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MAHA’s Treatments for Autism: Camel’s Milk, Stem Cell Injections — And Spelling Therapy

Arthur Allen — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Elizabeth Bonker is a silent woman with a loud mission. She wants government agencies to cover the costs of training people with autism in a form of communication called assisted spelling. One problem: Leading professional organizations don’t believe it works.

“All nonspeakers above the age of 5 should be given the opportunity,” typed Bonker, who is 28 and cannot talk. Her mother, Virginia Breen, held a wireless keyboard for her. They sat on a hotel patio before an April 27 meeting with a senior aide to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“We are misunderstood and underestimated,” Bonker typed, occasionally humming or lightly groaning as she considered where to place a slender forefinger on the keyboard.

Assisted spelling is used to help nonverbal people communicate by pointing to letters on boards or using keyboards with physical help from another person.

Supporters say assisted spelling has improved the lives of thousands of people with autism, such as Bonker, and they have powerful allies. Kennedy appointed Bonker and another autistic “speller,” as they call themselves, to a 20-member autism panel made up largely of parents with children whose autism they attribute to vaccinations.

At the reconfigured panel’s first public session on April 28, three other members said their nonspeaking adult children were learning to communicate through spelling. The panel issued a resolution with stating that “robust” communications programs are essential for autistic people. Bonker has urged the Department of Health and Human Services to support training in assisted spelling for those who want it.

But leading for , as well as those representing and , that these methods — premised on the idea that people with autism have the normal range of cognitive powers but are imprisoned in malfunctioning bodies — are flawed or fraudulent.

Other, validated methods enable nonspeakers to communicate through digital and analog pictures and letter boards. But assisted spelling isn’t autonomous communication, critics say: Consciously or not, the board holder may be influencing or responsible for the typed or pointed-at words — as with a Ouija board.

For many parents in Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again community, the spelling controversy is angrily ringing the same bells as the notion that vaccines cause autism — which they refuse to consider debunked. As some people see it: Established medicine damaged them with vaccines and now refuses to accept a helpful treatment.

People with autism are “trapped in bodies that have betrayed them because the medical establishment has betrayed them,” said Louis Conte, who has a child with autism, in a of a Kennedy-allied MAHA publication.

By limiting access to spelling, “you are not just limiting expression, you are erasing identity,” said Katie Sweeney, the mother of an autistic adult who is affiliated with an anti-vaccine , at the autism panel meeting.

Mainstream autism experts and advocates in March convened the Independent Autism Coordinating Committee as a counter to Kennedy’s panel. At the new group’s meeting, one member spoke out against the spelling methods.

“In this underfunded disability environment, I don’t want a single penny diverted to debunked interventions like spelling,” said , a senior lecturer in history at the University of Pennsylvania and an who described her 27-year-old son as “profoundly autistic.”

It’s not only a waste of time, she said later in an interview, but “people subjected to spelling are not given access to evidence-based education. Every interaction turns someone like my son into a puppet, and I find that very objectionable.”

A Patchwork of Perspectives

The universe of autistic people, their parents, researchers, advocates, and service providers is a broad, acrimonious spectrum. Some say that vaccines or chemical exposures caused a massive increase in autism, others that diagnostic changes account for most of the increase. Some seek mainstream or alternative treatments, some demand classroom inclusion, and others want residential treatment. Some people with autism say it’s a difference, not a disability.

“When I tell the parents of a young child they have autism, it’s a tragedy,” said Audrey Brumback, a child neurologist at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas-Austin. “When I give the same diagnosis to a teenager, it’s good news. It means, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you; you’re just autistic.’”

Scientific medicine has failed to deliver good treatments for autism. After four decades of concerted research, “the results have for the most part been very disappointing,” said David Mandell, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Severely autistic children — those requiring round-the-clock care with ailments like epilepsy and generally lacking in verbal language — account for of all U.S. autism diagnoses. Caring for them may mean dropping careers and spending vast sums on therapy. “They ought to spell special education with a dollar sign,” said Tracy Simmons, whose 17-year-old son, Noah, has autism.

Many parents of autistic children have tried vitamins and diets that exclude wheat, soy, or dairy. Some have turned to hyperbaric oxygen chambers, others to pig hormones to repair damage spuriously attributed to measles-mumps-rubella vaccines, and infusions of metal-leaching chemicals to remove traces of heavy metals in childhood shots. Recent regimens include camel milk, broccoli extract, and stem cell injections obtained at great expense in Panama and India.

In September, the White House touted leucovorin, used in some cancer care and for an ultra-rare genetic condition. Marty Makary, then-commissioner of the FDA, said the drug could help 50% to 60% of kids with autism.

There’s little evidence behind any of these treatments, Brumback said. Many parents try multiple remedies at once; if a child’s condition improves, it’s hard to tell what worked — or whether the child simply grew out of a problem.

Noah Simmons has spent two years learning to spell and type. At a climbing center in Gaithersburg, Maryland, he communicated with the aid of his mother, Tracy Simmons, who is holding a laminated sheet with the alphabet. (Arthur Allen/��ϳԹ�� News)

Noah Simmons glides down the rope at a climbing center. He high-fived his instructor and then beamed as he spelled out, “Im going to crush it again!” (Arthur Allen/��ϳԹ�� News)

Noah the Speller

During a Zoom session in which he typed on a keyboard held by his mother, Noah Simmons wrote glowingly about the world opened to him by two years of learning to spell and type.

“Im a new person. I have friends, I write, climbing,” he typed. “Conversation. I can have one. I have a say. Im human now.”

Later, at an indoor climbing center in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Noah scrambled nearly to the top of the wall before he slipped. He glided down the rope and slapped a high five with his climbing instructor as his mother approached. She carried a laminated sheet with the alphabet on it.

Tracy Simmons held the paper while Noah stabbed at the letters one by one, ending with a flourishing swipe at the exclamation mark: “Im going to crush it again!”

There, and at a later keyboard session at home, Noah seemed in control. But when Tracy stopped offering verbal prompts and encouragement, or stopped holding the board, Noah often got lost and signaled a need for help.

Tracy Simmons acknowledges that whoever holds the board could be steering a speller’s words. Despite his climbing prowess, Noah lacks fine motor skills, is anxious, and has trouble controlling his body, she said.

“He’s working on becoming an independent typer. He can do it short amounts of time,” she said. “But at times he gets overwhelmed.”

The method used by Noah and his mother came into use in the United States in the early 1990s. At first, trainers guided the arms or hands of the spellers as they pointed to a letter board. The idea was that the intelligence or literacy of severely autistic people was trapped in bodies they couldn’t control. They needed help physically learning to spell, first with a pencil or finger pointing at stenciled or printed letters, and eventually by typing on a keyboard.

Within a few years, however, dozens of experiments had shown that the facilitators, not the autistic people, were doing the spelling. A that the spellers could identify words or objects without their facilitators.

In addition, the technique has resulted in — sometimes in the autistic person’s life skeptical of the spelling process.

Next came the Rapid Prompting Method, devised by Soma Mukhopadhyay, an Indian mother of a boy with profound autism, who brought her system to the United States in 2001. Elizabeth Vosseller, a speech pathologist in Herndon, Virginia, launched a nearly identical method, Spelling to Communicate. In both, the facilitator, not the speller, holds the letter board. But each method relies on prompts.

Mukhopadhyay and Vosseller, who did not respond to requests for comment, have each declined to submit their systems to the kind of testing that disproved facilitated communication. Bonker said calls for such tests show a lack of respect for the disabled.

Asked why, after 23 years as a speller, she couldn’t communicate alone or without her mother holding the board, Bonker typed, “I can do it in certain environments that don’t include interviews with strangers.” Severely autistic people need coaches to help control their anxiety, Breen said.

Another star of the speller world, Woody Brown, spoke through his mother with Jenna Bush Hager on the Today show on April 1. The Browns were promoting his novel, Upward Bound, which became an immediate New York Times bestseller after its March release. During the segment, Mary Brown spoke in complete sentences that she said came from Woody, but the letters he typed, as far as the program’s viewers could see, did not correspond to her words and often looked like gibberish.

This raised questions about how Woody Brown could be the author of what critics described as a brilliant, sensitive novel. They pointed out that Mary Brown has worked as a Hollywood script analyst. The Browns did not respond to efforts to reach them for comment.

“Spellers” are best known to the public through the success of The Telepathy Tapes, which briefly unseated The Joe Rogan Experience as the country’s most popular podcast early last year. In The Telepathy Tapes’ first season, people with profound autism were allegedly revealed as clairvoyant superhumans.

The evidence for their telepathic abilities was produced through spelling. The host showed spellers and facilitators two things, and the speller, with the facilitator present, typed out what the facilitator saw. Viewers had to wonder whether this was evidence of telepathy or confirmation of what critics have said all along: that the facilitator is the one controlling the words, often by feeding the speller subtle cues.

Bonker said she appreciated the Telepathy Tapes’ host for including her nonprofit group’s information on its website. As for telepathic skills, “I believe nonspeakers have many gifts,” she said. “And I believe what they say.”

The debate over spelling is playing out in boards of education and courtrooms, where parents of autistic children seek aid for their children’s spelling lessons.

In New York state in March, anti-vaccine on state Sen. Patricia Fahy, the Democratic chair of the disabilities committee, after she inserted language into a disability rights bill requiring that payments go to “verified” communication methods that assured patient autonomy.

Vikram Jaswal, a University of Virginia psychologist who works with spellers, said he’s seen people with severe autism who can type independently, though only a handful have that ability out of the couple of hundred spellers he’s met. More research is needed to figure out who can best benefit from the technique, he said.

Tracy Simmons believes in the method, and so does her son — assuming he’s in control of what he types.

On a recent morning, Tracy read aloud a beautiful escape-from-Alcatraz story she said Noah had written with her help and that of his spelling trainer. “He writes all the time in his head,” she said, but it could take years for her son to consistently type independently.

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Louisiana’s Reporting Law Chills Immigrant Medicaid Applications

Halle Parker, Verite News — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Yolibeth’s 4-year-old daughter scrambled headfirst onto a cushy leather love seat at their home near New Orleans and pushed a hairbrush into the hands of Miriam Romero, a health coordinator who works with the family. Romero placed the girl in her lap and started brushing her dark hair.

Yolibeth, a 38-year-old single mother who moved to South Louisiana from Honduras 15 years ago, watched them, smiling. The daughter is the youngest of five children living in this mixed-status household. Yolibeth and her two oldest kids don’t have legal immigration status, but the other three — ages 4, 9, and 13 — were born in the U.S. and are citizens.

All of her U.S.-born kids were enrolled in Medicaid at birth, which made it affordable for her to take them to the doctor for regular checkups when they were little. Her oldest two, ages 15 and 17, have never had health insurance, so Yolibeth relies on low-cost community clinics when she can afford it.

But now she worries that healthcare access for all of her children is slipping away. Yolibeth has been waiting for months to hear whether any of her children’s Medicaid renewal applications has been approved. She fears they will be denied because of a new Louisiana law targeting noncitizen Medicaid enrollees, even though she isn’t applying for herself. She worries particularly about her 4-year-old’s access to routine care and required childhood vaccines.

“ I cannot access the same services, and so my child is not getting what she needs to grow healthy,” Yolibeth said in Spanish as her daughter giggled on the love seat.

Verite News and ��ϳԹ�� News agreed to not use Yolibeth’s full name, because she is worried about repercussions related to her immigration status.

Romero (left) welcomes a community member to Familias Unidas en Acción’s office in New Orleans in April. (Christiana Botic/Verite News and CatchLight Local/Report for America)

Romero, who works for a local immigrant advocacy group, said that in a single week she received calls from eight immigrant families who had been denied after applying for Medicaid on behalf of children who are citizens.

“Because of the law that passed in Louisiana, children are losing their Medicaid every day,” Romero said in Spanish. “The more time that goes by, the more children are impacted by it.”

Romero said that all children from mixed-status families are likely to be denied Medicaid by the end of the year.

Missing Out on Care

Nationally, many immigrants said they skipped or delayed healthcare last year, citing issues including costs, struggles finding services, and fears about their or a family member’s immigration status, by KFF and The New York Times. Immigrants without legal status were the most likely to skip or delay care for themselves or their children. An increasing number of immigrants avoided applying for programs like Medicaid, too scared to risk drawing attention to their or a family member’s immigration status, even if they were eligible.

In Louisiana, where about a third of residents are enrolled in Medicaid, the has added to those fears. The law requires the Louisiana Department of Health to verify Medicaid applicants’ U.S. citizenship, terminate coverage for applicants with “unsatisfactory” proof of status, and report those applicants to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Since the measure passed in Louisiana, similar bills have passed in North Carolina, Wyoming, Indiana, and Tennessee. At least three other states were considering similar measures this year.

State Rep. Chance Keith Henry, a Republican who sponsored the Louisiana bill, did not return calls or emails from Verite News seeking comment on the effects of the law. He said in last year’s state House floor debate that he didn’t anticipate any chilling effect on immigrants seeking healthcare. He also said that children born in the U.S. to parents without legal status would still receive Medicaid.

“This is making sure that American citizens and our taxpayers are taken care of and not illegal immigrants,” he said in the May 2025 floor debate.

State health officials said Medicaid applicants can’t be reported to ICE under the law without a formal investigation request by “the appropriate authorities.” Otherwise, reporting applicants without their consent would violate federal Medicaid and privacy laws.

But immigrant rights advocates say the law has had a chilling effect on applications and has led to immigrant families losing healthcare and resources they qualify for.

They said cutting off that access compounds the fear created by immigration enforcement crackdowns in states including and Minnesota, and by federal policy changes such as between ICE and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and for Medicaid.

Advocates said it’s unclear whether the new law has led to any detainments or deportations of people applying for Medicaid or other public benefit programs. But Aaron Moseley-Saldívar, a legal and public policy adviser with the Louisiana Organization for Refugees and Immigrants, said the legislative and policy changes act as a deterrent to immigrant families, even if they qualify for Medicaid as a legal resident, refugee, or asylum seeker, or have another form of legal status.

“ People are not applying for things that they probably otherwise would be eligible for, because they are intimidated by these laws and they’re worried that they’re going to get caught up in the system,” Moseley-Saldívar said. “ You have a large amount of people in Louisiana that are not leaving their homes at all, because they’re afraid of policies like this.”

Moseley-Saldívar said he believes the Louisiana law and similar policies are primarily aimed at removing people from state services. The state legislature passed a on May 27 to build on the 2025 law. It seeks to further narrow which noncitizens are qualified for public benefits in Louisiana, even though such restrictions for Medicaid are typically governed at the federal level.

The Louisiana Department of Health’s on the new law does not contain any data on applicants reported to ICE since the law took effect last August. But by February of this year, the state had terminated the coverage of 87% of enrollees who had unverified immigration or citizenship status as of June 2025.

From July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2025, according to the report, 1% of the 1.6 million people in Louisiana enrolled in Medicaid weren’t citizens, and fewer than 4,000 had an unclear immigration status.

Romero says that all children from mixed-status families in Louisiana are likely to be denied Medicaid by the end of the year. (Christiana Botic/Verite News and CatchLight Local/Report for America)

‘A Double-Edged Sword’

Late last year, more than 600 people lined up at 4 a.m. outside a Louisiana Organization for Refugees and Immigrants health fair, hoping to receive a free health checkup, said Sharon Njie, the nonprofit’s communications and strategic partners director. The fair was scheduled to begin at 9 a.m.

“ We had to start calling the doctors to see if they could come there at 7 a.m., because these people have been waiting for two hours in the cold,” Njie said. “We were so overwhelmed.”

Romero said some families in the New Orleans area have been waiting six months to vaccinate their children at one of the free events put on by healthcare providers. But she said fewer free health events for children have been scheduled, and even fewer for adults. For many of the residents she works with, Romero said, preventive care such as a Pap smear or prostate screening is out of reach.

“The challenge right now is a double-edged sword of people not going to the doctor out of fear but also ending up in an emergency that is too hard to treat,” Romero said. “It’s a life-or-death situation.”

For families with no other option, Njie and Romero try to connect people to doctors sympathetic to the immigrants’ plight and willing to absorb the cost of care or offer a discount, such as medical providers who are immigrants themselves.

But that does not address the systemic problems of immigrant access to healthcare created by the state law and federal immigration policies, or the lower quality of care for those who seek it. For example, one local New Orleans clinic, Luke’s House, caters to Spanish-speakers and immigrants, though it’s staffed largely by medical students, Romero said, so the level of care isn’t the same.

Romero says some families in the New Orleans area have been waiting six months to vaccinate their children at one of the free events put on by healthcare providers. (Christiana Botic/Verite News and CatchLight Local/Report for America)

While she waits for word on three of her kids’ Medicaid applications, Yolibeth secured a free insurance plan for them on the Louisiana Affordable Care Act marketplace, she said. But she hasn’t found any doctors who will accept the coverage, she said, leaving them effectively uninsured.

When her 13-year-old son recently fell ill, she wanted to take him to a pediatrician. But she said she couldn’t afford the $200 the appointment would have cost, plus any tests and medication.

Without a doctor’s note to provide proof of his illness, she said, she had to send her sick son to school, potentially exposing other children to a virus. Earlier in the school year, she was called into the school’s office after he missed five days because of illness. In Louisiana, truancy can be punishable with parental fines, community service, or jail.

Romero said if enough school is missed because of sickness, a criminal case could lead to family separation.

“That is unthinkable,” she said. “All because a family could not afford to take a child to see the doctor as opposed to these things being guaranteed to begin with.”

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RFK Jr. Seeks To Peek at Americans’ Medical Records for Clues on Autism and Vaccines

Amanda Seitz — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

U.S. health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is pursuing federal government access to most Americans’ medical records, in a quest to research a link between vaccines and autism — a connection the medical establishment studied for decades and flatly rejects.

The Department of Health and Human Services is seeking data from little-known state systems that allow hospitals and clinics to exchange detailed, identifiable patient information, ��ϳԹ�� News has learned.

In private meetings, some public health leaders have objected to giving Kennedy’s team access to such data, raising doubts that it’s legal or that the information would even be useful.

They have also expressed concerns about allowing the federal government to peer into the minutiae of Americans’ medical records, which could mean viewing anything from doctors’ notes to prescription history. HHS has offered no insight into how it will protect or handle the personal health information it obtains.

But Kennedy told ��ϳԹ�� News that medical records are key to investigating the cause of autism, vaccine safety, and chronic diseases. And millions of dollars in grant money has poured into a Nebraska nonprofit that has assisted Kennedy’s effort, according to state records.

He and his advisers have been frustrated that federal access to Americans’ medical records has been limited.

“We need a good health record system, and one of the things that really surprised me most when I came into office is that there is — that the systems are broken,” Kennedy said in a May interview. “We’ve had to go to the states and, luckily, we’ve got a lot of cooperation from the states, but we now have databases together that we can actually do the studies on. Those studies are in motion.”

HHS has not publicly announced any new projects involving medical records and autism or vaccine research. Kennedy faced blowback last year when he proposed compiling the medical records of people with autism to create a federal disease registry — which health department officials .

But Kennedy said in May, “We have a whole pipeline of studies that will be done over the next year.”

Though the White House has steered Kennedy away from further changes to U.S. vaccine policy ahead of November’s crucial midterm elections, President Donald Trump has regularly echoed Kennedy’s doubts about vaccine safety and last week signed an executive order calling for the U.S. to reduce the number of vaccines recommended for children.

Kennedy’s political appointees and allies — including William “Reyn” Archer III, a former Texas health official and whom Kennedy hired as a senior adviser — have led the initiative for the health department to collect and examine medical records.

William “Reyn” Archer III, a former Texas health commissioner, attends the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meeting at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters on Sept. 20. (Mary Conlon/AP)

Federal officials met with leaders of the state-run health information exchange systems several times over the past year and asked how the personal medical records they maintain could be used for vaccine research, according to seven people who participated in the discussions or were familiar with them.

Craig Behm, who runs the Maryland health information exchange, said Kennedy’s team asked about how the vast trove of medical records they store from hospitals and health systems could be used to study vaccines.

“If this administration wants to conduct research on the effectiveness of vaccines, are you saying you all can help us conduct that research?” Behm recalled being asked by a top official at HHS’ health information technology office.

Last June, Behm and leaders of other state exchanges met with Kennedy’s top advisers to discuss sharing more medical data with federal agencies. The state organizations followed up with a pitch in October for a new surveillance system that would give the federal health department “real-time, 24-hour data feeds on opioid and chronic disease trends” within a year, according to a presentation reviewed by ��ϳԹ�� News. Under the proposal, HHS would get data from 90% of the population’s medical records by 2028.

Administration officials regularly asked during the meetings how the records could be used to monitor vaccine safety. Kennedy has rejected the federal government’s current vaccine-monitoring systems; decades of research has shown immunizations are safe and effective for most people.

“Vaccine safety, or whatever words you want to use, has come up pretty consistently in those conversations,” said John Kansky, CEO of the Indiana Health Information Exchange.

Kansky sees the potential value of sharing information from the exchanges for public health but is worried about the focus on vaccines: “It’s like, oh man, I wish you would have picked something that pushed fewer buttons for people.”

A System To Monitor Chronic Disease

Nearly every state has at least one health information exchange — often regulated by state laws and run by private companies or nonprofits — that enables hospitals and health systems to immediately share patients’ medical records with one another. The systems allow doctors and nurses to quickly pull up nearly anyone’s medical history and records at emergency rooms or share after-visit summaries and notes with patients’ primary care providers, for example.

In certain circumstances — most often dealing with cases of infectious diseases such as measles or flu — the exchanges notify public health authorities, like the state health department or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Using the exchanges for broader public health purposes is not an unusual idea in itself. But it can present privacy, legal, and ethical complications, health officials say.

In the end, Behm said his organization in Maryland declined to share more data with the federal government for vaccine research, noting that sharing medical records for that purpose would require a rash of approvals from hospitals, state political leaders, and research boards. Any new data-sharing agreement should also have a clear, detailed framework outlining what would be shared and with whom, he added.

“A number of us said, ‘We can’t do anything our agreements don’t allow us to do, so no,’” Behm said. Indeed, most health information exchanges have contractual restrictions on who can access clinical data.

Kansky said Indiana is still weighing whether to provide additional data for Kennedy’s project, and that nothing has yet been shared.

HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard did not answer questions about how many states are participating in Kennedy’s project, what new data the agency is collecting, how much the federal government is spending on the initiative, how it is protecting patient privacy, or who has access to the data.

“HHS is strengthening public health surveillance and modernizing data systems to better understand and combat the childhood chronic disease epidemic as part of Secretary Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again agenda,” Hilliard said in an emailed statement. “Americans deserve robust systems to monitor the drivers of chronic illness.”

Kennedy has asserted, without evidence, that vaccines can cause chronic illness.

A Kennedy Partner in Nebraska

At least one state has been cooperative.

The former leader of Nebraska’s state health information exchange has led the effort to share data from medical records with the federal government.

Jaime Bland, former CEO of CyncHealth — the Nebraska health information exchange used by in the state — said several states are looking to “open up channels” to provide more analysis to Kennedy’s team.

“They’re looking at the data differently and providing some insights back to the CDC,” Bland told ��ϳԹ�� News.

Bland was among a group who proposed that CyncHealth would help kick off the initiative, according to a 43-slide PowerPoint presented to federal officials during an October meeting.

CyncHealth and other state health information exchanges would “ingest data from hospitals, clinics, laboratories, pharmacies, payers, and social services agencies,” then “link claims and clinical records through a master patient index.”

Data from the exchanges “will be deidentified where appropriate,” according to one slide.

The federal government would pay the exchanges for furnishing the records, according to the proposal: $3 a person, annually.

Officials would “frame publicly that this is not a new database, but a federated trust model that delivers real-time data for all HHS missions,” the presentation reads.

After the meeting, Nebraska’s health department was awarded a large grant from the CDC, and CyncHealth in turn got millions of dollars from the state.

On Dec. 19, the CDC announced new funding under its , which sends money to state and local health departments for lab work, health information enhancements, and solutions for outbreaks.

Nebraska’s state health department was awarded $18.7 million — the most of any state last year, though Nebraska is the 38th most populous state. By comparison, Texas received $9.2 million, and California got $10.8 million.

CyncHealth was then awarded three contracts totaling $13.6 million from the state health department just weeks later, on Jan. 9 and Jan. 16, according to a publicly accessible database of state contracts.

Grace McNamara, a spokesperson for CyncHealth, said it retained $2.4 million of the funding for Kennedy’s project; the remaining money was distributed to “other participating states and various vendor organizations for implementation support.”

A former CDC official who was aware of the transaction, but not authorized to speak publicly about it, confirmed the money was intended for CyncHealth to supply data for Kennedy’s initiative to look at vaccines and autism. McNamara said that the “work is focused on improving outcomes related to acute and chronic illnesses.”

“The referenced project is not research, but rather a proof-of-concept project on how health information exchange and public health can work together to improve health outcomes and is not specific to autism,” she said in an emailed statement.

McNamara did not answer questions about what type of medical data is being provided to the federal health department or whether patients’ identifying information is removed.

Bland left her post at CyncHealth — where she was paid nearly — in December. She was named in April as the chief data strategist for the MAHA Institute — a think tank founded by allies of Kennedy and Trump to advance their Make America Healthy Again movement.

Bland agreed with Kennedy that data from state health information exchanges could provide more insight into autism’s causes or vaccine injuries.

“The data is so fragmented, so modeled when it comes to population health and public health, that we lose sight of the individual stories,” Bland said. She told a story she had heard about a woman who had a seizure after receiving the HPV vaccine.

“You know, the vaccine is safe — it absolutely is — but it wasn’t safe for her,” Bland said. “As public health officials, we say the vaccine is safe. But there are cases where it is not.”

Daniel Jernigan, a former top CDC official who left the agency last summer, said he tried to point Kennedy to data that would help the health secretary study vaccine safety and autism.

Former CDC official Daniel Jernigan greets a supporter after resigning from the agency on Aug. 28. (Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)

After 31 years at the CDC overseeing public health surveillance, emerging infectious diseases, and the influenza divisions, Jernigan thought the solution was simple. The secretary could work with researchers to obtain huge databases pulled from health systems nationwide and maintained by major electronic health records companies.

Those databases are deidentified, meaning they don’t include patient names or other information that can identify individuals. Jernigan said Kennedy didn’t seem interested.

Instead, as The New York Times first reported, the health secretary dispatched two top advisers — Archer and Hannah Anderson, his former deputy chief of staff — to the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta last July to download millions of identifiable patient records directly from the Vaccine Safety Datalink, the system the health agency uses to investigate complications from vaccines. The records, though, were decades old.

Jernigan said the federal government has limited legal authority to access medical records from state health information exchanges. In any case, examining those records may provide a view of a person’s medical history that will not necessarily produce answers to Kennedy’s questions about vaccines and autism.

“If they’re just using the electronic health record data, there are limits to that,” Jernigan said. “If they’re only looking at electronic health record data, all you’re going to get is what was captured in the encounter. It’s not going to be very satisfying.”

��ϳԹ�� News data reporter Maia Rosenfeld contributed to this article.

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Michigan Found a Way To Reduce School Vaccine Waivers. Until It Backfired.

Kate Wells — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

PORT HURON, Mich. — State health officials urged parents in several counties to vaccinate babies against measles ahead of schedule this spring as cases multiplied in Michigan. The outbreaks of the highly contagious virus — which can lead to brain swelling, deafness, and death — came as parents are opting school-age kids out of vaccinations at a record-high rate.

It’s a situation state officials have spent more than a decade trying to avoid. For years, they’ve been trying to make it harder for parents to send their kids to school unvaccinated.

But those efforts have backfired in places like St. Clair County, in Michigan’s conservative Thumb region. Remington Nevin, the county’s medical director, has declared “a new era of vaccine choice.” Local parents there can now bypass the usual protocols and get school vaccine waivers via email, days after they fill out a brief digital form.

State health officials aren’t fighting it.

Remington Nevin is the medical director for the St. Clair County Health Department in Michigan. The county is the first in the state to make vaccine waivers available to parents entirely online. Parents who have “felt pressured” into getting vaccines “are going to experience a new era of vaccine choice in St. Clair County,” Nevin said at a January board meeting. (Kate Wells/��ϳԹ�� News)

In fact, Michigan’s health agency has been helping more than 30 counties move away from a state policy once credited with sharply reducing the number of parents who opted their kids out of shots.

In 2015, the state started requiring parents seeking waivers to first attend a vaccine education session, in person, at their local health department.

But in the post-covid era, local health officials say, the sessions became hostile, ineffective, and sometimes even unsafe for staff. One high school called police last fall over an escalating dispute with parents who refused to obtain a state-recognized waiver for their children, with a sheriff’s deputy warning the parents that they could face criminal charges.

In response, the state has helped create a hybrid waiver process for dozens of counties, allowing parents to take a brief vaccine education course online while still requiring they get their waivers signed in person. It’s part of a broader shift in strategy in a state that had some of the most polarizing and covid restrictions.

At Michigan schools where only 30% to 40% of students are now vaccinated, it is “simply not possible to keep diseases like measles at bay,” said , the state’s chief medical officer. “And when one of these measles cases ends up in a low-immunization community, that’s when the ember really has a chance to expand and become a wildfire.”

A Short-Lived Success Story

In 2014, Michigan had the in the country.

Health officials suspected some parents were just signing waivers during the stress of school registration, not because of a deeply held conviction.

“‘Oops, I forgot to do this. I’m just going to sign a waiver and be done with it,’” said Norm Hess, executive director of the . “That’s not really the way we want parents to make decisions on this issue.”

Around that time, national headlines were focused on a Disneyland-linked measles outbreak in which were infected. California cracked down, becoming the first state in decades to end .

With Republicans then in control of the Michigan Legislature and governor’s office, health officials found a side door. They created an saying nonmedical waivers required certification by the local health department “that the individual received education on the risks of not receiving the vaccines being waived and the benefits of vaccination to the individual and the community.”

“We were not aware of the rule until the day it happened,” Suzanne Waltman, president of Michigan for Vaccine Choice, . “We thought it was a stealth move.”

At first, it seemed to work. Kindergarten waiver rates in 2015. “Kids were protected more from these vaccine-preventable diseases,” Hess said.

But after that year, waiver rates started rebounding. When the pandemic hit five years later, immunization rates plunged.

Juan Marquez is the medical director for Washtenaw and Livingston counties in Michigan. He says the in-person education sessions the state required for parents seeking vaccine waivers for their children became ineffective — and unsafe for staff. (Kate Wells/��ϳԹ�� News)

‘An Unsafe Setting’ for Medical Staff

Juan Marquez is the medical director of a county where a measles outbreak sickened several people this spring, but even he wouldn’t want to do those in-person sessions again.

“It was really creating an unsafe setting, actually, for our nurses,” said Marquez, the medical director for two counties, Livingston and Washtenaw, just west of Detroit.

“Our nurses are just trying to do their job,” Marquez said. “And you can imagine, to have somebody yell at you or just say not nice things to your face and sit through that for hours is demoralizing.”

Washtenaw has had seven measles cases since March and is believed to be the source of an eighth case in a neighboring county. As of May 28, the state had a total of 14 cases this year.

Since the start of the pandemic, waiver requests in Michigan have been increasing.

Tensions over public health became especially high during the state’s covid lockdowns, which critics lambasted as too long and too strict. Republicans , and Donald Trump flipped the state in the 2024 presidential contest.

Some parents felt it was demeaning to have to go in for counseling sessions they perceived as judgmental.

Republican , who represents a district along the state’s southern border, recalled her session, speaking at a in Lansing last year. “I had a very negative experience there, simply because we made decisions as parents and did the research and made the choices that we felt were best for each one of our children.”

That resentment has also made it harder to do basic public health work, like contact tracing for measles cases, Marquez said.

Of the 10,000 vaccine waivers Marquez’s counties have given out in the past 10 years, he said, the education sessions changed the minds of maybe one or two people.

“If we’re not changing folks’ minds, can we do this in a safe way?” Marquez said. “So that was really the idea behind the hybrid model.”

Washtenaw County health officials used this van to test people for measles during an outbreak this spring, in an effort to reduce potential exposures. Seven people were sickened, including a child under 5. None of those individuals had been vaccinated for measles. (Kate Wells/��ϳԹ�� News)

The Workaround

At first, state immunizations director Ryan Malosh thought dropping the in-person requirement was a bad idea.

He was skeptical when Livingston County health officials said they wanted to replace in-person sessions with a 20-minute online course about the benefits of vaccines and the risks of vaccine-preventable diseases.

State health department staffers were worried that if the waiver process became more convenient, more people would get exemptions, which could lead to more outbreaks. And because parents could get a waiver from any local health department, people from across the state might start flooding Livingston County with requests.

“We were worried that this could be sort of a sinkhole,” Malosh said.

It wasn’t. Parents took the online course, then made an appointment at the health department to get their nonmedical waivers signed. Waiver rates increased in Livingston County, but at the same rate they were rising in the rest of the state.

State health officials urged parents in seven Michigan counties, including Washtenaw, to vaccinate all babies 6 months and older for measles as cases mounted in the spring. Typically, the first dose of the measles vaccine wouldn’t be administered until children are 12 to 15 months old. (Kate Wells/��ϳԹ�� News)

So the state turned to the University of Michigan to create a standardized, online course that any county could use. Parents would go through a 20- to 30-minute course, answering questions about the content, and then be able to get their waivers signed at their local health department office.

Michael Rubyan, a public health associate professor at the university, worked with some 40 public health nurses from throughout the state to design it. They wanted it to be simple and fact-based: Here’s what you should know about these diseases. Here’s how vaccines work. And if there is an outbreak at your school, your kids may have to stay home if they’re not vaccinated.

No judgment. No pressure.

This needed to be a building block in a much longer relationship with local public health, the nurses said. And while this change alone probably won’t lead to a dramatic decrease in waivers, Malosh said, it may start to rebuild some trust. “That then opens the door for further conversations, which maybe then gets these folks vaccinated,” he said.

Hybrid May Not Be Enough

About a third of the state’s counties have adopted the hybrid approach, but the waiver system is still creating confusion and conflict.

Last fall, a dispute over the waiver process involving a St. Clair County family blew up into a local controversy, and school officials asked local law enforcement to get involved.

Although the family lived in St. Clair, the children attended high school in neighboring Macomb County. Macomb had already switched to the hybrid model, but the parents didn’t want to file the documents, because they didn’t want their children’s vaccination status to be known by local health officials at all.

The father, Andrew Eberly, said at a that getting a certified waiver “forces parents like me to register personal health decisions” with an agency they don’t trust. (Eberly did not respond to multiple attempts to contact him via email, via phone, and at his home.)

At one point during the ongoing conflict, school officials asked the sheriff’s department to intervene. A deputy’s conversation with Eberly on Nov. 5 was captured in body-camera footage obtained by ��ϳԹ�� News through a public records request.

The deputy described the counseling requirement as a set of “stupid hoops.”

“I know it’s super inconvenient to go into the health department, go through their stupid 10-minute class for them to tell you something you already know, to sign the waiver,” the deputy said.

But the deputy went on to warn Eberly that if they continued taking their kids to school, despite being repeatedly informed they couldn’t be enrolled without a state-recognized waiver, then they could be charged with contributing to the truancy of minors.

The clash became a local cause célèbre. Nevin, the St. Clair medical director, seized on it — and the state’s falling immunization rates — at a public health board meeting as proof that people who mistrust the state’s public health establishment “have sound reasons for doing so.”

For years, Michigan has required parents to attend an in-person course to obtain vaccine waivers for their children. State officials are now supporting a hybrid model: Parents take a brief online course but still have to get their waivers signed at the local health department. But St. Clair County is allowing parents to do the whole process online. (Kate Wells/��ϳԹ�� News)

Members of the St. Clair County Health Advisory Board at their April meeting, where they discussed the rollout of the online vaccine waiver program. (Kate Wells/��ϳԹ�� News)

So far, state health officials have declined to engage in verbal or legal conflict with Nevin, who has drawn cheers and jeers at public meetings over his vaccine stance. He has also been the subject of at the county health department.

Instead, state officials are stressing the importance of parents understanding the risks that vaccine-preventable diseases, like measles, pose for their kids.

“Local health departments get to decide for themselves in a lot of ways what’s best for their residents,” Malosh said. “And I think that what’s best is to be as upfront as possible, to be as truthful as possible, and to try to give the best information that we have available to us to parents so that they can actually make an informed decision.”

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In a Vaccine-Skeptical California County, a Potential Playbook To Contain Measles

Annie Sciacca — Thu, 28 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

James Mu had braced for the call that came in late January.

A patient from his rural Northern California county , a disease so rare there that many physicians have never treated a case.

While California has some of the strictest vaccine laws in the country, conservative Shasta County’s approach during the covid pandemic stood in stark contrast with the state’s guidance. Its local leaders opposed masking and vaccine mandates, and the county public health officer, who had sought to enforce those state policies and other safety measures.

A potential measles outbreak had “always been in my mind,” said Mu, an outspoken family physician who was to sign a opposing covid vaccine mandates. But Mu, the county’s current public health officer, said that when his department identified the first local measles case, it acted decisively: “We forgot about fear.”

They went to work, he and his team said, to painstakingly retrace the steps of sickened with measles, contacting more than 600 people who may have been exposed at Costco, a sushi restaurant, sporting events, a school, or a healthcare clinic. Just one of the nine contracted measles from one of those locations, while the others were characterized by the public health department as “close contacts.”

Two and a half months later, the Shasta County public health department had declared the measles outbreak over. Infectious disease experts say the rapid response executed in the mostly rural, vaccine-hesitant county offers a playbook for public health officers across the nation who are struggling to keep the highly contagious virus from spreading.

“To me, the story of Shasta is one of hope,” said Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California-San Francisco.

Downtown Redding, California, the seat of Shasta County. (iStock/Getty Images)

After more than a year of ongoing cases, measles has sickened more than in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For the first time in two decades, the U.S. is poised to lose its measles elimination status, a designation signaling that outbreaks are rare and rapidly contained.

673 measles cases as of late May while had seen at least 997, according to their state health departments. 74 cases.

Critical Rapid Response

In late January, when Shasta County identified the first case, Mu gathered with more than a dozen communicable-disease nurses, epidemiologists, and emergency and community relations staffers for an “initial threat assessment meeting.”

Measles is an that can linger in a room for two hours after an infected person leaves, so on-call nurses and responders faced a daunting task figuring out exactly when the patient was infectious and where they had been.

“Everything is about speed — speed in identifying the person and finding the sites where measles were occurring,” Chin-Hong said. “If you keep it down to a few cases, it’s much easier. If you wait just a little bit longer, those people would have been in contact with a lot more people.”

Roughly 9 in 10 unvaccinated people exposed to the virus become infected. All nine of Shasta County’s confirmed cases were people who were unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination status, according to the county’s public health department. Before the department called families who may have been exposed, county nurses sometimes enlisted school principals, church staff, clinic managers, or others to make first contact, said Daniel Walker, the county’s supervising epidemiologist.

Erika Piper, the head of Redding Christian School in Palo Cedro, talked to school families wary of requests by public health officials — and government in general — to provide immunization records or other personal information. She said she also had tough but respectful conversations with families to ensure exposed, unvaccinated kids stayed home from school, so their community could abide by public health guidance calling for .

“I would say to them: ‘That’s totally fine. You have a choice. You’ve made your choice. But there are still consequences to the choices we make,’” Piper said, referring to families who had opted not to vaccinate their children. “‘And so you can either be a willing helper and a partner with me in this, and we can make it work and get through it, or you can battle me on it. But either way, you can’t be in school.’”

She allowed work to be sent home to quarantined students and personally took daily attendance at the school to help ensure health guidelines were met.

The California Department of Public Health assisted with case investigation by making calls to exposed people at the county’s request and deployed a covid-era phone system, CalCONNECT, that automates symptom monitoring for exposed contacts.

Shasta officials warned people not to be wary of calls from contract tracers using a 279 area code, worrying they would dismiss them as scams.

Delicate Conversations

In Shasta County, the measles vaccination rate is just below the for community-level protection, but in pockets of the community the rates are lower and vary widely, according to . And in those vulnerable places, an outbreak can spread.

For example, more than a quarter of Shasta schools had rates below 95% in 2024-25, according to the latest state data available. Several were below 90%. Although Redding Christian School reported a kindergarten measles vaccination rate at or above 95% in 2024-25, it was 87.8% three years earlier.

When it came to talking to people who had been exposed to measles, Sharayne Loomis, a supervising public health nurse on Shasta’s communicable-disease team, described the department’s approach as “meeting people where they are.” That included nonjudgmental conversations that supported residents regardless of their stance on vaccination, Loomis said.

Mu said the same philosophy extended across the county’s health agencies, but he publicly “measles parties,” gatherings where unvaccinated children are intentionally exposed to build immunity. And he spoke against receiving high doses of vitamin A without medical supervision. Vitamin A has circulated as a measles treatment in vaccine-skeptical communities and was endorsed last year by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., though the CDC website says that vitamin A “does not prevent measles and is not a substitute for vaccination.”

James Mu, Shasta County’s public health officer, led the rural, conservative California county’s effort to contain a measles outbreak that began in late January. (Shasta County)

Some community members said Mu’s department could have been more proactive before the outbreak, imploring him to emphasize the importance of vaccination in public messaging.

“Clearly, when the situation was known to be coming into our communities, that would have been a time to advise for vaccines,” Steve Kahn told county supervisors at their February board meeting. “I think he was negligent in that.”

For years, public health has been a political flash point for the region. The Board of Supervisors fired the previous public health officer, Karen Ramstrom, in May 2022 after upset with her enforcement of state covid rules.

In an effort to reach vaccine-hesitant Californians, state officials have been working in a coalition called Public Health for All Californians Together and through an effort nicknamed that uses social media monitoring and other research to tailor messaging to skeptical viewers.

Erica Pan, director of the California Department of Public Health, said the state is preparing for measles to possibly surge when it hosts World Cup soccer matches starting in June, as well as with increased summer travel.

But when it comes to mitigating an outbreak in a community, public health officials say, residents — especially those skeptical of vaccines — need to hear from the people they know.

“Trust is very important for us,” Mu said. “It is critical in getting people to follow our guidance, especially during an outbreak.”

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Colorado Charts Its Own Course on Vaccines Amid Federal Pullback

John Daley, Colorado Public Radio — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

In response to abrupt and politicized , concerned Coloradans have taken several steps to shore up support for vaccine science.

A bill in March then by Democratic Gov. Jared Polis allows Colorado to further uncouple itself from federal guidance.

The law allows health officials to follow the recommendations of national medical groups when making decisions such as purchasing bulk vaccines for the Medicaid program.

“We are insulating our state from the dysfunction coming out of Washington,” said Democratic state , a co-sponsor of the bill and a registered nurse. “We’re going to rely on science.”

“From fighting during the pandemic for Coloradans to get vaccines as quickly as possible to combating the Trump Administration’s barriers to getting vaccinated, we have expanded access to vaccines for Coloradans who want them,” Polis said in a statement when he signed the law.

Colorado is one of that, along with Washington, D.C., have taken steps to bypass the new federal recommendations amid worries that the changes could chip away at public trust in vaccines and erode .

Previously, Colorado, like most states, had followed federal guidance set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In January, CDC advisory panelists, selected by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., from the agency’s universal recommendation list.

Last year, doctors, scientists, local leaders, and other supporters came together to form an outreach and advocacy coalition called .

The group aims to offer a clear, unified voice on the proven benefits of vaccines and reassure residents confused by the many federal changes.

, a former Denver City Council member, joined the group because she wants more people to hear her own chilling story about vaccine-preventable illness.

“Every summer everybody got sick,” Boigon said, recounting her childhood in 1950s Detroit.

The illness was polio, a highly contagious viral disease that , sometimes causing partial or full paralysis.

During the summer of 1953, “the whole block was sick and some of us got crippled, and that was just the way it was,” she said.

New Group Steps Up

Boigon’s personal history will be part of the new generations about the dangers of infectious diseases that were once common in the U.S. but are now relatively rare.

The group, which formed last September, will also compile vaccine information from medical groups and the state health department and advocate for policy proposals with the state government.

Boigon shows memorabilia from her life and career. (Kevin J. Beaty/Colorado Public Radio/Denverite)

“It was in direct response to the federal threats,” said another coalition member, former state lawmaker . She leads the nonprofit .

Another member, public relations specialist Elizabet Garcia, wants more outreach to Hispanics, whose vaccination rates .

“A lot of time it’s this fear that they’re going to have to pay out-of-pocket, that their insurance doesn’t cover it, that they might not even have insurance in general,” Garcia said.

Boigon was 5 when she got sick and was hospitalized for six weeks with a fever. The virus attacked her spine.

“None of my limbs worked immediately afterwards,” Boigon said.

Although she regained function in her other limbs, her right arm never fully recovered. She had to adapt, relearning everyday tasks such as reaching out to shake hands with people with her left hand.

In 1955, not long after she got sick, the new polio vaccine became more widely available to the public. As vaccinations took off, U.S. cases of polio, once one of the nation’s most feared diseases, .

Increasing Public Trust

State leaders have taken other steps to promote public health. After the Trump administration pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, several states, including Colorado, the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network on their own.

Colorado also challenging the Trump administration’s changes to the childhood vaccine schedule.

And the new state law has provisions besides allowing the state to diverge from federal recommendations. It codifies pharmacists’ ability to prescribe and give vaccines themselves. It also increases legal protections for healthcare workers who give vaccines.

“This law will provide more clarity to guide all Coloradans, including providers who administer vaccines,” Lontine said.

But the legislation has opponents who say it would interfere with parental choice and claim vaccines might be unsafe or ineffective.

“I just want to make sure we’re not just getting into a big political dispute between the federal recommendations — the CDC and so forth — and different political views in Colorado here,” said Republican state , who voted against the vaccine bill.

NPR contacted the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services about Colorado’s new law. Spokesperson Emily Hilliard answered in an email: “The updated CDC childhood schedule continues to protect children against serious diseases.”

Preventable Illnesses Surge

The flurry of statewide activity comes as Colorado and the nation have seen surges in illnesses .

As of mid-May, Colorado had recorded 22 measles cases this year. In 2025, it registered , according to the state health department, far surpassing totals from previous years.

Across Colorado, for measles were 88% last school year — with only a few counties achieving rates of 95%, the level needed for herd immunity, according to data in December.

This has also been Colorado’s worst flu season in recent years.

Vaccination rates for both flu and covid-19 have dropped slightly in Colorado, according to the state health department.

Eight children in Colorado have died this season ; one from covid; and one from RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus. are available for children and recommended by the state’s health department.

Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, has defended his decisions to overhaul the recommended schedule for childhood vaccinations.

In March, a federal judge many of the changes.

“We’re not taking vaccines away from anybody. If you want to get the vaccine, you could get it. It’s going to be fully covered by insurance just like it was before,” Kennedy in January.

When a reporter suggested the new changes could result in fewer people getting a flu vaccine, Kennedy said: “Well, that may be, and maybe that’s a better thing.”

Boigon is sometimes incredulous at everything that has happened.

“It’s like we’re going backwards,” she said. “It’s like we have decided we don’t want a modern life; we want to be back in the 1950s, where children are sick and dying.”

Boigon at home in Denver. (Kevin J. Beaty/Colorado Public Radio/Denverite)

This article is from a partnership that includes ,��, and ��ϳԹ�� News.

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A Danish Couple’s Maverick African Research Finds Its Moment in RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Policy

Arthur Allen — Mon, 18 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

In 1996, Guinea-Bissau seemed like an ideal research post for budding pediatrician Lone Graff Stensballe. Her supervisor, a fellow Dane named Peter Aaby, had spent on 100,000 people living in the mud brick homes of the West African country’s capital.

Aaby and his partner, Christine Stabell Benn, believed that the years of research in the impoverished country had yielded a major discovery about vaccines — and what they described as “non-specific effects”: The measles and tuberculosis vaccines, which were derived from live, weakened viruses and bacteria, they said, boosted child survival beyond protecting against those particular pathogens.

But, the scientists said, shots made from deactivated whole germs, or pieces of them, such as the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis shot, caused more deaths — especially in little girls — than getting no vaccine at all.

The World Health Organization repeatedly and inconclusively examined these astonishing findings, which tended to elicit shrugs from the researchers’ colleagues in global health.

Then came Donald Trump, covid, and the administrative reign of anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Suddenly, Aaby and Benn weren’t just sending up distant smoke signals from a far corner of the planet. They were and policy prescriptions online and in medical journals. The “framework” for “testing, approving, and regulating vaccines needs to be updated to accommodate non-specific effects,” their team wrote in .

And the Trump administration has taken notice.

“They became more strident in saying that their findings were real and that the world needed to do something about it,” said Kathryn Edwards, a Vanderbilt University vaccinologist who has been aware of Aaby’s work since the 1990s. “And they became more aligned with RFK.”

Kennedy, as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, to justify slashing $2.6 billion in U.S. support for Gavi, a global alliance of vaccination initiatives. The cut could result in 1.2 million preventable deaths over five years in the world’s poorest countries, the nonprofit agency has estimated. Kennedy has in current Gavi funding over largely debunked vaccine safety claims.

Kennedy described as a “landmark study” by “five highly regarded mainstream vaccine experts” that found that girls who received a diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis, or DTP, shot were 10 times as likely as unvaccinated children to die from all causes.

In fact, the study was far too small to confidently make such assertions, as Benn later acknowledged. In a study of historical data that included about 500 girls, four of those vaccinated against DTP in a three-month period of infancy died of unrelated causes, while one unvaccinated girl died during that period. A in 2022 found that the DTP shot by itself had no effect on mortality. Critics say the 2017 study, rather than being a landmark, exemplified the troubling shortfalls they perceive in the Danish team’s research.

As Aaby and Benn’s U.S. profile has risen, scientists in Denmark have set upon the work of their compatriots. In news and journal published over the past 18 months, Danish statisticians and infectious disease experts have said the duo’s methods were , even , and structured to support . A national scientific board is investigating their work.

Christine Stabell Benn has led a vaccine research project in Guinea-Bissau for nearly three decades with her husband, Peter Aaby. (Thomas Lekfeldt/Ritzau Scanpix/Sipa USA)

Stensballe, who worked with Aaby and Benn for 20 years, has been among those voicing doubts.

“It took years to see what I see clearly today, that there is a strange concerning pattern in their work,” Stensballe said in a phone interview from Copenhagen, where she treats children at Rigshospitalet, the city’s largest teaching hospital. She said their work is full of confirmation bias — favoring interpretations that fit their hypotheses.

Those hypotheses overlap, in important areas, with the notions of Kennedy and other vaccine-skeptical officials at HHS.

In December, HHS announced the agency would award the scientists’ Bandim Health Project in Guinea-Bissau $1.6 million to study whether the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine weakens babies’ immune systems or causes neurological issues.

The researchers plan to withhold the vaccine from half of the 14,000 newborns in the study, although the long-established vaccine is 90% effective in preventing infection. The Bandim group justifies this decision by noting that impoverished Guinea-Bissau does not yet routinely vaccinate infants against hepatitis B. Given that 1 in 5 Guinea-Bissauan adults carry the hepatitis B virus, however, and many say it is unethical to withhold the birth dose.

Aaby and Benn did not respond to repeated requests for comment. They have elsewhere.

A Mixed Reputation

Many Danes admire the two for their decades of work in Guinea-Bissau, a nation of over 2 million people where, as in much of Africa, infant mortality has plunged over the past five decades. There’s even a novel, the 2013 Danish thriller The Arc of the Swallow, featuring a corporate plot to murder a scientist character clearly based on Aaby. The company’s goal: to keep him from publishing data showing deadly effects from the DTP shot. Benn the idea for the book.

Aaby and Benn have trained around 30 scientists through their Bandim Health Project, named for a district of Bissau, Guinea-Bissau’s capital. The research group has published over 1,000 academic papers and won scientific prizes. The Danish king knighted Benn last year. Their notion of non-specific vaccine effects gained enough traction to merit a short chapter in the 2023 edition of Plotkin’s Vaccines, the authoritative text of vaccinology.

Yet Danish health authorities have never followed Aaby and Benn’s vaccine advice. They still offer vaccines based on inactivated viruses and bacteria, that Kennedy largely shifted the U.S. to in January. (A federal judge on March 16 temporarily blocked those changes.) Danish vaccine authorities are considering the addition of two of the shots Kennedy sought to drop from the U.S. schedule — against rotavirus and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.

“What’s important is that Christine doesn’t have influence on our vaccine policy,” said Anders Hviid, chief epidemiologist at Statens Serum Institut, the Danish equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hviid — who knows Benn, as do most members of the tiny Danish vaccine fraternity — has contributed to many vaccine safety studies, including a that found no link between measles-mumps-rubella, or MMR, vaccination and autism. Kennedy to get a journal to retract showing no link between aluminum-adsorbed vaccines and allergies or neurodevelopmental disorders.

In a with Tracy Beth Høeg, the Danish American sports medicine doctor and covid vaccine skeptic who led the FDA’s drug regulation from December until she was , Benn said she had vaccinated her son and daughter, now in their late 20s, under the complete Danish schedule of vaccines. Like the U.S. schedule, Denmark’s includes a less reactive form of the DTP shot known as DTaP.

Tracy Beth Høeg, a sports medicine doctor and covid vaccine skeptic who emerged as the chief FDA drug regulator under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., takes part in an Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices hearing in Atlanta in December. She was fired on May 15. (Megan Varner/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

These vaccines aren’t dangerous to kids in well-off countries like the U.S. and Denmark, she said. But she said she would “never vaccinate my child according to the U.S. program.” She singled out the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose, which her group plans to test in Guinea-Bissau, saying she was “appalled” that the CDC recommended a universal birth dose.

Kennedy’s handpicked vaccine advisory committee — which a federal judge in , questioning its members’ qualifications — withdrew the birth dose recommendation last year.

Compatriots Grow Skeptical

Kennedy’s championing of Aaby and Benn prompted criticism from Danish scientists that has extended to the . “It is disturbing that Danish researchers could carry out such actions involving African children,” Stensballe said.

As of early March, the study was paused while officials from Guinea-Bissau and the African Centers for Disease Control examined it. Public Health Minister Quinhin Nantote, who took office after a November coup in Guinea-Bissau, said in January he had no evidence that the six-member ethics committee that signed off on the study earlier had ever met to discuss it.

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told ��ϳԹ�� News the proposed study was “based on the highest scientific and ethical standards” and “represents the world’s first and perhaps only opportunity to test the overall health effects” of the hepatitis B vaccine.

It’s only one area of the couple’s research that is under scrutiny.

In 2024, Danish physician and journalist Charlotte Strøm noting that the Bandim group scientists had failed to publish data they’d collected that contradicted their frequent claims that the vaccine caused high mortality in infants.

Strøm called it “an ethical and scientific scandal,” and it led to an by the news outlet Weekendavisen. In February, the University of Southern Denmark forwarded its probe into the duo’s possible withholding of DTP data to the Danish Agency for Higher Education and Science’s Board on Research Misconduct.

In response to the Weekendavisen articles, Aaby and Benn pushed out a . They said they hadn’t sought to publish it earlier because one co-author died in a boating accident and another left the project after getting pregnant.

“This is a bit fishy,” said Henrik Støvring, a statistician at the University of Southern Denmark and Aarhus University who co-authored with Strøm and others an of clinical trials conducted by Benn and Aaby.

In January, a and three other Danish infectious disease researchers questioned whether Aaby and Benn had actually proved that vaccines had bad or good “non-specific effects” beyond preventing the diseases they were designed to counter.

Scholars also have questions about Aaby and Benn’s studies of the tuberculosis vaccine, BCG. The pair recently began a study in which babies received a second vaccination with the live bacterial vaccine, although a they conducted some 15 years earlier was stopped after , compared with four in the control group, during a four-month span.

The study was aimed at testing Aaby and Benn’s hypothesis that the alleged dangers of DTP vaccination could be ameliorated by a shot soon after with live BCG.

Although there is some evidence that BCG provides a systemic boost to infant immune systems, the WHO does not recommend a second BCG dose, Vanderbilt’s Edwards noted. “Given the suspicion engendered with this group, there should be heightened attention to this protocol, with meticulous review of their work in Africa by the African authorities,” she said.

The Big Controversy

Aaby and Benn’s most controversial position is their stance on DTP, perhaps the most widely provided vaccine in the world. True evidence of its harm would be vitally important. And experts argue that research by others has not supported Benn and Aaby’s thesis.

An elementary school student in Indonesia receives a diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis, or DTP, shot in 2018. (Aditya Irawan/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

One involving nearly 55,000 newborns in Ghana and Tanzania, found that both BCG and DTP vaccines enhanced the survival of babies. The authors of the paper submitted it to a journal and fought long and hard with Benn, who happened to be a peer reviewer. They eventually resubmitted the paper to another journal to get it published in 2022, said co-author Emily Smith, an assistant professor of global health at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.

Benn’s approach “involves splitting up trial data a bunch of different ways using a bunch of different methods,” she said.

“If you split up the data” enough ways, she said, “you’re going to end up with maybe thinking you found something.”

Hviid said that Benn and Aaby continuously modify their hypotheses to fit new data even when the patterns they detect may have popped up by chance. Most of the footnotes in their studies and opinion pieces refer to their own work, he noted.

“They’ve been talking about their paradigm for years,” Hviid said. “But when you look at the numbers, it’s just a house of cards. There’s nothing there.”

To examine their many hypotheses about the interactions of vitamins and vaccines, “hundreds of thousands of African babies have been tested,” Stensballe said. “Is that ethical?”

Aaby and Benn asked the editors of the journal Vaccine to retract Strøm and Støvring’s paper. The request was denied.

The Danish Influence in America

The Bandim group’s influence on U.S. policy has roots in the covid pandemic, when Benn befriended Høeg, who had earned a PhD in epidemiology and public health from the University of Copenhagen in 2014 for a study of eye disease. In a series of YouTube videos, they bonded over skepticism about covid vaccines and lockdowns. Benn argued that mRNA vaccines were insufficiently studied and that covid should be allowed to run its course among kids. Høeg landed an adjunct professorship at the University of Southern Denmark, where Benn holds a senior position, in April 2023.

Høeg did not respond to a question about whether she was involved in the CDC decision to fund Benn’s hepatitis B study. Benn and Aaby also received $1.8 million from the Pershing Square Foundation, co-founded by Bill Ackman, an ally of President Trump who .

Ackman did not respond to requests for comment.

from the University of Southern Denmark showed that Benn secured the grant after communicating with anti-vaccine CDC officials Lyn Redwood and Stuart Burns around the time the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices was preparing to stop recommending hepatitis B vaccination for U.S. newborns.

Yet during a public debate with Støvring on Dec. 4, Benn said news reports had dried up all funding for her research. “You have literally closed our field station,” she said.

Aaby’s History

An anthropologist by training, Aaby, 81, has cultivated the image of a persecuted Galileo, Hviid said, “with us in the role of the dogmatic clergy.”

Aaby wrote in 1998 that he was “exploring and making sense of the unknown” while most of his colleagues’ work was “trivial.” At the December debate, he said Støvring’s work was “incredibly stupid.”

The Bandim Health Project’s study area covers six poor districts, now with about 200,000 inhabitants, around a third of the capital. The researchers say they have collected health and socioeconomic data from residents for more than 30 years.

Children play foosball in the Mindará neighborhood of Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau, in 2018. Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn have conducted childhood vaccine research in the West African city for decades. (Xaume Olleros/AFP via Getty Images)

Stensballe’s conflict with Benn and Aaby came to a head in 2015 as the team of 4,262 Danish babies comparing those who got a BCG vaccine at birth with those who didn’t. that his African research on vaccines would be duplicated in the developed world.

The Danish BCG study showed no difference in hospitalization rates between the two groups. But Benn and Aaby combed the data for other answers, known as secondary findings, and leaped upon a comparison that showed lower hospitalization rates in babies whose mothers had been vaccinated against BCG decades earlier, Stensballe recalled.

She found that troubling. “If the primary outcome is negative, the trial is negative,” she said.

The manner in which Aaby and Benn pose questions sows unnecessary doubt, said Arthur Reingold, a professor emeritus of epidemiology at the University of California-Berkeley.

“Some of the questions they propose to answer are important but can never be answered in my lifetime,” he said, “and not by an ethical study done in the real world.”

“And in the meantime,” he added, “babies will miss vaccines and get sick and die of preventable illness.”

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Journalists Unpack Latest on Vaccines, Vaping, and TrumpRx

Sat, 16 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

��ϳԹ�� News chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner discussed federal policy on vaccine research, vaping, and drug access on Science Friday on May 8. Rovner also discussed the Supreme Court decision on the abortion pill mifepristone on NPR’s Morning Edition on May 5.

Céline Gounder, ��ϳԹ�� News’ editor-at-large for public health, discussed the rising cost of drug prices, despite hopes about TrumpRx, on CBS News’ The Daily Report on May 7.

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Kennedy Swaps Vaccine Rhetoric for Story Time but Can’t Quite Change the Subject

Amanda Seitz — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:30:00 +0000

Here in Washington, we’ve been hearing about tensions between the White House and one of its most controversial — but, at least in some circles, most popular — figures: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Polling of likely voters indicates that the Health and Human Services secretary can be an asset to Republicans when he’s talking about improving the nation’s food supply or labeling ultraprocessed foods. But when he’s talking about removing recommendations for routine childhood vaccinations, he can be a detriment.

So, when I learned Kennedy would be taking his show on the road to my home state of Ohio, where populist figures tend to perform well, I knew I had to be there.

How would a politician who built his reputation seeding widespread doubts about routine childhood immunizations stay away from one of the core messages he’s preached for years?

Well, it turns out, he starts by reading a book about a trash truck to preschoolers.

The trip took us across northern Ohio, from a regenerative farm in Huron owned by two brothers who grow colorful vegetables to the Cleveland Clinic, where Kennedy masked up entering an operating room of a heart surgery patient.

In the end, though, Kennedy couldn’t escape the vaccine talk.

Speaking at the City Club of Cleveland, Kennedy raised doubts about the safety of vaccines that had been — up until last year — universally recommended to prevent hepatitis B, an incurable disease.

He called for parents to “be given that choice” on administering the vaccine to newborns,��a remark that gave way to cheers and applause from half the room.

The other half groaned and booed.

When I sat down with the health secretary for a few minutes in an Ohio farmhouse, Kennedy ticked off his accomplishments during his first year in office; redesigning federal nutrition guidelines and defining ultraprocessed foods for the American public were among them.

As his list grew longer, I thought about the mothers I’d talked to over the last year who had become increasingly nervous about taking their infants out in crowded places amid a raging measles outbreak and the growing threat from other infectious diseases.

What was his message for those parents, I asked?

“I would say everybody should be vaccinated — against measles,” Kennedy told me. “But we need to pay more and more attention to chronic disease. All of the vaccine-preventable, infectious diseases put together kill probably 10,000 Americans a year.”

The number of deaths is , according to scientific researchers.

RFK Jr. Swaps Vaccine Talk for Healthy Foods and Reading to Tots in Push To Woo Voters

He tested robotic hands on a heart surgery patient and chewed on microgreens in Ohio, but Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. couldn’t dodge questions about the Trump administration’s more controversial policies.

By Amanda Seitz May 13, 2026

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Kennedy, Balancing MAHA and White House, Says He Won’t Run for President in 2028

Stephanie Armour — Fri, 15 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is caught between his Make America Healthy Again supporters who want him to do more to advance their priorities, including curtailing vaccines, and a White House trying to combat President Donald Trump’s unpopularity.

Protesters’ chants could be heard from inside the Cleveland City Club, where Kennedy was speaking to a bipartisan group of citizens as part of his recent tour of northern Ohio. His calls for parents to have more “choice” on vaccinating their children was met with applause from half of the room. The other half released exasperated sighs and gasps.

His travel schedule is about to get busier: Kennedy is expected to stump for GOP lawmakers, traveling to states with competitive races in the upcoming midterm elections.

The goal of Kennedy’s campaign appearances is to shore up support for Republican candidates. But his targeted presence underscores the increasingly intense push and pull Kennedy faces as he works to maintain enduring political viability with GOP voters — especially MAHA supporters.

His challenge is complicated by a widening schism between the White House and Kennedy’s anti-vaccine crusade. Some MAHA adherents feel betrayed by the Trump administration, which they say is thwarting the movement’s agenda by not doing more to limit pesticides, halt access to covid shots, or investigate conspiracy theories about airplane contrails poisoning the skies.

Meanwhile, some in the MAHA camp hope Kennedy will announce his own run for the White House in 2028.

But Kennedy says he has no such aspirations. Asked by ��ϳԹ�� News on May 7 whether he sees a path to run for the presidency again as a Republican, he replied firmly: “No, I’m not going to run.”

Changing his position about running would put Kennedy on a collision course with President Donald Trump, who’s reportedly as possible successors. (Trump, too, has mused about running again in 2028, though the 22nd Amendment would prohibit it.) A Kennedy candidacy could also sap much of the Trump administration’s work on other MAHA causes, because the secretary would likely leave his role at the Department of Health and Human Services.

“If he isn’t secretary, then MAHA’s influence will severely diminish,” said David Mansdoerfer, who served as deputy assistant secretary for health at HHS in the first Trump administration.

“Running would be perfectly logical for Bobby,” said , a public policy and political science professor at Northeastern University. “Kennedy is being a good soldier, but to what extent? That is going to be a question.”

‘A Grave Misstep’

Recent Trump administration actions have riled up MAHA supporters. The president in April nominated , a doctor and vaccine supporter, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kennedy fired Susan Monarez, the agency’s previous director; she testified for not preapproving vaccine recommendations.

Schwartz’s nomination and White House efforts to shift Kennedy’s focus away from vaccines stand in stark contrast with 2024, when Trump pledged to let Kennedy “” on health.

In an interview, Kennedy said “I think I have” gone wild on health. He shot down claims that the White House has limited his work.

“President Trump has let me do more than any HHS secretary in history,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy has said he supports Schwartz, though he last month that he did not discuss her nomination with Trump. MAHA adherents have criticized her backing of covid vaccines, holding it up as evidence that the White House is restricting the health secretary.

“Trump’s pick to head the CDC, Erica Schwartz, would likely be a disaster,” a lawyer and Kennedy ally, said on X, citing her work supporting the covid vaccine rollout.

Trump also withdrew the nomination of wellness influencer Casey Means, another Kennedy ally, for U.S. surgeon general. In May, the president nominated Nicole Saphier, a radiologist and former Fox News contributor. MAHA adherents have panned the selection, which reflects a more mainstream and traditional medical approach to the position. Means had faced pushback from some Republican senators for questioning contraception methods and refusing to reject the debunked link between vaccines and autism.

“DOGE the Surgeon General!!! We want medical freedom!!!! If not Casey – we take no one!” Vani Hari, a MAHA influencer, said May 1 on X.

Taken together, these actions threaten to weaken MAHA support for GOP candidates. But many Republicans in competitive races are already distancing themselves from the grassroots, vaccine-skeptical “medical freedom” movement led by Kennedy.

Many MAHA supporters also feel let down by Trump administration directives that rolled back environmental regulations and promoted pesticides. Some now see a Kennedy presidency as critical to attaining their policy goals.

Stephanie Weidle “100%” wants to see Kennedy run again. The 34-year-old Washington, D.C., resident was outside the Supreme Court last month during a rally to oppose protections for the weed-killing chemical glyphosate.

A reliable Republican voter, Weidle described the administration’s actions as disappointing. She wants to see Kennedy go further on examining the childhood vaccine schedule and limiting chemical use on crops.

“His hands have been tied,” Weidle said of Kennedy. She believes the White House has ordered him to back down from those controversial issues. “Republicans have made a grave misstep in not leading with MAHA.”

Vaccines Are a Flash Point

In the midst of these dynamics, Kennedy is attempting to thread the needle between the White House, which wants him to back away from attacking vaccines, and MAHA supporters who want him to do more. He has sought to appease both sides, praising Saphier as the surgeon general pick and describing her on X as a “ for the MAHA movement.”

He’s also tempered his public focus on vaccines. His podcast, which he said would “” that lead to illness, has veered away from the topic and centered instead on food and nutrition.

During his recent congressional hearings, he also focused on initiatives that poll well with voters. Appearing before the Kennedy offered an opening statement focused on healthcare affordability and drug prices, issues he had shied away from during his first few months on the job.

While he mentioned his redesign of nutritional guidelines and pressing industry to cease its use of certain food dyes, he avoided more controversial topics that underscored his first few months in office, including his attempt to upend the childhood vaccine schedule and efforts to explore causes of autism.

Despite his pivot to more popular subjects, Kennedy’s draw weakens beyond MAHA circles. A March straw poll of more than 1,600 attendees at the annual found nearly zero support for him as a presidential candidate when participants were asked who they would vote for if the election were held today.

“He has a constituency that is very much attached to MAHA that may not vote in the Republican primaries or in a general election,” said Robert Blendon, professor emeritus of health policy and political analysis at Harvard University.

Kennedy ran for president in the 2024 race as a Democrat, then as an independent, before halting his campaign in August 2024 and throwing his support behind Trump.

Some of the president’s advisers credit Kennedy’s MAHA voters with tipping the scales just enough to help Trump secure his 2024 election win. About a third of U.S. adults now identify as MAHA supporters, according to a , and support is highest among Republicans who also back Trump’s Make America Great Again political movement.

Vaccine policy is galvanizing voters on both sides. Eighty-one percent of voters said vaccine policy, including decisions about what vaccines are recommended for children, will have an impact on their decision to vote in the 2026 midterm elections, according to a conducted in April. Voters said they trust Democrats more than Republicans on vaccine policy and other health issues, according to the poll.

But healthcare — especially its costs — looms larger as an issue. Sixty-four percent of voters said that they are very or somewhat worried about healthcare, including the cost of health insurance and out-of-pocket costs for things like office visits and prescription drugs, and 88% said such costs will have an impact on their vote.

Many of the MAHA faithful question whether their political muscle really matters.

Republicans seem less convinced the constituency will make or break the midterm election results.

Republicans in Congress and the administration “have decided not to run on MAHA for the midterms,” Robert Malone, a scientist and Kennedy ally who stepped away in March from his position on the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said April 16 on X.

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