Business
Kennedy Is Driving a Vast Inquiry Into Vaccines, Despite His Public Silence
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said little publicly about vaccines in recent months, at the behest of a White House worried that his unpopular stance will hurt Republicans in November’s midterm elections. But he has not abandoned his quest for evidence that they are unsafe.
Working behind the scenes, Mr. Kennedy is spearheading an intense push, across health agencies under his purview, for government scientists and federal data contractors to examine his long-held theory that vaccines are helping to fuel an epidemic of chronic disease, according to multiple people familiar with the effort.
They said the wide-ranging inquiry is a top priority for Mr. Kennedy, who sees vaccines as a “potential culprit” in various neurological and autoimmune disorders, including asthma and allergies. It resurrects research into a number of ideas Mr. Kennedy has espoused, including whether vaccines are linked to autism and whether thimerosal, a preservative that has largely been removed from vaccines in the United States but remains in some flu shots, is dangerous.
The effort is being led by Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician and vaccine safety expert who rose in prominence during the pandemic as a critic of Covid restrictions and vaccine mandates, and is now the health department’s chief science and data officer.
Career scientists at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are conducting the research alongside contractors who provide statistical expertise and access to millions of patient medical records. The initiative was described to The New York Times by six people who are close to it, all of whom insisted on anonymity because it is not public.
The work is raising alarms among some vaccine scholars and critics of Mr. Kennedy, who have long accused the secretary of cherry-picking data and misinterpreting studies to claim that vaccines are unsafe and to limit their use. They fear Mr. Kennedy will use the findings to further erode confidence in vaccines, which the World Health Organization estimates saved 154 million lives over the past half-century.
Mr. Kennedy, who came into office saying he would do nothing to discourage people from getting vaccinated, has already taken steps to scale back the number of vaccines children receive. Public health experts complain that by spending money on issues that have already been thoroughly studied, he is taking funds away from research that might answer the very questions he is asking, including what causes autism.
“It just demonstrates that no matter what the general tone is about vaccines, whether we talk about them or not, the secretary is going to continue to try and look at the data and analyze it in a way that will help support the conclusions that he’s already made,” said Dr. Daniel Jernigan, who oversaw vaccine safety at the C.D.C. until he resigned in August. “And that, to me, is a real problem.”
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for Mr. Kennedy, said in a statement that the effort reflected President Trump’s dedication to advancing “gold-standard vaccine research” that will enable policymakers to “better understand vaccine safety and efficacy and to assess how vaccine exposure, timing and patterns affect health across the life span.”
Mr. Nixon said the work would “inform vaccine recommendations, address critical gaps identified by scientific and medical organizations, including the Institute of Medicine, and strengthen public trust in public health.”
He said the initiative also involved the National Institutes of Health and universities. It remains unclear what the effort will cost and whether it is supplanting other routine government vaccine surveillance.
A former plaintiff’s lawyer, Mr. Kennedy has long said that he wants to build a body of scientific evidence on the harms of vaccines and environmental exposures, which he believes are behind an epidemic of chronic disease. That evidence, he has said, will lay the groundwork for legal action.
“That’s how you really change policy,” Mr. Kennedy said in a podcast as a presidential candidate in 2024. He added, “I’m going to provide that enough science, sufficient science, on each one of these exposures and each one of these injuries, to show who’s causing what and hold them responsible in court.”
During a daylong meeting on the new vaccine research initiative in late February, officials from the Health Department and the C.D.C. gathered to discuss specific studies and methods, including a look at the overall effect of the childhood vaccine schedule. Representatives from major health systems such as Kaiser Permanente were also at the table, given their role in allowing the C.D.C. access to vast troves of data through its Vaccine Safety Datalink system.
As part of the new effort, Mr. Kennedy has tasked some government scientists with studying the health status of vaccinated children compared with those who were not vaccinated. Mr. Kennedy coauthored a book, “Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak,” calling for such studies, which he believes will prove harm from vaccines.
Researchers say that such comparison studies would be riddled with pitfalls. Vaccinated children are more likely to receive medical care than those who are unvaccinated, and are thus more likely to receive additional medical diagnoses that could be wrongly attributed to vaccines.
Mr. Kennedy is also asking for the group to undertake new studies looking at the link between vaccines and autism.
The project is also looking at the question of harm from thimerosal, a mercury-based vaccine preservative, according to people close to the effort. The preservative has been thoroughly studied and found to be unrelated to autism, but Mr. Kennedy has remained concerned about it, and has rescinded federal recommendations for flu vaccines that contain thimerosal.
Through the C.D.C. alone, the cost of the project is estimated at $40 million to $50 million, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The project is being overseen by Mr. Kennedy and Stefanie Spear, his closest adviser. Mr. Kennedy’s new senior counselor for public health, Dr. Sara Brenner, a veteran of the F.D.A. who has voiced skepticism of vaccines, is expected to propel the studies forward in her new role, according to people familiar with the plan.
The new vaccine initiative is not the first time the secretary has waged a behind-the-scenes effort to study vaccine safety. Last year, Mr. Kennedy faced significant pushback within federal agencies and from Congress when he deployed David Geier, whose vaccine research is considered deeply flawed, to dig into vaccine safety data to explore some of the secretary’s longstanding concerns.
Mr. Kennedy’s team put pressure on C.D.C. officials, including Dr. Jernigan, who delayed Mr. Geier. When Mr. Kennedy ousted Susan Monarez, the agency’s director, Dr. Jernigan and other C.D.C. leaders quit.
Within the C.D.C. and F.D.A., scientists have registered some relief that Dr. Kulldorff, a pioneer in methods to examine vaccine safety, is leading the new inquiry. He worked on research that was groundbreaking in 2009 to monitor the safety of the H1N1 flu vaccine as it was being rolled out. The team he worked with found a slightly elevated rate of Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune condition associated with some vaccines.
“Martin had been known for decades as a top-notch vaccine safety scientist,” said Daniel Salmon, a Johns Hopkins University vaccine researcher who worked with Dr. Kulldorff on a vaccine data system that predated one the F.D.A. now uses.
Some scientists who worked with Dr. Kulldorff in the past, though, wonder if the evenhanded biostatistician they once knew changed during the pandemic. They point to a federal document, coauthored by Dr. Kulldorff, justifying sharp limitations on vaccines recommended to children in the United States, saying it left out reams of studies supporting flu and hepatitis B vaccines for infants and children.
In 2024, Dr. Kulldorff joined Mr. Kennedy in litigation against Merck, the makers of Gardasil, a vaccine for the human papilloma virus, earning $400 per hour as an expert witness, court records show. Merck, the vaccine’s maker, challenged Dr. Kulldorff’s standing as an expert based on his prior research finding that the vaccine was safe.
Dr. Kulldorff did not respond to a request for comment, and the health department did not respond to a request to make him available. Mr. Kennedy and Ms. Spear also did not respond to requests for comment.
The C.D.C. and the F.D.A. already devote considerable effort to investigating vaccine safety, using a number of databases and research methods. But Mr. Kennedy’s fellow vaccine critics, including Retsef Levi, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who serves on Mr. Kennedy’s handpicked a panel of C.D.C. vaccine advisers, find fault with the current studies.
“Many of them have serious methodological flaws,” Dr. Levi said.
Mr. Kennedy began raising questions about vaccines’ safety about 20 years ago, and became a champion for mothers of children with autism who blamed the condition on vaccines. People familiar with his thinking say he still feels deeply committed to those women, and cannot reconcile their often heartbreaking stories with the vast body of research that discounts a link.
For parents who believe vaccines have harmed their children, Mr. Kennedy is fulfilling a major promise. Katie Wright, whose 24-year-old son has autism and got to know Mr. Kennedy through her advocacy for parents who question the safety of vaccines, said more research is necessary to restore trust in childhood immunization.
“There’s been tremendous pushback; they say, ‘Well, the research has been done.’ ” Ms. Wright said. “Well, you know what? A lot of families are concerned. I don’t understand the fear of delving deeper into safety research.”
As health secretary, Mr. Kennedy has demonstrated an unorthodox view of what makes for reliable findings about vaccines. He dismissed a major vaccine study of 1.2 million Danish children over 24 years as “a deceitful propaganda stunt,” for failing to highlight a subset of about 50 children who were more likely to have gotten Asperger’s syndrome, a diagnosis previously applied to high-functioning people with autism, after getting vaccines.
In the language of vaccine science, such findings are considered a signal to be examined in more depth. Dr. Kathryn Edwards, a Vanderbilt University expert in vaccinology, said she was concerned that selective attention to such signals could be “used to further erode the confidence that people have in vaccines.”
Mr. Kennedy has also made hasty changes to vaccine policy, often with minimal scientific justification for decision making. Among those pivots was an overhaul in January of vaccine recommendations, reducing the number of immunizations for American children to 10 from 17.
Though the plan was held up in court, Dr. Edwards said it portends a scenario where the findings of the current effort get a big splash in the media or drive new policies before scientists can understand the reasoning.
“What they’ve done is also worrisome,” she said, “because there have been so many things that haven’t been open and transparent.”
Business
Commentary: Puncturing the myth of Alan Greenspan, whose policies gave us the Great Recession
Noah Cross, the archvillain of the movie “Chinatown,” had the definitive line on how old age brings respectability. “‘Course I’m respectable,” he tells Jake Gittes. “I’m old. Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”
I wouldn’t necessarily slot former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan into any of those categories, but the general reaction to his death Monday at age 100 puts the lie to Cross’ observation.
As much as he was revered during his nearly two decades as Fed chairman for protecting the stock market from a series of crashes and near-crashes, his obituaries take a more measured view. The headline on the Wall Street Journal’s main take on his legacy is: “The Myth of Alan Greenspan as ‘The Maestro.’”
Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.
— Alan Greenspan, writing as an Ayn Rand cultist (1966)
The Journal blames Greenspan for fostering “the great credit mania of the mid-2000s” and observes that “the music stopped in 2008, producing the panic that did so much harm to the free-market economy that Greenspan promoted.” That was the Great Recession, which started with the 2008 crash in the housing market and persisted into 2012.
That is from a publication that was more or less in accord with Greenspan’s goals of less regulation and lower taxes. His contemporary adversaries were harsher. “R.I.P. Alan Greenspan: You were charming, thoughtful, powerful, and wrong,” writes Robert Reich, who served as Bill Clinton’s Labor secretary while Greenspan led the Fed.
The Great Recession, “in which in which millions of Americans lost their jobs, their savings, and even their homes — resulted from the deregulation of Wall Street that Greenspan advocated,” Reich wrote. But he had to admit that Greenspan’s “iron grip” over Fed policy forced Clinton “to do exactly what Greenspan wanted — which was to reduce the federal budget deficit and thereby destroy much of the agenda Clinton ran on.”
It would be unfair to depict Greenspan’s influence as invariably pernicious. Social Security advocates still think highly of his work chairing the so-called Greenspan Commission of 1982-1983, which developed a series of changes in benefits and revenues for that program to address a looming, immediate fiscal crisis.
Greenspan led the bipartisan panel “masterfully,” recalls William J. Arnone, the former chief executive of the National Academy of Social Insurance, who witnessed its deliberations as a consultant to the New York Citizens Committee on Aging.
Before the commission’s formation, “Republicans and Democrats fiercely disagreed over underlying data,” Arnone told me. “Greenspan used his expertise as an economic empiricist to convince both sides to agree on a singular, shared set of actuarial facts. Quite an accomplishment.”
To the public, Greenspan was known for his impenetrably cryptic speaking style and for the relative tranquility in the American economy during his tenure, which has been termed “the great moderation” despite recurrent short-term crises.
Greenspan was the second-longest serving Fed chair. But he may have had the weirdest background. Having grown up in an affluent New York household, he was talented enough on clarinet and saxophone to have sat in with Stan Getz’s band and attended Juilliard for a time.
He began his economics education in 1945 at New York University and got as far as a master’s degree, but by then he was already working on Wall Street, where his skill at financial analysis propelled him toward the top echelons of high finance.
Somewhere along the line he fell in with the arch-libertarian Ayn Rand, becoming part of her inner circle of economic cultists. Referring to his dour mien and predilection for charcoal gray garb, Rand called him her “undertaker.”
Greenspan provided a veneer of rigorous economic analysis for Rand’s ideology, which lionized the rich and described them as fighting a ferocious battle with the lazy and grasping hoi polloi. He contributed three essays to her 1966 anthology “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.”
His association with Rand was seldom highlighted during his Fed tenure, but even a casual reading of those essays exposes the Randian underpinnings — and the Randian self-contradictions — of his Fed policies.
One essay defended the gold standard, which had been discredited in the 1930s. Greenspan blamed “welfare-state advocates” for the developed world’s abandonment of the gold standard.
He wrote, “Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes…. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights” — language that could have come right out of the text of Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”
Another essay called for the dismantling of government regulators such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Greenspan’s argument was that the consumer was adequately protected by the businessman’s profit-seeking, which in turn depended on maintaining a reputation for honesty and fair-dealing.
For drug companies, he wrote, “the loss of reputation through the sale of a shoddy or dangerous product would sharply reduce the market value of the drug company.” The same goes for securities brokers — “The slightest doubt as to the trustworthiness of a broker’s word or commitment would put him out of business overnight.”
One might ask what inspired Greenspan’s faith in, well, the faithfulness of business enterprises, given centuries of proof otherwise. Anyway, he refuted his own argument. “The guiding purpose of the government regulator is to prevent rather than to create something,” he wrote. “He gets no credit if a new miraculous drug is discovered by drug company scientists; he does if he bans thalidomide.”
He didn’t bother to question why his trustworthy drug companies had tried to market as a morning-sickness drug in the U.S. a formulation that already had been shown to produce severe birth defects in the children of mothers who took it overseas. (American families were largely saved from this tragedy by Frances Oldham Kelsey, who blocked its importation as an official of, yes, the FDA.)
To stock market investors, Greenspan’s chief legacy was the “Greenspan Put.” This was an implicit commitment by the Fed to counteract sharp declines in the market by pumping liquidity into the economy through the mass purchase of Treasury bonds.
The term comes from the options market, in which a “put” gives the holder the right to sell the underlying stock at a set price in the future, even if the market price has fallen below that price. In effect, it establishes a floor to the investor’s losses in a downturn.
The Greenspan put first appeared on Oct. 19, 1987, when the stock market suffered its greatest one-day percentage crash ever, 20.47%. Greenspan had been in office for only a few weeks, but his Fed issued a statement promising to inject liquidity into the system and cut interest rates. “We will back you,” he told bankers in a series of phone calls.
In truth, Greenspan had no legal authority to make that pledge. In any event, the market recovered the next day, and the Fed’s image as a willing bulwark against market declines was born.
The problem was that the idea that the Fed would act in a market crisis encouraged ever more flagrant risk-taking on Wall Street.
The harvest was a series of crises, notably the 1998 collapse of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, which was founded by Nobel economics laureates to pursue abstruse arbitrage trades. It was brought low by market moves that confounded their projections. LTCM was so deeply embedded in Wall Street trading it had to be saved with a $3.6-billion bailout the Fed orchestrated.
The Greenspan put, like so many other such grand schemes, worked well right up until it stopped working. That moment came in 2008, with a crash and a long, throbbing hangover.
Testifying to Congress in 2008, Greenspan acknowledged that maybe self-regulation, that watchword of his economic worldview, didn’t work.
“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms…. Something which looked to be a very solid edifice, and, indeed a critical pillar to market competition and free markets, did break down.”
That, he said, “shocked me.” It was a rare admission of blame by a man who, as my former colleagues Thomas S. Mulligan and Don Lee reported in their Greenspan obituary, had told CNBC a few months earlier that he had “no regrets” about his policies.
San José tech company Cisco plans to cut 471 workers in three Bay Area offices, according to layoff notices filed to a state agency.
The company, which provides networking devices along with other services including video conferencing and cybersecurity, told employees in May that it was going to cut fewer than 4,000 jobs or less than 5% of its workforce.
The notices, processed by the California Employment Development Department this week, provide more details about what jobs Cisco will cut in California.
The artificial-intelligence boom has fueled more investments in data centers, commercial real estate and other areas. But advancements in AI tools have also been reshaping jobs, especially in Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the tech industry.
Cisco’s layoffs in California impacted workers in its San José, Milpitas and San Francisco offices. The company cut a variety of roles in software engineering, product management, design, business operations and other areas, the notices show.
Cisco said it didn’t have anything additional to share beyond what it published in May about its restructuring plans.
Tech companies have been citing various reasons for layoffs including prioritizing investments in artificial intelligence. As workers use AI-powered tools to generate code, words and other content, some executives have said they don’t need as many employees. There’s also skepticism, though, about how big a role AI is playing at companies with a large amount of workers globally.
From January to May, U.S. technology companies announced 123,653 cuts, up 66% from the same period in 2025, according to a June report from global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The firm said that AI was the leading reason companies cited for cuts but it still isn’t the “jobpocalypse some predicted.”
Meta, Snap, Block, Oracle and Amazon are among tech companies that have announced mass layoffs this year.
Cisco markets itself as a company that “provides critical infrastructure for the AI era” and has benefited from the AI boom, reaching a record revenue of $15.8 billion in the third quarter this year. The company’s net income grew 35% to $3.4 billion year-over-year during that quarter.
Cisco Chief Executive Chuck Robbins told employees in May it’s cutting costs in certain areas while prioritizing other investments. That includes employee use of AI across the company.
He said Cisco will be among winners in the AI era, but that means “making hard decisions — about where we invest, how we’re organized, and how our cost structure reflects the opportunity in front of us.”
As of July 2025, Cisco had roughly 86,200 employees, according to its annual report.
Social media company Snap is being sued by the parents of a girl who was raped when she was 12 years old by a man she met on disappearing messaging app Snapchat.
The 111-page lawsuit, filed this week in a Missouri Circuit Court, alleges that Santa Monica-based Snap “enabled and facilitated the grooming, exploitation, and sexual abuse” of the minor who is referred to as “J.F.”
The company failed to disable or warn users about “dangerous” features that predators use on the app to find and abuse their victims, according to the lawsuit.
Missouri resident Gabriel Joel Valentin-Rios, who was 25 years old at the time, raped the girl in September 2021 after she sneaked out of her house, the lawsuit alleges. The parents are also suing the attacker, who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting the girl and is serving 18 years in prison, according to the Social Media Victims Law Center.
The center and the Holland Law Firm announced Thursday they filed the lawsuit on behalf on the victim’s family.
“This assault did not happen in a vacuum — it happened because Snapchat’s product design made it easy for a predator to reach and manipulate an unsuspecting child,” said Matthew Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, in a statement. “Snap executives have long known that their features create a perfect environment for predators to exploit children, yet they have repeatedly failed to make the platform safe.”
A Snap spokesperson said in a statement the company cares “deeply about the safety and well-being of all Snapchatters.”
“Our teams have worked for years to build safeguards, launch safety tutorials, partner with experts, and work with law enforcement to help prevent the misuse of our platform,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The lawsuit is the latest legal hurdle facing Snap. Multiple parents who lost their children have previously sued the company, alleging that Snap failed to provide enough safeguards on the messaging app. Parents and child safety groups have voice concerns about how the app can be used to connect young people with drug dealers and child predators.
Other tech companies such as gaming platform Roblox, Google-owned YouTube and Facebook parent company Meta have also faced lawsuits over safety and mental health issues.
In March, a Los Angeles jury found that Meta-owned Instagram and YouTube were liable for the suffering of a California woman who alleged the platforms were built to addict young users. Snap settled that lawsuit before the trial started.
The latest lawsuit against Snap highlights safety concerns surrounding several features on the messaging app including “Quick Add,” which suggests users to connect with on Snapchat. Valentin-Rios used that feature to connect with the girl along with others to disguise his identity and groom her into sending explicit photos, the lawsuit said. The company’s “Snap Maps” feature allowed him to find the girl’s home address. And he used a cartoon avatar known as Bitmoji on Snapchat to conceal his age and present himself as a “a young, innocuous, and friendly looking boy.”
Families have faced challenges holding tech companies accountable for safety issues because a U.S. law shields platforms from being held liable for content posted by its users.
The lawsuit against Snap, though, says that it seeks to hold the company liable for the design and marketing of “unreasonably dangerous social media products.” It alleges that Snap co-created content such as Bitmojis abused by child predators and it designed the app to entice users to spend more time messaging others.
The lawsuit accused Snap of consistently turning a “blind eye” to underage users of its app. Snapchat requires users be at least 13 years old to sign up for an account, but J.F. started using the app when she was 11 years old. Snapchat was popular among her peers and friends so J.F. downloaded the app, which was presented as lighthearted and entertaining platform, without her parents’ knowledge or consent. The company failed to warn users about potential dangers, verify the ages of minors and lacks adequate parental controls, the lawsuit alleges.
Snapchat has a “family center” where parents can see their teen’s friends, view time spent and other insights about how their children are using the app. But the lawsuit said it isn’t enough because parents can’t restrict teens from sending private messages and children can create accounts without their parents’ knowledge.
The plaintiffs’ counsel also tested Snap’s “Quick Add” feature in 2023 and found that many of the usernames “generated by Snap’s recommendation algorithm appeared on their face to belong to predatory users,” the lawsuit said.
Valentin-Rios was also able to create a second Snapchat account with the username “Nocits21g” to connect with J.F. and to conceal the activity from his girlfriend, according to the lawsuit.
The rape victim, who was diagnosed with PTSD, anxiety and depression, started to engage in self-harm and expressed suicidal thoughts, the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit seeks a jury trial and financial damages for the harm allegedly caused by the company to the family.
“J.F. feels embarrassed and ashamed, but she is also angry that Snap facilitated this by design, and angrier still that Snap continues to operate its platform in the same manner today,” the lawsuit said.
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