Today was a doozy. What in the health is going on these last couple weeks at the hands of RFK Jr.? Let’s dive in.

• Today RFK Jr. abruptly fired all 17 members of CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP. True to form for this administration, he did it with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, and from what I’ve heard the members of the committee didn’t receive any advance communication about it. I talked about the ACIP in my post about COVID vaccines on June 2. I said that I hoped that after the ACIP meeting at the end of this month we’d have some more clarity about vaccine accessibility this fall. I’d say we have a lot more clarity as of today: RFK Jr. says that he’ll single-handedly replace all 17 committee members and ACIP will still meet as planned. He also claims this move was necessary to restore trust, because of ongoing conflicts of interest…citing an inspector general’s report about from 16 years ago about errors in paperwork, not financial conflicts. Nothing more relevant, or more current. No one who’s been paying attention thinks that this is about restoring trust, nor using data to drive our decision-making about vaccine access this fall. Senator Cassidy can post whatever he wants on X—during RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearings Cassidy had the potential to block this. He talked with RFK Jr. and received assurances that he would not alter ACIP if confirmed. We all knew he was lying, but Cassidy apparently believed him, and green-lit his confirmation after all. And yet Cassidy seems to think a conversation now will make it better again. It will not.

• Something much more remarkable also happened today: More than 300 employees from the NIH signed an open letter to NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, dissenting from his actions as leader of the agency. This was brave, but even better, it was sassy—fairly rare for such serious scientists. They called it the Bethesda Declaration, after the city in Maryland where NIH is headquartered. “We hope you will welcome this dissent, which we modeled after your Great Barrington Declaration,” the staffers wrote in the letter. (The Great Barrington Declaration, named for the Massachusetts town where they signed it, was an infamous letter that Dr. Bhattacharya and two colleagues published in October 2020—two months before people in the U.S. were able to access COVID-19 vaccines—advocating for “those who are not vulnerable” to “immediately be allowed to resume life as normal,” so that society could reach herd immunity.) In the Bethesda Declaration, the scientists note that about 2,100 NIH grants for about $9.5 billion have been terminated since the second Trump administration began. The letter explains that these grant terminations “throw away years of hard work and millions of dollars,” going on to brilliantly declare: “Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million, it wastes $4 million.” Not only do I tip my hat to these brave scientists willing to take a stand, but I signed a supplemental letter in support. You too can sign, whether or not you consider yourself a research scientist! It’s open to the public and the list of supporters is growing: 9,536 names at the time of this post.

• On May 28, RFK Jr. took to a podcast and said he was considering barring government scientists from publishing their work in many of the world’s highly respected and widely read medical journals (specifically naming the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA). “We’re probably going to stop publishing in [those journals], because they’re all corrupt,” he said. Instead? They’d create “in-house” publications within HHS. For a guy who keeps talking about his commitment to “radical transparency,” this is yet another obvious step to censor and control the information that’s made available to Americans. They’re not even trying to hide it. In addition to any effort to restrict government scientists from adding scientific findings to high-impact academic literature, RFK Jr. recently ended a 54-year old transparency policy (the Richardson Waiver) that required public comment periods for most types of policy decisions HHS could enact. This administration has also removed peer-reviewed, good quality scientific articles from US government websites due to their inclusion of language regarding trans people and trans health (though a judge ruled two weeks ago that they must restore these articles to their former spot on the websites if they are authored by private individuals and not government workers).

• We can’t end this update without talking about the MAHA Report, which RFK Jr. released on May 22. Speaking of transparency, it’s unclear who authored the report, and RFK Jr. has refused to provide any details about that—not exactly a hallmark of good science. One of the major focus areas of the report was childhood vaccines, with inflammatory sentences like “Since 1986 the average child, by one year of age, has gone from 3 injections to 29.” But as Dr. Paul Offit (who used to serve on ACIP and is an actual vaccine expert) has explained well, in the 1980s—when I was receiving my own infant vaccines—kids were vaccinated for 8 diseases and were receiving over 3,000 immunological components when following the vaccine schedule. But thanks to modern science and technology, today babies in the U.S. who follow the schedule receive protection against more than 14 diseases and receive only around 150 immunologic components. That’s a 20-fold reduction in the challenge to babies’ immune systems today, and nearly twice as much disease protection! But you wouldn’t know that from reading the MAHA report. In fact, you wouldn’t even know what you know by reading the report. Why? It’s filled with false information, mischaracterized studies, and fake citations. At least 7 studies appear to be entirely made up. Could they be AI hallucinations? Shoddy work? Straight up fabrications to prove a point not backed up by science? Who knows. All I know is that the American public deserves better from the people at the helm of its health institutions. It’s an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that.

Here’s the bottom line from all these updates: None of us can trust what RFK Jr. says. There are lots of reasons for this, but perhaps the most charitable is that he simply doesn’t seem to have many critical thinking skills. Despite how much he likes to talk like he’s a scientist, he’s not trained as one (except in political science…a different beast). He makes statements that are not just wrong, they’re absurd—and either he has no idea that they couldn’t possibly be true, or he knows but doesn’t care. As a result of this, people don’t know who to believe or what to do. This is intentional, and it’s tragic.

So what can we do? Sign that letter in support of those brave NIH staffers who took a stand with their Bethesda Declaration. Or pick one of the 13 other things in this gift article from the New York Times Opinion Page: Get Mad in Public, and 12 Other Ways to Save Health and Science. Join a protest on Saturday for No King’s Day! If you’re in San Francisco, maybe I’ll see you there.