President Donald Trump has signed a new executive order on childhood vaccines, alarming multiple health experts and medical organizations due to the changes having no scientific basis. The order, titled the “Delivering Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations for Americans,” was signed by Trump in the Oval Office on Monday. It calls for revising vaccine recommendations for children…
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Amid speculation from the public that a deadline had passed to replace Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, whose health status and ability to return to office are presently unknown, Gov. Andy Beshear (D-Kentucky) has reiterated that no such deadline exists. McConnell’s office has said that the senator required hospitalization in June for a fall in his home. The senator has made no…
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It’s difficult to say whether Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. intended to clash with CNN’s Dana Bash during his latest appearance on “State of the Union,” but there was a reason the host characterized the interview as “contentious.”
Over the course of the on-air segment, Kennedy attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, accused CNN of vague misdeeds, peddled absurdities about the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines and, when pressed on preparations for future possible pandemics, prioritized individual liberties over public health.
But perhaps most notably, Kennedy appeared eager, if not desperate, to rewrite the recent past. In the secretary’s telling, it was Fauci’s fault that so many Americans were sickened by the contagion (which is absurd), it was federal officials who shut down businesses and government offices (it was actually state and local officials), and it was the United States that saw the world’s highest death rate from Covid.
RFK Jr: We had the highest death rate from covid of any nation on earthBASH: That’s not accurateRFK Jr: What I said was accurateBASH: There are other countries that had higherRFK Jr: When Fauci was mismanaging the pandemic, he was doing it under the Biden administration — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-02T13:09:17.612Z
When Bash tried to remind viewers of reality, Kennedy continued to insist that his misinformation was accurate. It was not.
The interview came just a few days after a mind-numbing Senate hearing in which Republican members also tried to rewrite the story of what transpired in 2020, recasting Fauci as the villain of the story.
The war on the recent past, however, is being fought on other fronts. Two days after the embarrassing Senate hearing,
When George W. Bush’s administration took steps to pass Medicare Part D ahead of the Republican president’s re-election campaign, the entire process was an embarrassing mess. The White House misled Congress about the cost of the prescription drug program, GOP leaders on Capitol Hill used ugly tactics to force through legislation and Republicans insisted the whole endeavor be deficit financed, their “fiscal responsibility” rhetoric notwithstanding.
Democrats fought against the proposal, pushing a more efficient and more cost-effective approach, but their efforts fell short, and Bush’s policy became law in late 2003.
In the years that followed, Democrats resisted calls to repeal Medicare Part D and instead took steps to make it better. In fact, during Joe Biden’s presidency, federal policymakers agreed to help subsidize millions of seniors’ prescription drug costs as part of a broader effort to improve the Bush-era policy.
Take a wild guess what Donald Trump and his team want to do to those subsidies. The Wall Street Journal reported:
The Trump administration plans to end a subsidy program that helped hold down premiums for Medicare drug plans, a move that could leave many seniors facing higher rates for their prescription coverage next year.
The move will eliminate a program that is giving insurance companies an estimated $3.6 billion in subsidies this year to blunt increases in premiums for the Medicare prescription plans, known as Part D. The program will end after 2026, according to administration officials.
Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, confirmed via social media that the subsidies had been scrapped, but he argued that they were no longer necessary and that Medicare beneficiaries would have
Over the past year or so, leading Trump administration officials from the Pentagon to the Department of Transportation have sparked controversies by making unfortunate and unnecessary changes to online public resources.
But arguably the most important website change happened last fall when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. personally intervened and directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change its website, which used to reflect the scientific consensus, alerting the public to the fact that vaccines do not cause autism.
The revised online resource told the public, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” This was a ridiculous assertion at odds with basic logic — by this reasoning, the claim “saxophones do not cause autism” is also not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that saxophones cause autism — and it was certainly unbecoming of the CDC, which used to represent the international gold standard in its field.
Roughly nine months later, this issue returned to the fore when Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, endorsed Erica Schwartz’s nomination to lead the CDC after it agreed to change the centers’ website on vaccines and autism.
Cassidy was apparently impressed by what he characterized as a constructive move. “I am confident that [Schwartz] knows what she is doing and will stand against those who don’t,” the senator told The Washington Post. He added that “as a sign of good faith, HHS modified the CDC’s autism and
For Americans concerned about public-health challenges, Friday afternoon brought a series of discouraging headlines. For example, we learned late last week that the United States has recorded more cases of measles in 2026 than in any other year since the virus was declared eliminated in 2000 — and this year isn’t yet over. Around the same time, roughly 1.5 million dozen white and brown cage-free eggs were recalled due to potential salmonella contamination.
And then, of course, there’s the cyclospora problem: Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday that they’ve linked cases of a diarrhea-causing parasite tied to shredded lettuce to additional states, bringing the new total to nine states.
As Friday came to an end, Frank Yiannas, who served as the Food and Drug Administration’s deputy commissioner for food policy and response under Donald Trump and Joe Biden, called for an independent review of the federal government’s response to the cyclospora outbreak.
“This one deserves a lot of questions, and it is starting to approach a catastrophic level in terms of how mismanaged it’s been on multiple fronts,” Yiannas told Politico. Pointing to the outbreak’s magnitude and widespread consumer confusion, he went on to criticize the “lack of strong federal leadership.”
It was against this backdrop that the incumbent president fielded some questions from reporters on Friday during an unrelated event in the Oval Office. “There’s this nasty parasite that is giving people in nine states explosive diarrhea,” Fox News’ Peter Doocy said. “When is it going to be safe to eat lettuce again?”
Doocy: “There’s this nasty parasite that is giving people in nine states explosive diarrhea. When is