbreak. “We have measles outbreaks every year,” he said at a cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump.
In an interview on Fox News last month, Kennedy championed doctors in Texas who he said were treating measles with a steroid, an antibiotic and cod liver oil, a supplement that is high in vitamin A. “They’re seeing what they describe as almost miraculous and instantaneous recovery from that,” Kennedy said.
As parents near the outbreak in Texas stocked up on vitamin A supplements, doctors there raced to assure parents that only vaccination, not the vitamin, can prevent measles.
Still, the CDC added an entry on Vitamin A to its measles website for clinicians.
Last Wednesday, CNN reported that several hospitalized children in Lubbock, Texas, had abnormal liver function, a likely sign of toxicity from too much vitamin A.
Texas health officials also said that the Trump administration’s decision to rescind $11 billion in pandemic-related grants across the country will hinder their ability to respond to the growing outbreak, according to The Texas Tribune.
Measles is among the most contagious diseases and can be dangerous. About 20 percent of unvaccinated people who get measles wind up in the hospital. And nearly 1 to 3 of every 1,000 children with measles will die from respiratory and neurologic complications. The virus can linger in the air for two hours after an infected person has left an area, and patients can spread measles before they even know they have it.
Last week Amtrak said it was notifying customers that they may have been exposed to the disease in March when a passenger with measles rode one of its trains from New York City to Washington, D.C.
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File under “You’re on Your Own”. Just like they did with the pre-mature so called “ending of the Pandemic”. We can also reference the earlier link in the E.U. to stock up for 3 days in case of, what, nuclear war? Yeah that should be enough. /sarc
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/18/europe/nato-sweden-finland-wartime-guidance-intl/index.html
Yesterday I posted this comment regarding this issue, and it includes a link to the same ProPublica article. The ProPublica article is quite good and provides a sober assessment of the situation. The comment I posted also includes a link to another article similar to the tweet in the intro, that tries to claim that Kennedy said Vitamin A was an alternative to getting vaccinated.
I haven’t been able to find where Kennedy says that, and the tweet in the intro doesn’t have a link. If you click through the “March 4 interview of Fox News” link in the first article link from yesterday’s comment, you will find this video of Kennedy on Fox. https://www.foxnews.com/video/6369595673112 It may be a shorter form of a longer interview, or possibly there is another separate interview, but Kennedy does not say that Vitamin A is an alternative to getting vaccinated in the Foxnews link either. He says that doctors have treated people who already have measles with Vitamin A, with some good results from that, along with a few other treatments that have been tried.
I don’t like the fact that Kennedy is stressing that vaccinations are a personal choice at all. It should be pretty clear by now that those personal choices were not good ones, judging by the outbreaks we keep seeing. I do believe in the concept of public good, and would much rather see that stressed, which the current CDC is clearly not doing. But it is also true that vaccinations have always been a personal choice, and that those choices have consequences – namely that in most areas your children can’t attend public schools, a consequence I wholeheartedly support.
On a somewhat related side note, I asked my father recently about the polio vaccine, since it was just coming out when he was a small child. I believe he had an aunt who died of polio as well. That was way before my time, but from what I can gather, pretty much everybody then knew someone who caught polio and either died or had permanent health issues. My father and aunt both remember that my grandfather did not want them to get the polio vaccine when it was new, because there had been some problems with the vaccine at the time, but those were eventually fixed and they did both get vaccinated eventually.
My late mom born in 1925 related to me about 10 years ago what a scourge Polio was, somebody would get it in her school and they would halt all classes for a week-nobody knew how it got around.
The only person I know that did time in an iron lung is my buddy from Tucson that spent a couple years ensconced in one on account of having Guillain-Barré syndrome, some sixty something years ago.
Now imagine hospitals full of people in iron lungs, killing time.
Measles killed 85-90% of the Yokuts tribe populations here in 1868-69, they had no immunity.
that story (an unattenuated batch of polio vaccine killing kids) is the centerpiece of this show on vaccine hesitancy https://www.npr.org/2025/02/13/1231104444/the-anti-vaccine-movement
the show is Throughline – it’s a history/politics podcast from NPR; this episode does a good job (in an hour) tracing how vaccines went from mandatory to “choice”.
This whole thing is pretty disgusting and I am putting the blame on RFk jr. You have a measles outbreak but instead of a campaign to encourage people to get a measles vaccine, Kennedy is just muttering that people probably know that option already. And if they are not sure, they can go see their doctor. As chuk jones pointed out above, this is just fobbing off all responsibility and telling people that they are on their own. And if it goes wrong, then it is not Bobby’s fault and he has clean hands. He pulled the same stunt in Samoa but learned nothing from that deadly episode and now seeks to do the same thing for the entire United States. I fear what will happen if America experiences a new Pandemic with Kennedy still on the scene.
Regarding that advice to contact one’s health care provider with questions about vaccines. My PCP is booked for the next two months. Even the Nurse Practitioner takes a few weeks. I am sure many other people are in the same situation.
Is it really true that RFJnr’s policies have actually resulted in the current outbreak? What is the vaccination rate the areas that are affected? If we assume 100% of Texans heed RFJnr and immedietly stop vaccinating their children it should take some time before a purely unvaccinated population develops hence an outbreak be blamed on him. The fact that there is an outbreak right now however is a major redflag IMHO
The post said absolutely nothing like that. Straw manning is a violation of our written site Policies. Please read them and adhere to them if you want to preserve your comment privileges.
The post refers to the “anti-vax beliefs of HHS chief RFK, Jr.” But is he really “anti-vax”? I understand his position to be that vaccines should be safety tested against placebo controls. This is not to say that safety data does not exist. It certainly does, but the safety trials did not test against placebo. Perhaps one might argue that the existing data is “good enough” — but I can understand the scientific argument that vaccines should be subject to the same safety testing as other pharmaceticals, which are tested against placebo.
There is a good argument that in the middle of an outbreak the CDC should promote the MMR vaccine, which has been on the market for a long time. But after this passes, I would like to see all of the vaccines, including MMR, tested against placebo. I am not anti-vax. I have received more adult vaccines than anyone I know, including the shingles vaccine last year. But if I had known then that there was no safety testing against placebo, it would have made me think twice.
Yes, RFK, Jr. is anti-vax. He is still promoting the myth that vaccines cause autism. He refused to recommend measles vaccination even with measles cases spiking.
He killed people in Samoa with his anti-vax position and was discouraging their use even as he was peddling an “alternative” approach, as in profiteering!
https://www.schatz.senate.gov/news/press-releases/schatz-rfk-jr-whose-dangerous-lies-fueled-measles-outbreak-in-samoa-and-caused-preventable-deaths-unqualified-to-lead-hhs
https://apnews.com/article/rfk-jr-samoa-measles-kennedy-vaccines-pacific-42a9cb583c71f165699b16710884c474
I don’t see why this is so hard to understand.
My understanding is that vaccine trials don’t always do double blinding in phase 3 because it would be unethical to not allow participants to have a vaccine that actually works, when the trial is for a new version of an existing vaccine, and in other cases, they don’t want to use an entirely inert shot because it would be obvious that there was no immune response. I’m not a doctor but that makes sense from the ethical standards point of view.
I understand the situation to be following (and I should have been more precise earlier):
Pharmaceuticals are tested against a placebo for safety. The placebo is something known to be safe, typically saline, but sometimes new products are tested against an existing product already established to be safe.
For vaccines, they test the vaccine (antigen + other ingredients) against the a placebo, where the placebo is the “other ingredients” without the antigen. These “other ingredients” may be buffers, stabilizing agents, emulsifying agents and/or an adjuvant. The controversial part about this practice is that the adjuvant, rather than the antigen, might be the problematic ingredient. Mercury used to be used as an adjuvant. If you test an antigen plus mercury against mercury alone, you might see no difference. But does this prove the vaccine is safe? Of course not. These days aluminum is often used as the adjuvant, rather than mercury. So the trial tests the antigen plus aluminum against aluminum alone. If there is no difference, does this mean the vaccine is safe?
You might expect that the aluminum adjuvant has been independently tested for safety against something entirely inert, like saline. But that is where you would be wrong. That has never happened in human studies. This is concerning because aluminum is not used in any of the body’s chemical processes. It is a substance that does not belong circulating in the body.
The only safety study on aluminum adjuvants was an animal study on rabbits. Only four rabbits. Data was lost for one of the four. It was only a short term study. Is this a problem? Some say it is. Some say we need to go back and test whether it is safe to inject aluminum into the body. Others say this is not necessary. They say that we know enough about aluminum because we have already used it for so long with no significant problems. And aluminum is included in some products like antacids that are injested with no apparent problems. But is injesting aluminum in the gut (where the gut might prevent it from being absorbed) different from injecting it into the bloodstream? If if it is repeatedly injected into the bloodstream for multiple vaccines, are there any long term cumulative effects? The problem is that we don’t know for sure.
Do we want to know? Many do, but you can see how this can be a Pandora’s box for public health authorities. On one hand, if we go back and do the tests properly, and the results are good, this might help overcome vaccine hesitancy. On the other hand, if the results are negative, or nuanced, this would be a disaster and we could see a huge increase in vaccine hesitancy. So there are big risks.
As Yves points out, if there is a measles outbreak and people avoid the vaccines, then we have a deadly measles pandemic on our hands. Nobody wants that if we can avoid it. In the minds of many public health officials (and probably most of the public) this is a no-brainer: Promote the MMR vaccine. But at least a few people will say “I want to have more data on that aluminum adjuvant.”