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Trump says he wants RFK Jr. to investigate potential link between childhood vaccines, autism

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

‘Well, if you take a look at autism, go back 20 years: Autism was almost nonexistent, it was one out of 100,000. And now it’s close to one out of 100. I mean, what’s happening?’ the president-elect asked.

President-elect Donald Trump told NBC’s Meet the Press that his pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will look into potential links between childhood vaccines and autism.

During the Sunday Morning interview with Kristen Welker — which one conservative commentator characterized as “an absolute masterclass” in dealing with hostile corporate journalists — Trump defended RFK Jr.’s quest to investigate the vaccines/autism link as Welker repeatedly insisted that no link exists.

Welker desperately wanted to coax Trump into saying that he’s outright opposed to childhood vaccines, but Trump repeatedly sidestepped her statements, serving up sound judgment for her listeners instead.

Trump would only say that if certain vaccines are shown to be “dangerous for children” they should be eliminated.

“When you look at some of the problems, when you look at what’s going on with disease and sickness in our country, something’s wrong,” Trump emphasized.

“Are you talking about autism?” Welker asked.

“Well, if you take a look at autism, go back 20 years: Autism was almost nonexistent, it was one out of 100,000. And now it’s close to one out of 100. I mean, what’s happening?” he asked.

When Welker insisted that studies have shown that there is no link between vaccines and autism, Trump allowed that “Maybe it’s not vaccines, maybe it’s chlorine in the water … I want them to look at everything.”

“Certain vaccines are incredible,” Trump said. “But maybe some aren’t, and if they aren’t, we have to find out.”

 

RFK Jr. is known for vehemently opposing vaccines, a stance he adopted after the mothers of vaccine-injured children implored him to look into the research linking thimerosal to neurological injuries, including autism. He went on to found Children’s Health Defense, an organization with the stated mission of “ending childhood health epidemics by eliminating toxic exposure,” largely through vaccines.

Kennedy said in October that Trump had asked him to reorganize and “clean up” federal health agencies like the CDC and FDA. This would involve ending conflicts of interest that favor the interests of pharmaceutical companies over evidence-based medicine, according to Kennedy.

He further shared that Trump had tasked him with ending “the chronic disease epidemic in this country,” especially chronic disease among children.

The future head of HHS recently described the unholy alliance between government health agencies and pharmaceutical companies. He explained how lucrative government-mandated children’s vaccines have been for the pharmaceutical industry:

There’s no downstream liability, there’s no front-end safety testing – that saves them a quarter billion dollars – and there’s no marketing and advertising costs, because the federal government is ordering 78 million school kids to take that vaccine every year.

What better product could you have? And so there was a gold rush to add all these new vaccines to the schedule that we don’t need. Most of these vaccines are unnecessary. Many of them are for diseases that are not even casually contagious.

It was a gold rush, because if you get onto that schedule, it’s a billion dollars a year for your company.

And in many cases, NIH is earning the royalties.

According to Kennedy, more obscene than the huge profits being horded by Big Pharma are the vast number of negative side effects from all those untested vaccines.

“Neurological diseases” have “exploded,” he said.

“ADHD, sleep disorders, language delays, ASD, autism, Tourette’s syndrome, ticks, narcolepsy. These are all things that I never heard of,” Kennedy said. “Autism went from one in 10,000 in my generation according to CDC data to one in every 34 kids today.”

RFK Jr. as future head of HHS scares Nobel laureates and The New York Times

Meanwhile, 77 Nobel laureates signed a letter urging the Senate to oppose Kennedy’s confirmation as head of HHS.

Thee New York Times described Kennedy as “a staunch critic of mainstream medicine” who “has been hostile to the scientists and agencies he would oversee.”

To many Americans, those are the perfect qualifications for the next head of HHS.

The laureates wrote:

The proposal to place Mr. Kennedy in charge of the federal agencies responsible for protecting the health of American citizens and for conducting the medical research that benefits our country and the rest of humanity has been widely criticized on multiple grounds. In addition to his lack of credentials or relevant experience in medicine, science, public health, or administration, Mr. Kennedy has been an opponent of many health-protecting and life-saving vaccines, such as those that prevent measles and polio; a critic of the well-established positive effects of fluoridation of drinking water; a promoter of conspiracy theories about remarkably successful treatments for AIDS and other diseases; and a belligerent critic of respected agencies (especially the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health).

The leader of DHHS should continue to nurture and improve — not threaten — these important and highly respected institutions and their employees.

In view of his record, placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of DHHS would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors.

It’s no surprise that those sitting atop the Big Pharma/Big Government/Academia industrial complex are displaying concern if not sheer desperation over Kennedy’s future role as head of HHS.

In October, Kennedy issued a warning on X:

FDA’s war on public health is about to end … If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.

Public support for Kennedy’s quest is evident in the post having received nearly 7 million views and garnering 149,000 “Likes.”

Daily Caller

Ex-FDA Commissioners Against Higher Vaccine Standards Took $6 Million From COVID Vaccine Makers

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Emily Kopp

Ten of the twelve former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioners and acting commissioners opposed to the Trump administration’s stiffer standards for vaccines quietly disclosed ties to the pharmaceutical industry, a Daily Caller News Foundation review shows.

The FDA old guard criticized the new leadership in a Dec. 3 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) letter over a higher regulatory bar for vaccines, namely the expectation that most new vaccine approvals will require randomized clinical trials, arguing it could hamper the market.

“Insisting on long, expensive outcomes studies for every updated formulation would delay the arrival of better-matched vaccines when new outbreaks emerge or when additional groups of patients could benefit,” the former commissioners wrote. “Abandoning the existing methods won’t ‘elevate vaccine science’ … It will subject vaccines to a substantially higher and more subjective approval bar.”

But while the former commissioners disclosed their conflicts of interest to the medical journal — per standard practice in scientific publishing — reporters didn’t relay them to the broader public in reports in the Washington PostSTAT News and CNN.

The headlines about a bipartisan rebuke from former occupants of FDA’s highest office give the impression that the Trump administration is contravening established science, but closer inspection reveals a revolving door between pharmaceutical corporations and the agencies overseeing them.

Three of the signatories have received payments totaling $6 million from manufacturers or former manufacturers of COVID vaccines.

Scott Gottlieb has received $2.1 million in cash and stock from his position on the Pfizer board of directors, where he has advised on ethics and regulatory compliance since 2019, according to company filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Stephen Ostroff has received $752,310 from Pfizer in consulting fees since 2020, according to OpenPayments.

Mark McClellan has received $3.3 million from Johnson & Johnson as a member of the board of directors since 2013, SEC filings also show. McClellan also consults for the new pharmaceutical arm of the alternative investment management company Blackstone, which invested $750 million in Moderna in April 2025.

Gottlieb and McClellan did not respond to requests for comment. Ostroff could not be reached for comment.

FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Vinay Prasad outlined the higher standards and shared the results of an internal analysis validating 10 reports of children’s deaths following the COVID-19 vaccine in a Nov. 28 memo to staff. He called for introspection and reform at the agency.

The NEJM letter criticizes Prasad for cracking down on a practice called “immunobridging” that infers vaccine efficacy from laboratory tests rather than assessing it through real-world reductions in disease or death. The FDA under the Biden administration expanded COVID vaccines to children using this “immunobridging” technique, extrapolating vaccine efficacy from adults to children based on antibody levels.

Norman Sharpless — who in addition to previously serving as acting FDA commissioner also served as the head of the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute — consults for Tempus, a company that collaborates with COVID vaccine maker BioNTech. He has helped steer $70 million in investments in biotech through a venture capital firm he founded in November 2024. Sharpless also disclosed $26,180 in payments in 2024 from Chugai Pharmaceutical, a Japanese pharmaceutical company that markets mRNA technology among other drugs, on OpenPayments.

“I was grateful for the opportunity to serve as NCI Director and Acting FDA Commissioner in the first Trump Administration, and strongly support many of the things President Trump is trying to do in the current Administration,” Sharpless said in an email.

Margaret Hamburg, another former FDA commissioner and signatory of the NEJM letter, has since 2020 earned $2.8 million as a member of the board of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, which markets RNA interference (RNAi) technology.

Hamburg did not respond to a message on LinkedIn.

Most signatories disclosed income from biotech companies testing experimental cancer treatments. These products could face tighter scrutiny under Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist long wary of rubberstamping pricey oncology drugs — which Prasad points out often cause some toxicity — without plausible evidence of an improvement in quality of life or survival.

The former FDA commissioners disclosed ties to Sermonix Pharmaceuticals Inc.; OncoNano Medicine; incyclix; Nucleus Radiopharma; and N-Power, a contractor that runs oncology clinical trials.

Andrew von Eschenbach, who like Sharpless formerly served both as FDA commissioner and the head of the National Cancer Institute, disclosed stock in HistoSonics, a company with investments from Bezos Expeditions and Thiel Bio seeking FDA approval for ultrasound technology targeted at tumors.

Some FDA commissioners who signed onto the letter opposing changes to vaccine approvals have ties to biotechnology investment firms, namely McClellan, who consults Arsenal Capital; Janet Woodcock, who consults RA Capital Management; and Robert Califf, who owns stock in Population Health Partners.

Califf did not respond to an email requesting comment. Woodcock did not respond to requests for comment sent to two medical research advocacy groups with Woodcock on the board. Eschenbach did not respond to a LinkedIn message.

The two signatories without pharmaceutical ties may find their judgement challenged by the FDA investigation into COVID-19 vaccine deaths, having either implemented or formally defended the Biden administration’s headlong expansion of vaccines and boosters to healthy adults and children.

David Kessler executed Biden’s vaccination policy as chief science officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, helping to secure deals for shots with Pfizer and Moderna.

Meanwhile Jane Henney chaired a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report published in October 2025 that praised the performance of FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine surveillance during the pandemic — underwritten with CDC funding.

That assessment clashes with that of a Senate report, citing internal documents from FDA, finding that CDC never updated its vaccine surveillance tool “V-Safe” to include cardiac symptoms, despite naming myocarditis as a potential adverse event by October 2020, and that top officials in the Biden administration delayed warning pediatricians and other providers about the risk of myocarditis after their approval in some children in May 2021, months after Israeli health officials first detected it in February 2021. The Senate investigation named Woodcock, a signatory of the NEJM letter, as one of the FDA officials who slow-walked the warning.

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Health

RFK Jr reversing Biden-era policies on gender transition care for minors

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From The Center Square

By

HHS is also working to “reverse the Biden administration’s attempt” to classify gender dysphoria as a type of disability.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services unveiled a multi-pronged regulatory effort Thursday to curtail gender-affirming care for minors, including gender transition procedures at hospitals.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has drafted a rule that would prohibit pharmaceutical or surgical gender reassignment procedures from receiving federal Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program funding. It’s also proposing a rule that would allow it to withdraw Medicare and Medicaid funding from hospitals that perform such surgeries on minors. HHS is also working to “reverse the Biden administration’s attempt” to classify gender dysphoria as a type of disability. If gender dysphoria were to be defined as a disability, then health care providers who don’t want to perform what the department has dubbed “sex-rejecting” procedures could be in danger of violating anti-discrimination laws.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr., described gender affirming procedures as “unsafe” and “irreversible,” and framed the administration’s actions as “[protecting] America’s most vulnerable.”

“Our children deserve better – and we are delivering on that promise,” Kennedy told reporters Thursday.

The department is acting on directives from an executive order from President Donald Trump’s first few weeks in office. The Jan. 28 order called on government agencies to “[defund] chemical and surgical mutilation” of children, seemingly in the manner that HHS has proposed, as well as “rescind or amend all policies” relying on guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

The Food and Drug Administration is also taking regulatory action against some organizations that market breast binders to minors.

“Illegal marketing of these products for children is alarming, and the FDA will take further enforcement action such as import alerts, seizures, and injunctions if it continues,” said Food and Drug Commissioner Marty Makary.

Kennedy signed a declaration Thursday that gender affirming procedures for minors “do not meet professionally recognized standards of health care” and the Assistant Secretary for Health and Head of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, Admiral Brian Christine, signed a public health message stating the same.

“Evidence shows sex-rejecting puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries are dangerous. Providers have an obligation to offer care grounded in evidence and to avoid interventions that expose young people to a lifetime of harm,” Christine said.

The House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday that would criminalize the act of providing gender affirming care to minors.

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