WASHINGTON, D.C. — Vice President JD Vance&#8217;s Fraud Task Force is referring a number of hospitals and clinics to the Justice Department and the HHS Inspector General for possible violations of federal law.
Those hospitals have billed millions of dollars in insurance claims for puberty blockers for children, according to a new Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) report. Now the Trump administration is investigating.
HHS released &#8220;Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of &#8216;Gender Medicine'&#8221; on Thursday morning. The report examines insurance coding, financial incentives, and the &#8220;provision&#8221; of transgender medical procedures for minors, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
It&#8217;s the first time in history that HHS examined the financial incentives behind the pediatric gender medicine industry that has exploded over the last decade, leaving many young people mentally and physically harmed in its wake.
Over 225 hospitals and health systems established pediatric gender programs across the country, the report found. Between 2015 and 2025, there were approximately $50 million in insurance claims for puberty blockers that were billed using the endocrine disorder diagnostic code E34.9 — a billable code used when a patient has a hormone problem.
&#8220;These allegations are crazy, and they demand investigation,&#8221; Vance said in a video obtained exclusively by The Daily Wire. &#8220;When children may have been harmed, and families misled, it’s on those of us in power to find the truth and to seek justice for kids who were harmed by these doctors.”
&#8220;Using this code in place of a gender-related diagnosis (e.g., gender identity disorder, F64.0) violates CMS guidelines for the simple reason that gender dysphoria is not an endocrine disorder, since it exhibits no hormonal abnormalities,&#8221; the report states. &#8220;In fact, the only endocrine disorders these patients have are the ones created by their doctors through the use of sex-rejecting interventions. Yet it appears that healthcare providers are misusing this code.&#8221;
The report cites a 2016 study titled “Identifying the Transgender Population in the Medicare Program&#8221; in which CMS’s Office of Minority Health states that &#8220;proxy diagnosis codes are being substituted for gender dysphoria.&#8221; In the methods section, the authors explain how they included the code for Unspecified Endocrine Disorder because it is “frequently used by the transgender community to combat the perceived stigma of a GID diagnosis.&#8221;
Doctors and practitioners of &#8220;pediatric gender care&#8221; have been using this code to bill insurance claims for children for whom they prescribe &#8220;gender-affirming&#8221; puberty blockers, or prescription medication that stops a child&#8217;s puberty. While transgender advocates claim that halting a child&#8217;s puberty helps them feel more comfortable in their body before they begin testosterone or estrogen treatments or undergo transgender surgeries, critics argue that the puberty blockers carry significant risks to the child&#8217;s fertility, bone density, and more.
The new HHS report also found that hospitals and clinics billed nearly $11 million in claims for patients between the ages of 13 and 17 using a diagnosis code for precocious puberty (E30.1). That finding also signals to HHS and the task force that there should be additional review of insurance coding practices.
“The findings raise serious questions about what families were told, what insurers were told, and how these procedures were billed,&#8221; HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in the video message obtained by The Daily Wire.
&#8220;HHS will follow the evidence, protect taxpayers, and hold accountable anyone who broke the law or violated the trust of patients and families,&#8221; he vowed in a statement issued Thursday. &#8220;Under President Trump’s leadership, we are restoring transparency and integrity to American medicine.”
HHS&#8217; report offers recommendations on how to strengthen oversight of insurance coding practices and make sure that billing practices flagged as potentially improper are thoroughly reviewed.
It was compiled by a number of top gender experts and researchers who have been outspoken on pediatric gender practices under the Biden administration, including Eithan Haim, a doctor targeted by the former administration for speaking out against transgender medical practices in Texas, Quentin Van Meter, a board-certified pediatric endocrinologist with 46 years of continuous clinical experience, Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue, Victoria Coley of the Independent Women’s Forum, May Mailman, the director of the Independent Women’s Law Center, and Rachel Morrison of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
&#8220;The research and first-hand stories in this report demonstrates potential large-scale fraud, and a critical need for more accountability and rigorous oversight of the medical providers, insurers, advocacy organizations, and government agencies that not only allowed, but often encouraged it,&#8221; the report concludes. &#8220;Because of the dangerous combination of ideology and financial incentives, we believe the potential fraud exposed in this report is only the tip of the iceberg.&#8221;
Assistant Secretary for Health, Admiral Brian Christine, has been outspoken in his desire to end the promotion of transgender procedures for kids, describing such procedures as &#8220;sex-denying,&#8221; and emphasizing the harm that puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries cause to these confused young people.
“Our responsibility as healthcare professionals, first and foremost, is to do no harm,&#8221; he said on Thursday. &#8220;As HHS’ commissioned report Wolves in White Coats details, the medical establishment created what the report describes as ‘captive patients,’ placing vulnerable children on a path toward potentially lifelong medical interventions.&#8221;
Christine vowed that HHS is committed to protecting kids from these procedures, as well as &#8220;following the evidence, and restoring trust in American medicine.&#8221;

EXCLUSIVE: Trump Admin Opens New Front In War On Fraud, This Time In Child Sex-Changes

Fraud

J.D. Vance

Puberty blockers

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Transgender

transgender surgery

The internet is getting a kick out of Secretary of State Marco Rubio&#8217;s take on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.&#8217;s sauerkraut-heavy diet and his admission that diets and MAHA just aren&#8217;t for him &#8212; although Pop-Tarts very much are.
Rubio made the admission during a Tuesday appearance with his wife, Jeanette, on &#8220;The Katie Miller Podcast,&#8221; where host Katie Miller asked whether he had adopted RFK&#8217;s diet of red meat and fermented vegetables.
Rubio immediately said no and called the diet &#8220;crazy.&#8221;
&#8220;This is a diet that consists of eating sauerkraut and meat,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Now, you understand, like this is not a sustainable thing.&#8221;
&#8220;Well he sustains it, because he does it,&#8221; Rubio&#8217;s wife Jeanette, who joined him on the podcast, chimed in.
&#8220;But he has to travel with coolers of sauerkraut!&#8221; Rubio said, cracking up Miller. &#8220;I&#8217;m not gonna travel the world with a cooler full of sauerkraut. It&#8217;s ridiculous. I can&#8217;t do it. It&#8217;s not sustainable.&#8221;
&#8220;I&#8217;m in favor of MAHA,&#8221; he continued, referring to the Make America Healthy Again movement. &#8220;Like, I think people should be healthy &#8211;&#8221;
&#8220;He is not. He is completely not,&#8221; Jeanette interjected again. She also revealed that her husband eats Pop-Tarts, a shameful admission to anyone in the MAHA world.
&#8220;No, I don&#8217;t eat Pop-Tarts every day, okay?&#8221; Rubio responded. &#8220;You eat sweets!&#8221; Jeanette said.
&#8220;The Pop-Tart is one of the great American innovations in the history of the world,&#8221; Rubio said, embracing his love of Pop-Tarts. &#8220;If you think about it, it comes in this beautiful foil package.&#8221;
&#8220;He eats all the things you should not be eating, every single thing,&#8221; Jeanette added.
Rubio went on to say that diets just aren&#8217;t for him. He said he once tried the ketogenic diet and called it a &#8220;near-psychotic event&#8221; for him.
&#8220;I tried this thing called keto,&#8221; he said. &#8220;You just eat all this protein, and so you go through this massive withdrawal from sugar and carbohydrates for the first 72 hours. It was a near-psychotic event for me.&#8221;
&#8220;It&#8217;s true, like if I did this in this job [at that time], I would be saying, &#8216;Mr. President, we must bomb Paraguay,'&#8221; Rubio joked. &#8220;And it&#8217;s like, why? I don&#8217;t know. I&#8217;m just really mad I haven&#8217;t had any sugar.&#8221;
&#8220;I&#8217;m not against this diet, I&#8217;m not asking that we ban it,&#8221; the Secretary of State added. &#8220;I encourage people to try it. I&#8217;m just saying it&#8217;s not for everyone. That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m saying.&#8221;
The internet seems to be laughing along with Miller, too. The post has garnered millions of views and tens of thousands of likes in a matter of hours. Many folks commented on Rubio&#8217;s wife playfully calling him out and how Rubio is actually spitting &#8220;facts&#8221; about Pop-Tarts. And, of course, the obligatory Rubio meme has been given a Pop-Tart makeover:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none">
<a href="https://t.co/K8LwIfCNAo">pic.twitter.com/K8LwIfCNAo</a>
— NERV2nd Branch (@NERV2nd) <a href="https://x.com/NERV2nd/status/2087348133957394601?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 12, 2026</a></blockquote>

Marco Rubio

Marco Rubio’s Take On RFK’s ‘Crazy’ Diet Goes Viral: ‘It’s Ridiculous’

Rubio Cracks Up Host, Roasts RFK Jr.’s Extreme MAHA Diet

Health

MAHA

Podcast

After the release of the revamped nutritional guidelines earlier this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has launched a cooking show putting these new guidelines into practice. &#8220;The Real Food Show&#8221; premiered last week with its first episode teaching Americans how to make crispy salmon cakes with a side of apple, white bean, and greens salad. 
The show’s premise is simple: Teach Americans how to eat healthy foods at affordable prices. RFK Jr. is joined by a renowned chef each episode with a new recipe for Americans to try at home. 
The premiere episode features celebrity chef and restaurateur <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/author/andrew-gruel">Andrew Gruel</a>, who has made a name for himself in Make America Healthy Again circles with his wealth of knowledge on cooking, sourcing food, the food industry, and focus on healthy eating.  
As RFK Jr. and Chef Gruel walk Americans through the steps and ingredients of the recipe, they aren’t just teaching people how to cook salmon cakes; they’re also focused on the nutritional benefit of each ingredient. Salmon contains high-quality protein, for instance, and beans offer prebiotic fiber. The flipped food pyramid and new dietary guidelines are heavily featured throughout the running commentary the hosts give as they cook. And along the way, sidebars pop up with more facts about the nutritional value of each ingredient, as well as other relevant facts about the ingredients. 
Speaking to the origin of the dietary guidelines, RFK Jr. explains that the previous guidelines were crafted by food lobbyists. The new guidelines flip the old ones on their head by being spearheaded by top nutritionists, he says. And while the public messaging on the new dietary guidelines has highlighted the benefits of high-quality protein and healthy fats, the other aspects of the guidelines — fruit, vegetables, and whole grains — have been far less discussed.
That’s one area &#8220;The Real Food Show&#8221; shines: The recipe includes arugula, apple, onion, nutritional yeast, herbs, and more. Certainly, the visuals of the flipped food pyramid are striking, but beyond the pictures, <a href="https://cdn.realfood.gov/Daily%20Serving%20Sizes.pdf">the actual guidelines</a> recommend nearly as many servings of vegetables as protein and as many servings of whole grain — if not more — than protein. The serving size for each food group is different, but the guidelines make clear the importance of all types of macro and micronutrients.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/r5vKilWJNKo?si=Qd4W8wa16AJBY2x2" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Additionally, the new dietary guidelines emphasize the quality of each food consumed, and RFK Jr. and Chef Gruel each reference the value of buying high-quality ingredients and offer their tips on buying seafood. For instance, Chef Gruel explains that flash freezing technology has made frozen fish a better choice than fresh fish in many cases.
Amid ongoing concerns about the cost of groceries, another part of the pitch for &#8220;The Real Food Show&#8221; is showing Americans how to make healthy food for less than $5 per serving. For some households, that’s an already high number, and for others, it’s lower than their current spending levels. But it is, of course, cheaper than dining out, especially at a restaurant offering healthy, quality choices. The first episode has a $4.91 per serving cost, and as the hosts point out, that cost could be lowered with canned salmon, tuna, or another protein of choice. It’s not a magic fix to rising grocery costs, but it’s one way for price-savvy Americans to save a few dollars. 
&#8220;The Real Food Show&#8221; also adds in other corollary tenets of MAHA such as conservation and supporting the American food supply, with mention of sustainable fishing regulations and U.S.-based fisheries. 
But all that information is also the show’s weakness. The tips on ingredient substitutions, flavor swaps, and other recipe modifications may be helpful to an intermediate cook but overwhelming to a novice. And for a first-time cook or a parent accustomed to reheating rather than cooking from scratch, the show doesn’t offer many beginner cooking tips or much advice. How do you know when your salmon is fully cooked? Why is emulsion important for the vinaigrette? Why do prebiotics matter?
There’s no doubt the show can help plenty of cooks by demonstrating the recipe, offering aspiring home cooks new ideas, and teaching Americans about health information that’s been long lacking in public discourse. The show is a perfect conversation starter for American families about real food, and for classrooms, it would be an equally appropriate lesson about nutrition and the American food supply. But there’s also a <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/may/22/wealth-geeks-more-half-americans-struggle-cook-bas/">contingent of Americans</a> who are completely new to home cooking and the world of health and wellness. On one hand, the show simplifies these concepts (and the <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/real-food-show/recipes/index.html">written recipe</a> also lays out some of the details in a format that can be re-referenced), but on the other hand, it may not meet beginner cooks where they are.
Despite this, it’s a light in the wasteland of American nutritional advice. Groceries are far too expensive, the standard American diet is filled with ultra-processed food and devoid of nutrients, and many Americans don’t know where to start. 
There are plenty of beginner-friendly resources to learn how to cook from home. We live in an age of millions of free recipes online, pages of recipes on shelves at local libraries, in-depth online tutorials for advanced and novice cooks alike, and even meal kit boxes that bring ingredients straight to your doorstep. There’s never been a better time to learn how to cook, and maybe &#8220;The Real Food Show&#8221; will be what some Americans need to start rethinking how they approach their grocery plans.
***
Jordan Jantz is the assistant editor at IW Features as well as a freelance writer, editor, and website designer.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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RFK Jr.’s New Cooking Show Proves We Can Fix The American Diet

Food

grocery prices

Upstream

The Trump administration <a href="https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/cms-ends-federal-medicaid-chip-funding-sex-rejecting-procedures-children-youth" target="_blank" rel="noopener">announced</a> Tuesday that a final rule barring federal Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) funds from being used to pay for transgender medical interventions for minors, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
“Today, we are ending federal taxpayer funding for sex-rejecting procedures on children,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said. “These interventions carry serious risks and can cause irreversible harm. The federal government will no longer use Medicaid and CHIP dollars to fund procedures that fail to meet the evidentiary standard our children deserve.”
President Donald Trump celebrated the decision Tuesday, saying his administration would no longer force taxpayers to finance “barbaric surgeries and practices” on children. 
“Just think about all of the young, innocent, and perhaps confused children who will be spared!” Trump wrote on <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117078967972327386">Truth Social</a>.
Centers for Medicare &amp; Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said the policy is intended to protect children from experimental and potentially irreversible medical interventions. 
“Children deserve our protection, not experimental interventions that pose serious risks and convey no proven benefits,” Oz said. “By cutting off federal funds for these sex-rejecting procedures, we’re following the science, saving taxpayer dollars, and, most importantly, protecting children from potentially irreversible harm so they can truly flourish.”
CMS said its decision followed a review of national and international research conducted by HHS that identified what the agency described as significant evidence gaps and safety concerns.
CMS said the procedures can carry potentially permanent consequences, including infertility, impaired sexual function, diminished bone density, altered brain development, and other lasting physiological effects.
The agency also pointed to the United Kingdom’s Cass Review, a comprehensive examination of medical treatment for transgender-identifying children, as evidence of international scrutiny surrounding the treatments.  
The new rule includes a taper-off period for minors already receiving hormone therapy. Federal Medicaid and CHIP funding will remain available for up to six months after the rule takes effect to allow patients to safely get off hormone treatment.
The rule does not affect Medicaid or CHIP coverage for mental health services, which CMS said will continue to be covered under existing federal requirements.
Trump tied the policy to the upcoming midterm elections.
“Please remember this when you are casting your vote in the Midterm Elections in November,” he wrote.
CMS said Tuesday’s action is specifically focused on the use of federal taxpayer dollars. 
“The Trump Administration is drawing a clear line: America’s children will not be subjected to life-altering interventions on the taxpayer’s dime without reliable evidence of safety and clinical benefit,” HHS Press Secretary Emily Hilliard said.
The rule is set to take effect October 13, putting the federal funding restrictions in place less than a month before the November midterm elections.

President Trump Participates In Swearing-In Ceremony For Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz

Trump Admin Ends Medicaid Funding For Child ‘Sex-Rejecting’ Procedures

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Donald Trump

Dr. Oz

Gender Transition

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On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order that backed fewer routine vaccines for kids.
I&#8217;m actually rather indifferent to this. The reason I&#8217;m indifferent to this is that different countries have different standards for the number and the schedule for childhood vaccines.
Some of these vaccines are recommendations; they&#8217;re not mandates. But when you are talking about the vaccinations that are most likely to prevent health problems, they&#8217;re not all equivalent.
The HPV vaccine is for a sexually transmitted disease that typically leads to cancer. Thus, it seems it should be a matter of parental choice. If you are deeply worried that your kid is going to get HPV from something based on their activity, that is not quite the same as the MMR vaccine, which is for something that is infectious.
The reason the Europeans do it differently very often has to do with their nationalized health care systems: how often you are expected to visit the doctor, the prevalence of particular diseases in particular countries, etc. So that’s a little more complicated than people may think.
But I will tell you what is not particularly complicated. There is no data, none, that links vaccines to autism. This is not a scientifically-backed concept.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2483?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
But this is what the president was promoting on Monday. I object to this because data and science show this is inaccurate.
This has been a big push by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for years. The president suggested that breaking up the vaccine schedule would decrease the prevalence of autism. The data do not exist for this proposition. They don&#8217;t.
Trump stated, “It is essential to our research efforts that we have the very best vaccine recommendations in the entire world. So we&#8217;re reducing them. We&#8217;re changing it to visits over a period of a year or year and a half so they get 20% of what they would have gotten in one big shot.”
When he says “one big shot,” he says that as though it&#8217;s a water bottle filled with vaccine.
I don&#8217;t have a problem with changing the vaccine schedule, but suggesting that this is going to reduce autism diagnoses in the United States is not backed by any evidence.
The person most associated with promoting this nonsense is gone — Andrew Wakefield. He published a paper in 1998 suggesting that there was a link between vaccination and autism. In the original paper — which was later retracted by The Lancet — Wakefield and 12 co-authors <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2831678/">claimed</a> to have investigated a consecutive series of 12 children referred to the Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine with chronic enterocolitis and regressive developmental disorder. The authors reported that the parents of eight of the 12 children associated their loss of acquired skills, including language, with the MMR vaccine.
Number one: That was self-reported. Number two: That was an extraordinarily small sample size. Number three: Wakefield had been selecting these people, and his research had been funded by lawyers acting for the parents who were trying to sue the vaccine manufacturers.
The British General Medical Council found that Wakefield had acted unethically and had shown callous disregard for the children in his study, upon whom the invasive tests were performed. And all of this was fueled by Wakefield pushing single vaccines rather than, for example, the combined MMR. The new schedule that Trump is suggesting separates M from MR, measles from mumps and rubella, as opposed to one shot.
The reason all this was combined was to minimize inconvenience and ensure kids got the full battery of vaccines. Separating them off, the idea goes, means three separate visits. How many parents want to go to the doctor three separate times, as opposed to just doing it once and being done with it?
I&#8217;m not arguing that we can&#8217;t make changes to the vaccine schedule based on the best possible science or good decision-making, but the attempt to link this with autism diagnosis is not scientific.
RFK Jr. argued that there has been a skyrocketing increase in autism diagnoses after 1990.
The reason that exists is that the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1975. It funded schools to a greater extent because of disability claims. In 1990, the federal government reset the standards for disability claims in schools, and they included autism.
So it turns out that if you are a school and you wish for additional federal or state monies, a great way to do that is through additional autism claims. It’s the same thing with ADHD, by the way.
How do I know that this is a case of incentives creating outcomes? Because there is a study done this year that compared autism prevalence by functional severity.
Anyone who has ever met kids with actual severe autism, moderate to profound autism, knows it is real.
But if you&#8217;re weird or if you have a particular skill set or if you&#8217;re kind of smart, people will say that you&#8217;re autistic now, which is stupid.
Autism is a real thing, and severe autism is disabling. Kids with severe autism very often cannot talk. They cannot interact in society. Having moderate autism means that you largely cannot fully interact. You very often need full-time care.
It is not the same thing as “You&#8217;re a weirdo with a 158 IQ.” Autism is not just “Your buddy’s a little bit weird around people.”
Guess what? It turns out that prevalence by functional severity, meaning diagnoses of moderate to profound autism, has been down since 2000. The diagnosis of moderate to profound autism was 1.5 per 1000 children in 2000. It is 1.2 per 1000 children in 2016.
Real hardcore autism is actually slightly down between 2000 and 2016. How about mild autism? The diagnosis rate for eight-year-olds has more than doubled. In 2000, it was 3.1 per 1000 children. Now it is 7.3 per 1000 children. Borderline autism has absolutely skyrocketed.
If autism diagnoses are increasing across the board, wouldn&#8217;t you expect more moderate to profound cases? Why is moderate to profound declining, while mild and borderline are wildly increasing?
So if you’re mild, borderline, or have no significant challenges, there has been a massive increase in diagnoses; if you&#8217;re moderate to profound autism, a decrease in diagnoses.
What could explain this? Could it be the possibility that, just as the number of COVID-attributed deaths skyrocketed when the federal government started paying hospitals based on COVID deaths, and so people started mislabeling heart attacks as COVID, could it be we&#8217;re getting a mass overdiagnosis?
It turns out that public policy has this impact on a wide variety of maladies. There was a pretty massive increase in disability all the way up to about 1978-79. That’s because the federal government started making Social Security disability more widely available then.
It turned out that a lot of people were engaging in fraud. And so a bunch of restrictions were imposed, resulting in a complete flatlining of disability spending between 1978 and roughly 1990.
Then there was a recession, and people started claiming disability to get the money; the government loosened it up, and boom, exponential growth.
It&#8217;s almost as though people respond to incentive structures.
Why am I pointing this out? Because data matters.
And this, to me, remains the greatest sin of people like Anthony Fauci. They destroyed any faith in data.

follow the science

The Cardinal Sin That Shattered America’s Trust

Anthony Fauci

Ben Shapiro

COVID

Opinion

Vaccines

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday directing the federal government to overhaul childhood vaccine recommendations, delivering a major policy victory to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again movement.
The order, dubbed “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations,” calls for reducing the number of diseases for which vaccines are routinely recommended for all children, spacing out childhood immunizations, and eventually administering the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine as three separate shots.
Under the order, vaccines for 11 diseases, including measles, mumps, rubella, polio and whooping cough, would be recommended for all children, down from 18 under the current schedule. Vaccines for several other diseases, including hepatitis A and B and meningococcal disease, would instead be recommended for certain higher-risk groups or through shared decision-making between parents and doctors. Influenza and COVID-19 vaccines would also fall into the shared decision-making category.
The order also directs federal agencies to work toward making separate measles, mumps and rubella vaccines available in the United States. “To the maximum extent feasible,” it calls for childhood immunizations to be administered at separate medical visits. 
Trump defended the changes during an Oval Office signing ceremony, saying they would reduce the number of vaccines administered during individual visits and arguing that parents should have greater control over when their children receive shots. 
“It’s inconvenient, it’s five stops, but it’s something that I think will have a huge impact on autism,” Trump said.
Trump has repeatedly suggested that childhood vaccines could be connected to rising autism diagnoses. Numerous large studies have found no association between the MMR vaccines and autism. The president also acknowledged Monday that he did not have scientific evidence for a claim he made that the current MMR vaccine could be “lethal.”
“What I’ve heard is that there are some people that say it is that way, and I say, ‘Well, let’s say there’s a 5 percent chance of it; let’s split it up,’” Trump said. 
Secretary Kennedy, who has promoted vaccine skepticism for years and made reshaping federal vaccine policy a central part of his tenure at the Department of Health and Human Services, stood alongside Trump during the announcement.
The order directs HHS to develop proposed changes to the childhood vaccine schedule within 90 days. It also calls for additional research into vaccine safety, alternative vaccine ingredients and the timing and sequencing of childhood immunizations.
The practical effect of the order remains uncertain. States generally determine which vaccines children must receive to attend public schools, rather than the federal government, and individual measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines are not currently available in the United States. Manufacturers would have to develop and obtain approval for each product separately.
The order acknowledges that similar previous directives have been <a href="https://www.npr.org/2026/03/16/nx-s1-5749530/judge-blocks-rfk-jr-vaccine-changes">delayed by litigation</a> and instructs federal agencies to advance the new recommendations “to the fullest extent allowable by law.” It also directs the Justice Department to pursue what it calls “meritorious” legal challenges involving state vaccine requirements and exemptions, including those based on parental authority and religious and medical grounds. 
Medical organizations and some Republicans have criticized the order.
 “I’m a doctor. This executive order is wrong,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), chairman of the Senate Health Committee, wrote on <a href="https://x.com/SenBillCassidy/status/2086906268669624512">X</a>. “The President does not have the expertise to make these changes.”
“Vaccines are overwhelmingly safe. Vaccines are effective. Vaccines DO NOT cause autism,” Cassidy added, arguing that separating vaccines could require children to receive more shots to obtain the same protection.
The administration has portrayed the changes as part of a broader effort to give parents more control over medical decisions and to reconsider longstanding federal recommendations.

US-POLITICS-TRUMP

Trump Orders Major Overhaul Of Childhood Vaccine Recommendations

Children's Health

Family policy

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The Trump administration is shutting down an organ donor group after finding “patients placed on the organ donation pathway who should’ve never been there.”
“We found patients placed on the organ donation pathway who should’ve never been there,” said Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday. “We found cases with a donation process continued, despite signs that patients were not appropriate organ donors.”
One of those cases <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/05/health/kentucky-organ-procurement-organization-hhs">involved</a> TJ Hoover, a man who almost had his organs harvested after he was declared dead. In 2021, Hoover was taken to the hospital in cardiac arrest after an overdose. He woke up a couple of days later on the operating table to his chest being shaved and hospital staff discussing how they would take his organs. Donna Rhorer, TJ’s sister, said she became concerned something wasn’t right when TJ appeared to open his eyes and look around the room.
&#8220;It was like it was his way of letting us know, you know, &#8216;Hey, I&#8217;m still here,'&#8221; Rhorer <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/10/16/nx-s1-5113976/organ-transplantion-mistake-brain-dead-surgery-still-alive">said</a> during an interview. When Rhorer brought it up to medical professionals, she said she was told that it was just a common reflex.
Kennedy announced the decertification and shutdown process for Network for Hope, an organ donor group serving Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia. Out of the nearly 350 organ donation cases reviewed, over 100 were flagged with concerning features, including patients showing clear signs incompatible with organ donation. At least 28 of the patients may not have been deceased when organ procurement was initiated, and multiple patients <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/us/organ-donations-kentucky.html">appeared</a> to exhibit pain or distress as they were being readied for surgery.
Network of Hope <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/us/organ-donations-kentucky.html">plans</a> to appeal the decision, with the organization saying, “More than 3,000 people waiting for a lifesaving organ transplant will be negatively impacted by the decision today.”
Two agencies under the Health and Human Services Department conducted independent investigations, but both Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) and Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) determined the network failed to correct deficiencies, ultimately leading to the decertification process.
“Today’s action to begin the decertification process sends a clear message, not just to organ transplant organizations, but to every provider that participates in CMS programs: If you can’t be trusted to safeguard patients and be responsible stewards of American taxpayer dollars, we’ll find organizations that can,” <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/hhs-decertifies-kentucky-organ-procurement-organization.html">said</a> CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.
The Trump administration is also establishing a misconduct reporting system to give patients and providers in organ retrieval a direct channel for safety concerns, a transparency tool that shows when organs are allocated outside the standard match list, and establish Organ Procurement Transplantation Network Officers who will oversee and investigate patient safety events in real time.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Testifies During House Hearing

The Organ Donation Cases Involving Patients Who Began Waking Up

Network of Hope

Organ Donation

A Senate panel investigating Dr. Anthony Fauci has reportedly obtained a copy of the cellphone he used during the COVID-19 pandemic ahead of a key committee vote Thursday to hold him in contempt of Congress. 
The <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/anthony-fauci-covid-phone-senate-96ebd8be?st=68LAAW">Wall Street Journal</a> reported Wednesday that the Department of Health and Human Services, which is led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, transferred a copy of the phone&#8217;s records to the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. 
Fauci used the phone during his tenure as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, according to The Journal, which also revealed that Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Rand Paul (R-KY) have obtained &#8220;millions of additional Fauci-related pages&#8221; from government servers.
On Wednesday, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/when-it-comes-to-anthony-fauci-rand-paul-is-just-getting-started?topStoryPosition=undefined&amp;author=Mary+Margaret+Olohan&amp;category=Original&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;row=1&amp;rowHeadline=Top+Stories&amp;rowType=Top+Stories&amp;title=When+It+Comes+To+Anthony+Fauci%2C+Rand+Paul+Is+Just+Getting+Started">The Daily Wire</a> interviewed Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul, whose release of Fauci&#8217;s private diaries helped set the stage for an explosive Capitol Hill hearing where Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times.
“Historically, votes like this have gone to the full Senate, but I think there’s no absolute rule that says we can’t send it directly to the Department of Justice,” Paul said. “So my plan is that if we win the vote on Thursday, to immediately send it to the Department of Justice with a recommendation for prosecution, even if it passes the whole Senate.”
Paul’s office sent two criminal referrals to the Biden Justice Department, the senator said, and two more under President Donald Trump’s administration.
“This will be the first time that our entire committee or the majority of our committee sends it,” he noted. “So we’ll see what happens. We’ll discuss with [Senate Majority Leader John] Thune whether or not he thinks he can get the votes to do it on the floor.”
A floor vote would require 60 votes to pass, meaning Democrats would have to cooperate. Last week, Thune said that Fauci’s answers were “completely inadequate” and that the floor vote was “certainly an option that ought to be available to us.”
Paul told The Daily Wire that he does not expect Democrats to support a contempt vote and that he wants the Justice Department to prosecute Fauci for contempt of Congress. He plans to send the DOJ a legal brief arguing that Fauci could not invoke the Fifth Amendment because President Joe Biden&#8217;s pardon eliminated any risk of self-incrimination, leaving him with only an obligation to answer truthfully.
Statutory penalties for <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/192">contempt of Congress</a>, a federal misdemeanor, carry fines between $100 and $100,000 and a mandatory sentence of one to 12 months in prison.
“This is an important case because I think a lot of people anticipate that President Trump is going to issue similar pardons to many people in his administration who will end up being called before Congress, and the precedent here is important,” Mark Osler, a law professor and pardon power expert, told the <a href="https://apnews.com/article/fauci-fifth-amendment-congress-justice-department-paul-868a0dfcf016d830571fb6a78afae4f9">Associated Press. </a>
&nbsp;
&nbsp;

US-POLITICS-HEALTH-VIRUS-HEARING

Fauci’s COVID Phone Turned Over To Senate Panel Ahead Of Contempt Vote

Coronavirus

COVID-19

fauci diaries

Investigations

News

Pandemic

Politics

Rand Paul

Senate

U.S. Senate

“I wasn’t part of the problem” during Covid-19, insisted CNN’s Dana Bash in an interview with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday. “Let me just say, for the record, that I am not saying that the entire Covid reaction was accurate. It was a scary time, and people made mistakes.” Bash later added that “What we were doing in Covid… is getting the best information, the best science that we can and putting it out there.”
But Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary shows that the media was more interested in pushing specific narratives and promoting Fauci than it was in getting the “best information” to the public. On April 17, 2021, for example, Bash herself texted Fauci, “I just watched the whole Jordan thing. Again, you’re a better man than I&#8230;. As our friend Wolf Blitzer said to me yesterday – no one would have blamed you if you said simply ‘Mr. Jordan, go f&#8212; yourself.’”
Bash was referring to a House Oversight Committee hearing in which Representative Jim Jordan pointed out many of the “mistakes” Bash now admits were made.
The next day, Bash sent Fauci another text “pointing out that Vanity Fair recently had a headline that said: Jim Jordan trips over his own asshole trying to debate Anthony Fauci.”
Since Senator Rand Paul released Fauci’s diary, journalists have claimed that he had no real authority to impose lockdowns or mandates, suggesting it wasn’t their job to hold him accountable. “Dr. Fauci did not have the authority to force anyone to do anything,” the New York Times <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/1de9a5f6-7f9b-447d-a6cf-454f3904954f?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">stated</a>.
But his diary shows how members of the media worked to help Fauci win policy debates against President Donald Trump. As early as March 11, 2020, Fauci was aware that the press was heavily on his side, noting, “the CNN commentators (Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, David Gergon, David Gregory) all discussed me as the adult in the room and the person [we] should all trust.”
In this way, the media worked to undermine the authority of the democratically elected president by upholding Fauci, an unelected bureaucrat, as the ultimate expert and truth-teller. While today they claim that Fauci had no power, six years ago they insisted he be granted nearly unlimited power.
When Trump said Fauci disagreed with a decision in May 2020, Fauci noted that “Chris Cuomo, and Jake Tapper are trying to clarify this in my defense on their shows.” In October 2020, Kaitlan Collins contacted Fauci about a campaign ad and tweeted out a statement for him, which “went totally viral on twitter [sic] and several networks and cable reported it.”
Fauci had personal relationships with several members of the press. On April 13, 2020, he noted that CNN’s Jake Tapper called him “to make sure the interview did not cause me any problems.” On July 1, 2020, Fauci wrote that he had dinner with Tapper and his wife. “Terrific couple. Friendship building.” In October, they had dinner again at Fauci’s home.
Journalists didn’t try to hide their affection for Fauci. Chris Cuomo “gave a wonderful explanation to viewers how close and good friends we are and how I checked in on him every night including weekends for weeks during his COVID illness,” Fauci noted in May 2020. “Never saw something like that on TV.”
It’s no coincidence that much of Fauci’s diary is spent recording his various appearances and interviews. Under pressure from the media, political leaders deferred to Fauci when crafting policy, including on issues like school closures, his diary <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/145efd6c-86b7-482c-b4b8-f7635507796e?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">shows</a>.
Rather than, as Bash claimed, sharing the “best science” with viewers, TV and print journalists aired Fauci’s views without examining the evidence. If they had examined it, they would have reported on the publicly available data Fauci privately discussed in his diary. Fauci knew, for example, that vaccines <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/85c12387-d7b7-4030-9098-eb5104e7c211?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">did not prevent</a>infection and transmission and that natural immunity <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/2b5df709-c1c1-49d3-90cc-0b2576248bcc?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">was protective</a>. These facts made vaccine mandates unnecessary, yet he <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/4ac32575-f61a-43e6-a09b-a020e21d056e?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">relentlessly</a> <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/a2d50c08-d88d-42bf-bfd7-7a0b31cd3cc4?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">sought</a> to implement them.
Years later, news outlets have failed to accurately report on Covid, even retrospectively. For instance, they ignored documents <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/4d90b8be-87d4-4ddb-ab36-06c0df3989fc?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">revealing</a> that the CDC received concerning reports about vaccine-induced myocarditis in 2021, and that the CDC Director lied about it. And in 2023, mainstream media outlets did not cover extensive records showing that Fauci and other scientists initially believed Covid originated from a lab in Wuhan before <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/071fc69c-b472-40f6-bb19-2e2b08a7a310?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">collaborating</a> to dismiss the lab leak as a “conspiracy theory.”
While news anchors like Bash may still believe that Covid was well-managed despite a few “mistakes,” it is by now undeniable that their preferred policies created enormous backlash not just against Fauci personally, but against medical institutions, the Democratic Party, and the media itself.
Much of this backlash is due to the kind of duplicitousness displayed in Fauci’s diary. Scientists and officials privately acknowledged the realities of gain-of-function research, vaccine-induced myocarditis, and natural immunity, all while giving the public entirely different messages and using censorship to enforce compliance.
The liberal media’s response to the Fauci hearing shows a broad lack of understanding, or lack of desire to understand. With defending Covid lockdowns and mandates still a political liability, it would be strategically wise for journalists to avoid doubling down. So why do they continue to insist that criticism of Fauci is baseless? Why can’t they reckon with what really happened during Covid?
In 2020 and 2021, The New York Times and Washington Post published article after article in support of school closures. They claimed Covid could <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/87cced0f-80ec-4740-b2f5-0309b35815e1?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“soar”</a> if schools reopened, that it was <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/46423805-72cc-495a-97eb-3f1831066983?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">risky</a> for children to play together, and that virtual learning provided black families a <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/ee52dc86-25b1-4acc-a595-f959dd34929a?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">relief</a> from racism. They published headlines like <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/c96a5af3-f7d9-4416-93f3-35fe13a398f9?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“Can We Stop Telling ‘Corona Kids’ How Little They Are Learning?,”</a> <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/d349090c-ca97-4d2a-a95b-6a23e88b0142?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“The Racist Effects of School Reopening During the Pandemic—By a Teacher,”</a> <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/c272127a-2785-4a4b-bf44-b16f84308569?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“Does It Hurt Children to Measure Pandemic Learning Loss?”</a> and <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/a1c9c63a-ac68-4be5-a707-431dbd7c1ef1?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“Actually Wearing a Mask Can Help Your Child Learn.”</a>
This was all despite the fact that European nations had safely reopened their public schools in 2020 and education ministers in the European Union announced that they saw no negative consequences from reopening schools. As David Zweig <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/c387c76e-9078-450c-8c6c-5193f63a498a?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">points out</a>, no one in legacy media reported on this.
At first, when the Chinese government imposed a lockdown in Wuhan, China, many in the liberal media questioned the approach, <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/d7592799-bbab-40e9-bea6-9347ae1257c4?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">noting</a> that it would violate human rights and be ineffective. Democratic politicians <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/555f575b-3cbe-44fc-a08e-e8600245cfb1?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">encouraged</a> people to go to Chinatown and said that concern about Covid was <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/efee174c-e87b-49ff-9e9b-c09977d01ec7?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">racist</a>.
But when it became clear that Covid offered unprecedented power for the professional expert class, the media and the broader Left changed their approach. “Many progressives see the coronavirus response,” <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/1be47999-c7b5-4554-be92-3b6d21143db6?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">noted</a> NPR in May 2020, “as a chance to prove that policies they support can work and should be made permanent… Now there is a crisis, and Democrats want to use this moment to remake the system.”
Covid could thus be used for social restructuring, locking in government spending, and continuously attacking Trump as a mass killer. Before Covid, Trump had remained politically resilient. In January 2020, the percentage of Americans satisfied with “the way things are going” went up to <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/fe4735fd-16d0-4f6e-8a2c-39ab27d4d56a?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">45 percent</a>, the highest since February 2005. And Trump had signaled that if he achieved a second term, he would take aim at many of the Left’s core achievements, including in the areas of education and immigration.
Covid offered a chance to thwart this trajectory while cementing the authority of the managerial class over democratic institutions in the name of “safety” and “saving lives.”
The Left equated wrongthink and “misinformation” with murder, justifying unprecedented censorship. When three epidemiologists from Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard simply suggested an alternative approach in the Great Barrington Declaration, the New York Times called it “dangerous” for not supporting lockdowns. Journalists denounced dissenters and “the unvaccinated” in increasingly dehumanizing terms.
<a href="https://substack.com/redirect/ae808a81-31bc-47b3-8e97-e7e4e1dc3086?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“I’m Furious at the Unvaccinated,”</a> one column was titled in The New York Times. <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/fed65b3d-1936-42f2-83dc-7137eeee445c?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“Unvaxxed, Unmasked and Putting Our Kids at Risk,”</a> read another. <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/2da283db-7774-45c6-aa93-eecfce685cdf?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“The Unvaccinated Are a Risk to All of Us,”</a> a Bloomberg headline stated.
The unvaccinated, explained CNN’s Don Lemon, were <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/f578a6c0-ebb5-4da9-9611-15ef58896575?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“idiotic and nonsensical.” </a>It was time to “start shaming them” or “leave them behind,” he said. Wrote a columnist in the Los Angeles Times, <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/8fe97ded-98ab-4af4-a043-f216a8f0c036?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">“Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes, but may be necessary.</a>” Others warned of “compassion fatigue” for the unvaccinated and platformed doctors who said they would refuse to treat them.
Liberal politicians who the media supported denounced their own citizens. President Joe Biden <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/5a22104a-7e52-4313-a378-24e7e5884122?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">said</a> in the fall of 2021 that his “patience [was] wearing thin” and that we needed to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated coworkers.” He declared a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” and <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/a8932eea-429a-4907-97e5-5b66354d89ed?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">warned</a> “the unvaccinated” that they would face a “winter of severe illness and death.”
“Do we tolerate these people?” <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/5ae06228-5b4f-4110-aade-80d5c82d7052?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">asked</a> Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, about the unvaccinated. They “are very often misogynistic and racist.” French President Emmanuel Macron <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/ba52db55-af3a-4c3c-ae01-5c74e4e71974?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">vowed</a> to put “pressure on the unvaccinated by limiting… access [to] social activities.” Someone who refuses the Covid vaccine, he said, is “not a citizen.” <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/347e4a6d-8101-4cd4-9e90-805d751c1172?j=eyJ1IjoiMjk0dHMifQ.cmJkfm0X0r0SrUjdPQSLO8z8KA2siPUsFk8HgV3kFag">Said</a> a commentator in The Washington Post, “Macron is right: It’s time to make life a living hell for anti-vaxxers.”
So-called “anti-vaxxers” and “anti-maskers” represented resistance to rule by experts, and their very survival was evidence that the experts, and the journalists who endorsed them, were wrong.
***
This is the first section of the author’s full essay. You can read the rest on Public <a href="https://www.public.news/p/journalists-are-still-defending-fauci">here</a> and <a href="https://www.public.news/">subscribe</a> to the newsletter.
Alex Gutentag is a Senior Editor for Public and writes about censorship, government abuse of power, and other topics. She has been a columnist for Tablet and a contributing editor for Compact. She is based in California.

Meet the Press – Season 73

COVID Bitter Clingers In The Media Will Never End Their Fauci Love Affair

Chris Cuomo

Dana Bash

DW Opinion

House Oversight Committee

Jake Tapper

Justin Trudeau

In a stunning revelation, Dana Bash <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/rfk-jr-torches-cnn-anchor-dana-bash-press-malpractice-covid-coverage-explosive-clash">admits</a> that it&#8217;s her job to tell the American people the truth. Where has that attitude been the last five years?
On CNN&#8217;s &#8220;State of the Union&#8221; this weekend, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the network&#8217;s chief fact-checker-in-residence got into it over how America responded to the COVID pandemic, and the two obviously had grievances to get off their chests. The conversation looked less like an interview and more like a holiday dinner after one too many eggnog martinis.
Things got heated when Bash pushed the line she&#8217;s pushed for years: Trump bears the blame, governors closed things because hospitals were overrun, Fauci didn&#8217;t shut down America.
RFK correctly called BS. 
 
Fauci&#8217;s own private diary entries show him actively engineering the closures he later denied under oath. March 9, 2020, Fauci advised New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to close schools in Westchester’s Orthodox Jewish communities. Six days later, he &#8220;convinced&#8221; Mayor Bill de Blasio to close New York City&#8217;s schools (de Blasio, per Fauci&#8217;s diary, &#8220;had already decided based on what I was saying on TV&#8221;), then went further, telling the mayor he should close the bars and restaurants too. De Blasio said he&#8217;d base it on Fauci&#8217;s recommendation.
I’m sure the “most famous scientist in the world” was giggling, penning that into the burn book.
Days later, Fauci advised de Blasio to push full shelter-in-place for the entire city over Cuomo&#8217;s objections, promising to lean on the governor himself. He privately celebrated convincing Trump to extend &#8220;15 Days to Slow the Spread&#8221; into a 30-day lockdown, calling it a &#8220;good outcome&#8221; that avoided ending mitigation &#8220;prematurely.&#8221; By October 2020, on CBS, he&#8217;d said the quiet part out loud: he recommended the president shut the country down.
Yet by 2022, once the learning-loss data and the empty ICUs became impossible to ignore, Fauci pivoted: he&#8217;d had nothing to do with school closures; the &#8220;default position&#8221; was always to keep kids in class. Wrong — the diary is the receipt. He was the top-down architect leaning on mayors and governors to do his bidding, while the press treated their compliance as spontaneous local wisdom.
Now Bash is doing damage control for the media’s image, but the damage is already done. Lockdowns shuttered 3.5 million businesses, cratered childhood education, and left the U.S. with some of the worst excess-mortality numbers among developed nations, because one man&#8217;s private certainty got laundered into public consensus, and nobody in the press box asked him to show his work.
Then Bash asked what RFK would do differently when the next pandemic hits (because, according to her experts, it’s going to happen within 10 years).
RFK quickly remarked that he’d protect constitutional rights and end the censorship that silenced dissenting doctors the first time around. Bash tried to pivot. RFK didn’t let her. “That was the job of CNN,&#8221; he told her. &#8220;To put the chyrons up on how many people are dying, to get people to comply.&#8221;
“You were part of the problem. There was absolute press malpractice. Your job is a fierce skepticism towards authority, and you weren’t doing that. You were beating up people who were dissenting.”
Boom.
And he’s absolutely correct. Take the lab-leak theory for example. Fauci privately noted the Wuhan market was an “amplifier,” not the source, and scientists on a February 2020 call he joined raised serious concerns about lab manipulation at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Publicly, the “Proximal Origin” paper (shaped with input from the Fauci circle) declared a lab origin “not plausible.” CNN ran with it. Lab leak was a “conspiracy theory,” “comic book” stuff, “widely debunked,” a “Trump talking point.” Then-CNN president Jeff Zucker reportedly ordered staff not to chase it. When former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield said it was most likely a lab origin, CNN framed it as “controversial” and “without evidence.” Only years later, <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/02/28/new-york-times-msnbc-cnn-slammed-over-debunked-lab-leak-theory/">once</a> FBI and court documents leaned toward the lab theory, did the network quietly soften the ridicule.
Because ostensibly it’s their job to “tell the truth to the American people,” once the truth becomes convenient.
CNN did the same with the mortality numbers. Fauci&#8217;s own February 2020 diary put the case fatality rate at 0.2%–0.3%, closer to a bad flu once mild and asymptomatic cases were counted. Weeks later, in congressional testimony, he told lawmakers the rate was 2%–3%, settling near 1% — 10 times deadlier than seasonal flu. The scarier number is the one that stuck; CNN ran the catastrophe models and sidelined the seroprevalence data that quickly told a calmer story.
The network also frightened parents silly into vaccinating their healthy kids. Which RFK rightfully pointed out. He charged that CNN’s job was “scaring people.” From late 2021 on, CNN treated pediatric vaccination as an unalloyed moral imperative; “Kids 5 to 11 can now get vaccinated. Here’s why it’s safe.” Segments pushed shots for children under 5 the moment the FDA authorized them. Jill Biden’s CNN op-ed urged parents that the vaccine was “the best way” to protect kids. Anchors and experts framed hesitation as dangerous, citing every hospitalization while downplaying the extremely low risk of severe disease in healthy children and the emerging myocarditis signal in adolescent males.
By 2022, Florida’s health department, citing the data, said healthy five- to 17-year-olds “may not benefit.” Randomized trials showed the shots reduced short-term symptomatic infection but offered negligible absolute risk reduction against severe outcomes for low-risk kids. Transmission benefits evaporated with variants. Yet CNN kept up the pressure, treating parental caution as anti-science. RFK asked Bash to present a single study proving net benefit for children. She pivoted to “data upon data” about adult mortality and “misinformation deaths.”
A master of misdirection.
If the world does see another pandemic, it’s good to know certain scientists won’t have their First Amendment right stripped away for saying an uncomfortable truth. Take Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta. In October 2020, the trio authored the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing for focused protection of the vulnerable instead of blanket lockdowns. NIH Director Francis Collins wanted a &#8220;quick and devastating&#8221; takedown. Fauci called it &#8220;nonsense and very dangerous.&#8221; On CNN, a former Harvard professor announced that herd immunity was &#8220;another word for mass murder.&#8221; The chorus followed, branding the authors reckless cranks.
Today, Bhattacharya runs the NIH. The &#8220;crazies&#8221; keep getting promoted; the experts who got it catastrophically wrong still want the benefit of the doubt.
Look, reporters get things wrong sometimes; so do experts. But there&#8217;s a difference between an honest miss and five years of &#8220;trust the experts&#8221; deployed as a gag order, while the experts secretly admitted they weren&#8217;t sure.
Fauci privately knew mortality was far lower and later walked back school closures. CNN treated lab leak as taboo and pediatric vaccines as non-negotiable. Dissenters were “beaten up.” And now that the diaries, the excess-death data, the learning-loss studies, and the intelligence assessments are public, the same network hosts are rightfully getting grilled for gaslighting us all for years.
And RFK called them on it live, to a quivering, culpable Bash. The ultimate fact-check. And it felt good to watch.

Microplastics Event at EPA

RFK Jr. Owns Dana Bash Proving Media Fed COVID Hysteria

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday launched an online cooking series aimed at helping Americans prepare healthy, budget-friendly meals as part of the Trump administration&#8217;s &#8220;Make America Healthy Again&#8221; initiative.
The new series, &#8220;The Real Food Show,&#8221; features Kennedy traveling across the country to meet with chefs and culinary experts who demonstrate recipes using minimally processed ingredients.
“Inspired by President Trump&#8217;s Make America Healthy Again agenda, Secretary Kennedy is bringing the Dietary Guidelines for Americans to life and showing that cooking with real food can be practical, approachable, and affordable for every family,” the Department of Health and Human Services <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/real-food-show/index.html">said</a> in a statement.
“Every episode is packed with affordable, budget-friendly recipes and easy cooking techniques designed to save you time and money,” the department added.
In a promotional video announcing the series, Kennedy <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWBP4REwZeY">said</a> the goal is to encourage Americans to embrace healthier eating habits through simple home cooking. 
“Thanks to President Trump, we flipped the food pyramid and put real food back to where it belongs — at the center of the American plate,&#8221; Kennedy said. &#8220;America, it&#8217;s time to eat real food. Let’s get cooking.” 
The new series premiered Thursday on the HHS website and YouTube. Celebrity chef Andrew Gruel joined Kennedy for the first episode, where they prepared crispy wild Alaskan salmon cakes served with an apple, white bean and greens salad.
&#8220;I&#8217;m excited to be part of the premiere episode because I believe the message is much bigger than a cooking show,&#8221; Gruel <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/rfk-jr-takes-maha-kitchen-hhs-cooking-series-promoting-healthy-meals-under-5">told</a> Fox News Digital.
&#8220;My hope is that this series helps demystify cooking and shows people that preparing crave-worthy, healthy meals doesn&#8217;t require professional training or expensive ingredients,&#8221; he added.

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Move Over, Food Network: RFK Jr. Has A Cooking Show

nutrition

TV Shows

YouTube

Measles, the world’s most infectious disease once declared eliminated, has made a comeback in the United States, ravaging states such as South Carolina, Florida, Utah, Virginia and Texas.
Multiple outbreaks occurred over the past year across the United States, costing millions in taxpayer money. South Carolina has<a href="https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html"> suffered</a> through 670 cases this year. Virginia has <a href="https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/measles/">reported</a> 176 confirmed cases and eight hospitalizations, and the Texas Department of State Health Services has <a href="https://www.dshs.texas.gov/vaccine-preventable-diseases/vaccine-preventable-disease-conditions/measles-rubeola/measles-rubeola/measles-rubeola-data">reported</a> a total of 182 cases as of July 15.
The airborne virus is notorious for spreading rapidly. Nine out of 10 people who come into close contact with a person infected with measles can come down with the illness if they are not protected, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/index.html">reports</a>. This makes the disease about five to six times more contagious than the common cold.
Three to four million Americans contracted the disease every year in the 1950s and 60s. However, Health officials declared measles eliminated in 2000 after 12 consecutive months without endemic transmission. 
However, resistance to taking vaccines has grown over the years. This is partly due to people refusing vaccines produced using cell lines originally derived from aborted fetal tissue obtained in the 1960s — <a href="https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety/vaccine-ingredients/fetal-tissues">such as</a> the rubella vaccine in the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine. Additionally, <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10224336/">studies</a> have found that many parents remain concerned about a possible link between vaccines and autism.
As fewer people take the measles vaccine, more cases are popping up in the United States. Johns Hopkins University, which manages a <a href="https://publichealth.jhu.edu/ivac/resources/us-measles-tracker">tracker</a> for measles cases, reports that the number of cases for 2026 has reached 2,295 — the highest number of cases since 1991
“This is not simply the return of a childhood rash illness,” epidemiologist Dr. Syra Madad <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/07/22/health/us-hits-most-cases-of-worlds-most-contagious-disease-in-35-years/">told</a> the New York Post. “Measles can cause pneumonia, encephalitis, hospitalization and death, especially in young children and medically vulnerable people.”
Measles can also create the condition called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis. This is a fatal neurological condition that causes inflammation and scarring of the brain, the National Institutes of Health <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK560673/">reports</a>. This condition can take up to 20 years after a measles infection to develop. 
Prominent health officials in the Trump administration have called on all Americans to take the measles vaccine, especially after the 2025 measles outbreak.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/02/09/us-news/measles-outbreak-surges-in-us-as-dr-oz-begs-people-to-get-vaccinated/">told</a> Americans to “take the vaccine, please.”
“Not all illnesses are equally dangerous and not all people are equally susceptible to those illnesses,” Oz said on CNN&#8217;s “State of the Union.” “But measles is one you should get your vaccine [for].”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is known for being skeptical about the benefit of modern vaccines rolled out by Big Pharma, has urged parents to consult their doctors about vaccinating their children.
“The measles outbreak in Texas is a call to action for all of us to reaffirm our commitment to public health,” Kennedy <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/robert-f-kennedy-jr-measles-outbreak-call-action-all-us?title=op-ed%20for%20Fox%20News">said</a> in an opinion piece last year. “By working together — parents, healthcare providers, community leaders, and government officials, we can prevent future outbreaks and protect the health of our nation.” 
“Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons,” Kennedy added.
This article has been updated to correct that South Carolina has reported 670 cases in 2026, not 997.

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A Disease Once Thought Defeated Is Spreading Across America

The World’s Most Infectious Disease Is Making a Comeback in the United States

Florida

Measles

Mehmet Oz

South Carolina

Texas

Utah

Virginia

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