Science
The Many Ways Kennedy Is Already Undermining Vaccines
During his Senate confirmation hearings to be health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presented himself as a supporter of vaccines. But in office, he and the agencies he leads have taken far-reaching, sometimes subtle steps to undermine confidence in vaccine efficacy and safety.
The National Institutes of Health halted funding for researchers who study vaccine hesitancy and hoped to find ways to overcome it. It also canceled programs intended to discover new vaccines to prevent future pandemics.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shelved an advertising campaign for the flu shot. Mr. Kennedy has said inaccurately that the scientists who advise the C.D.C. on vaccines have “severe, severe conflicts of interest” in promoting the products and cannot be trusted.
The Health and Human Services Department cut billions of dollars to state health agencies, including funds needed to modernize state programs for childhood immunization. Mr. Kennedy said in a televised interview on Wednesday that he was unaware of this widely reported development.
The Food and Drug Administration canceled an open meeting on flu vaccines with scientific advisers, later holding it behind closed doors. A top official paused the agency’s review of Novavax’s Covid vaccine. In a televised interview last week, Mr. Kennedy said falsely that similarly created vaccines don’t work against respiratory viruses.
Some scientists said they saw a pattern: an effort to erode support for routine vaccination, and for the scientists who have long held it up as a public health goal.
“This is a simultaneous process of increasing the likelihood that you will hear his voice and decreasing the likelihood that you’ll hear other voices,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said of Mr. Kennedy.
He is “decertifying other voices of authority,” she said.
H.H.S. disagreed that Mr. Kennedy was working against vaccines.
“Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine; he is pro-safety,” Andrew Nixon, a department spokesman, said in a statement. “His focus has always been on ensuring that vaccines are rigorously tested for efficacy and safety.”
The statement continued, “We are taking action so that Americans get the transparency they deserve and can make informed decisions about their health.”
After attending the funeral of an unvaccinated child who died of measles in West Texas on Sunday, Mr. Kennedy endorsed the measles vaccine on X as “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.”
But he has also described vaccination as a personal choice with poorly understood risks and suggested that miracle treatments were readily available. On Sunday, he praised two local doctors on social media who have promoted dubious, potentially harmful, treatments for measles.
Even as cases of measles in the United States have surged past 600 in 22 jurisdictions, Mr. Kennedy has claimed in a recent interview that the measles vaccine causes deaths every year (untrue); that it causes encephalitis, blindness and “all the illnesses that measles itself causes” (untrue); and that the vaccine’s effect wanes so dramatically that older adults are “essentially unvaccinated” (untrue).
According to an email obtained by The New York Times, H.H.S. intends to revise its web pages to include statements like “The decision to vaccinate is a personal one” and “People should also be informed about the potential adverse events associated with vaccines.” (Vaccines are already administered only after patients provide informed consent, as required by law.)
Tensions with mainstream experts came into sharp focus last week, when Dr. Peter Marks, the top vaccine regulator, resigned under pressure from the F.D.A.
“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Dr. Marks said in his resignation letter.
Mr. Kennedy’s position on vaccines has raised alarm for decades. But it has become particularly notable now, against a backdrop of rising skepticism of vaccines and worsening outbreaks of measles and bird flu, experts said.
The M.M.R. vaccine — a combination product to prevent measles, mumps and rubella that has been available since 1971 — has long been a target of anti-vaccine campaigns because of the disproved theory that it can cause autism. Mr. Kennedy has said that he would like to revisit the issue, in part to assuage parents’ fears that the vaccines are unsafe.
But he has hired David Geier to re-examine the data. Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, a doctor and the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, has sharply criticized the decision to spend tax dollars testing a discredited hypothesis even as the administration is cutting billions for other research.
“If we’re pissing away money over here,” he said last month, “that’s less money that we have to actually go after the true reason.”
The refusal to accept scientific consensus is “disturbing, because then we get into very strange territory where it’s somebody’s hunch that this does or doesn’t happen, or does or doesn’t work,” said Stephen Jameson, president of the American Association of Immunologists.
In interviews, Mr. Kennedy has downplayed risks of measles and emphasized what he sees as the benefits of infection.
“Everybody got measles, and measles gave you protected lifetime protection against measles infection — the vaccine doesn’t do that,” he said in an interview on Fox News.
Two doses of the M.M.R. vaccine do provide decades-long immunity. And while immunity from the infection may last a lifetime, “people also suffer the consequences of that natural infection,” Dr. Jameson said.
One consequence was discovered just a few years ago: A measles infection can destroy the immune system’s memory of other invading pathogens, leaving the body vulnerable to them again.
Measles kills roughly 1 in every 1,000 infected people, and 11 percent of those infected this year have been hospitalized, many of them children under 5, according to the C.D.C. Two girls, ages 6 and 8, died in West Texas.
By contrast, side effects after vaccination are uncommon. But Mr. Kennedy has suggested that people should apprise themselves of the risks before opting for the shot.
The phrasing implies that “if you are more fully informed, you might make a different decision,” said Dr. Jamieson, of the Annenberg center.
Doctors have long expected health secretaries and the C.D.C. to urge widespread vaccination unequivocally amid an outbreak, and in the past they have.
But Mr. Kennedy has spoken enthusiastically about cod liver oil, a steroid and an antibiotic that are not standard therapies. Some of those treatments may be making children more sick.
“The messaging I’m seeing is focused on potential treatments for measles,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the infectious disease committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Closed Doors
At his confirmation hearing, Mr. Kennedy promised that he would not change the C.D.C.’s childhood vaccination schedule. About two weeks later, he announced a new commission that would scrutinize it.
The schedule is based on recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a panel of medical experts who review safety and effectiveness data, potential interactions with other drugs and the ideal timing to maximize protection.
At his confirmation hearing, Mr. Kennedy claimed that 97 percent of A.C.I.P. members had financial conflicts of interest. He has long held, without evidence, that federal regulators are compromised and are hiding information about the risks of vaccines.
“It’s frankly false,” said Dr. O’Leary, who serves as a liaison to the committee from the pediatric academy.
Mr. Kennedy’s statistic came from a 2009 report that found that 97 percent of disclosure forms had errors, such as missing dates or information in the wrong section.
In fact, A.C.I.P. members are carefully screened for major conflicts of interest, and they cannot hold stocks or serve on advisory boards or speaker bureaus affiliated with vaccine manufacturers.
On the rare occasion that members have indirect conflicts of interest — for example, if an institution at which they work receives money from a drug manufacturer — they disclose the conflict and recuse themselves from related votes.
The committee’s votes were public and often heavily debated.
“When I was C.D.C. director, people flew in from Korea and all over the world to observe the A.C.I.P. meetings, because they were a model of transparency,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who led the agency from 2009 to 2017.
Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly promised greater transparency and accountability, but he has proposed ending public comment on health policies.
His department canceled a meeting of the A.C.I.P. in February at which members were set to discuss vaccines for meningitis and flu, rescheduling it for April.
The department also canceled a meeting to discuss the seasonal flu vaccine. Officials met later without the agency’s scientific advisers.
“After all that conversation about how they want to be transparent, one of the first things he does is take things behind closed doors and diminish the amount of public input we’re getting,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.
At his confirmation hearing, Mr. Kennedy repeated a fringe theory that Black Americans should not receive the same vaccines as others because they “have a much stronger reaction.”
Senator Angela Alsobrooks, Democrat of Maryland, who is Black, admonished him for his “dangerous” opinion: “Your voice would be a voice that parents would listen to.”
Two weeks later, at a clinic for teenage mothers in Denver, a 19-year-old woman refused all vaccines for herself and her 1-year-old son — including the measles and chickenpox shots he was supposed to have that day.
She told the pediatrician, Dr. Hana Smith, who described the incident, that she had read online that vaccines were bad for people with more melanin in their skin.
There are reams of evidence to the contrary. Still, it quickly became clear to Dr. Smith that nothing was going to change her patient’s mind.
“No matter how much information I can give to the contrary on it, the damage is already done,” Dr. Smith said.
Misinformation is particularly difficult to counter, Dr. Smith said, “when it’s someone that has a leadership position, especially within the health care system.”
NEW YORK — Scientists have unearthed communities of marine life — including jellyfish, tubeworms and brittle stars — thriving on a whale graveyard that is millions of years old.
These graveyards form when whale carcasses fall to the sea floor, becoming a sustaining snack for nearby critters. This one, located up to 23,000 feet below the surface of the southeastern Indian Ocean, spans the largest area and is so far the deepest and oldest found.
A whale’s sheer size and the unique chemistry of its bones are the keys to forming these unique underwater neighborhoods, said Xikun Song, a biologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering.
“At the same time, the very nature of the deep ocean makes these sites exceptionally difficult for scientists to locate,” Song, who was involved with the latest find, wrote in an email.
Researchers explored the remains during multiple deep-sea submersible trips in 2023, collecting samples and mapping the extent of the necropolis. They found five carcass sites and fossils, including skulls belonging to beaked and baleen whales. The oldest bones date back 5.3 million years.
Feeding and living on the carcasses were myriad creatures, large and small, including sea cucumbers, squat lobsters and saltwater clams. Many of them are likely species that have never been documented, according to findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“The potential number of specimens is just astounding,” said paleontologist Stephen Godfrey with the Calvert Marine Museum in Maryland, who wasn’t involved in the research.
Many factors likely conspired to preserve the bones for millions of years, according to the study authors. They’re dense enough to outlast attacks from bone-eating worms, and located deep enough in the ocean to avoid getting buried by dust and loose particles. The bones also were coated with a light layer of minerals from the surrounding seawater, which may have prevented them from degrading.
Why did so many whales die here? Maybe they were already living in the area and died of natural causes. A few could have perished from exhaustion or illness caused by deep-sea diving. The area’s shape, akin to the letter V, could also have funneled the remains to their resting spot, the authors wrote.
Such discoveries are important because they clue scientists into the vibrant communities that find a way to live even in remote, hard-to-reach environments.
Studying the whale graveyards “is important for understanding how life can adapt to such extreme conditions, not only due to the lack of light and oxygen but also to the incredibly high pressure,” said study co-author and paleontologist Giovanni Bianucci with the University of Pisa in Italy in an email.
Ramakrishnan writes for The Associated Press.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Science
El Niño turns crumbling California pier into climate battleground over what to save — and who pays
As a historic El Niño supercharges the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco experiences record high seasonal sea levels, the latest structural casualty of intense wave action is prompting Bay Area politicians to call for help from the state and federal governments.
They want to rebuild a concrete pier shut down this month after officials deemed it unsafe because of cracking from decades of pounding surf and storms.
As waves crashed against the derelict structure Monday morning, U.S. Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-San José) held a news conference and asked the federal government to follow through on $50 million in climate resilience funding promised by the Biden administration but terminated by the Trump administration in 2025.
The city of Pacifica had been on the shortlist for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, managed through FEMA. California and 22 other states successfully sued to reinstate the program, but the funding has yet to be allocated.
Liccardo also asked for nearly $1 million in promised funds from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for a handrail project on the pier and an additional $9 million to protect coastal bluffs.
Coastlines are already being buffeted and inundated by rising seas. With the closed-off Pacifica Municipal Pier in the background, local politicians and community members said they’re on the front lines and want to rebuild.
“Pacifica is ground zero for coastal resilience,” said state Sen. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park), as he asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency and “help us fix this pier and help this community recover again.”
“This is very much a reminder that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he said, noting that previous attempts for funding went unheeded. “We cannot wait until infrastructure fails before we invest in protecting it.”
As climate change starts to become expensive, it prompts questions about what to protect and what to abandon.
Chad Nelson, chief executive of the Surfrider Foundation, a coastal environmental advocacy organization, said city piers provide coastal access to people who can’t swim or walk on the beach; they are often popular fishing spots and tend to serve a broad swath of their communities.
On the flip side, he said, they keep getting beat up by the ocean and costing taxpayers millions of dollars to repair or replace.
In Santa Cruz, a public wharf damaged by storms in 2024 recently reopened after $1.3 million in repairs. In Capitola, a storm-damaged wharf reopened earlier this year after $10 million had been sunk into repairs. The city is now considering building an open-air restaurant, public bathrooms, a bait shop and a boat launch.
“I think the larger question is: Are we subsidizing bad responses to problems that we know are going to persist?” he said, responding to a question about infrastructure that won’t last.
Charles Lester, director of the Ocean and Coastal Policy Center at UC Santa Barbara, agreed with Nelson that it’s important to distinguish public from private benefits.
“There’s a bit of a difference between a public recreational pier, for example, and your private development that’s going to impact the beach,” he said.
And at some point, he said, we have to acknowledge things are only going to get worse.
In a white paper authored by Lester and Nelson, the two described the coming El Niño as a “reckoning” for the California coast.
El Niños result in larger waves, elevated sea levels and powerful storms — “predictable signature(s) of a climate pattern that returns every two to seven years and is expected, as the planet warms, to intensify,” they wrote.
Wave energy along the shore can run 50% above average during an El Niño, while sea levels can climb 6 to 12 inches — flooding coastal homes, roads and infrastructure. Coastal erosion increases by more than 69% during extreme El Niño events, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
During the 1997-98 El Niño, seven Pacifica seaside houses were condemned after powerful waves and storms made them unsafe and irreparable. Seventeen people in the state died as a result of the historic flooding and storms.
The funding requests for the pier also come as San Francisco sees its highest summer water levels ever. On Saturday, the National Weather Service recorded levels 1.83 feet above normal high tide. Early Monday morning, the popular Pier 14 along the city’s Embarcadero waterfront was submerged.
High surf along the coast killed a young girl in Laguna Beach, and hundreds of people have been rescued at Newport Beach. Water stranded a hiker along the cliffs of San Francisco’s Presidio — requiring a seven-hour rescue mission that ultimately left the hiker and a rescuer injured as the waves crashed them into the rocks.
“This stretch of coast has been a continuous coastal emergency declaration for almost 10 years due to the repeat damage of storms in recent El Niño years,” the mayor of Pacifica, Christine Boles, said.
Pacifica has been planning for climate change for years, she said. But climate change is outstripping those efforts, and without financial and regulatory support from the federal and state governments, the battle will be all but lost.
Science
Californian is infected with rare tick-borne illness. What to know about the deadly bacteria
A Northern Californian has been confirmed as the fourth-ever person diagnosed with a newly recognized and rare tick-borne disease that causes symptoms similar to Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
The California Department of Public Health confirmed the latest case of Rickettsia lanei bacteria in a patient who was diagnosed in April of this year. Two other California cases were reported in 2004 and 2023.
Public health officials told The Times that the infected person “was seriously ill, hospitalized and has since been discharged and is recovering.”
It is unclear how long the person was in the hospital or what their symptoms were. The state agency said it could not disclose the home county of the person but confirmed the infected person lived and worked in Northern California.
Rickettsia lanei comes from the spotted fever group Rickettsia, bacteria transmitted to humans from the bite of an infected tick.
In California three types of ticks — the American dog tick (Dermacentor similis), the Pacific Coast tick (Dermacentor occidentalis) and the brown dog tick (Rhipicephalus sanguineus) — can transmit the bacteria that cause Rocky Mountain spotted fever in humans and dogs, according to the California Department of Public Health.
Symptoms of Rocky Mountain spotted fever can range from fever and a rash to long-term effects that include damage to internal organs or neurological disorders.
The tick-borne disease has been spreading globally since the early 2000s, most notably in Mexico and Brazil, with reported fatality rates that can exceed 50%, according to a study published by UC Davis.
What is Rickettsia lanei?
Rickettsia lanei bacteria were identified this year in a few Pacific Coast ticks, including a tick in Contra Costa County, according to SFGate, where the latest case was first reported in April.
The new bacterium was added to the list of potentially transmittable pathogens in 2024 by the state public health department after its severe symptoms were studied in two cases of infected men nearly 20 years apart, according to a report published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Emerging and Infectious Diseases journal.
“Sustained investment in public health has enabled development of the advanced molecular tools that detected these infections,” the California Department of Public Health said in a statement to The Times.
According to the report, both men fell ill after spending time outdoors, one playing golf at five courses in Alameda and Contra Costa counties within 14 days of the onset of his symptoms. This first patient had fever, headaches, muscle pain, malaise, loss of appetite, diarrhea and abdominal pain, among other symptoms. His condition worsened on his third day in the hospital, according to the report. The man was ultimately in the hospital for 22 days, including 11 in the intensive care unit with a primary diagnosis of rocky mountain spotted fever and a secondary diagnosis of acute kidney injury.
The other infected person had visited and camped at a county park and state beach in San Mateo and Marin counties. The second man reported a five-day history of headaches, vomiting, light sensitivity, neck pain and confusion, according to the report. On the third day of hospitalization, the man became comatose and was intubated, the report stated. After 13 days, he was discharged with a primary diagnosis of severe Rickettsia.
Researchers have known about Rickettsia lanei since 2018 when it was detected in rabbit ticks in Sonoma County, but they didn’t know its potential harm to humans because the rabbit tick rarely bites people.
“The Pacific Coast tick, which bites humans more frequently, may occasionally acquire the organism from an infected rabbit, which is the most likely route for the rare human infections that have been identified,” the state health agency said.
Should I be worried about contracting Rickettsia lanei?
Human infections are rare but could be underreported because Rickettsia lanei symptoms are very similar to those of rocky mountain spotted fever, said Janet Foley, veterinarian and disease ecologist at UC Davis.
“I think it’s so new that I don’t know if anybody’s really gotten a grant to study it or put it under a microscope,” Foley said.
Rickettsia lanei bacteria cases could also have gone undetected for so long because some cases were not severe, she said.
Foley said Californians should be aware of Rickettsia lanei and take precautions against tick bites.
How to keep disease-carrying ticks at bay
The best way to avoid ticks and tick bites is to be vigilant in your surroundings, Foley said, noting that ticks can transmit other diseases such as Lyme disease.
To keep a disease-carrying tick at bay, Foley recommends:
- Covering up your arms and legs when outdoors by wearing pants and long-sleeved shirts.
- Staying out of the grass where a tick can latch onto your clothing. Instead stay on a cleared path.
- Wearing light-colored clothing so it’s easier to spot a tick if one jumps on you.
- After an outdoor activity, take off your clothes, toss them in the wash and take a shower.
- If your dog goes with you for outdoor activities, give it a bath and then apply tick medication.
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