The resistance to RFK Jr. quietly racks up wins

One year into Donald Trump’s second presidency appears to mark a tipping point, with a growing resistance to one of the most reckless members of his Cabinet finally taking root. A pair of reports published last week sparked widespread public outrage against a key part of the administration’s agenda, forcing Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reverse some of his department’s most dangerous policies. 

On the morning of Jan. 14, the leaders of hundreds of health care organizations across the country woke up to frantic emails after finding out that $2 billion in federal grants had been terminated by the Trump administration overnight. Without any warning or avenue for recourse, as many as 2,800 grantees of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) representing about 26% of the agency’s entire budget lost their funding for addiction and mental health care when health officials unexpectedly canceled funding, sending shockwaves through the nation’s health care system. Thousands of patients lost access to programs like drug courts that offer treatment as an alternative to incarceration, recovery for pregnant and postpartum women, and overdose prevention education for young people.

Kennedy, who is set to hold a so-called Make America Healthy Again rally in Pennsylvania on Wednesday touting the White House’s new food pyramid, has proposed folding SAMHSA into a new agency he would call the Administration for a Healthy America. According to a letter obtained by the Guardian, federal funding to grantees was terminated because the services no longer aligned with the Trump administration’s priorities. The new goals, according to a letter from Christopher Carroll, SAMHSA’s deputy assistant secretary, include “innovative programs and interventions.”

During his 2024 presidential campaign, Kennedy repeatedly pointed to the addiction and mental health crisis as a top priority. Despite his promises and his own history — he is in long-term recovery from heroin and alcohol addiction — his department is now seeking to gut the very infrastructure designed to address these crises, with no explanation beyond bureaucratic double-speak. 

Within hours of the funding cuts, NPR’s Brian Mann broke the story. The response was immediate and bipartisan, particularly since the SAMHSA funding had been appropriated by Congress, yet members were not consulted about the administration’s rescissions. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., blasted the administration’s claims about tackling the opioid crisis as “hollow.” Following 24 hours of furious lobbying by lawmakers from both parties to restore the cuts, including a letter to Kennedy signed by 100 House members, the secretary and officials reversed course and reinstated the grants. 

Reports from that chaotic 24 hours after the sudden cuts suggests that, between constituent calls and legislators’ own concern for their communities, Kennedy’s department came under enormous pressure to rescind the cuts, which followed a series of massive and legally contested cuts he made to health agencies throughout the first year of the Trump administration.

“I think it’s undeniable when you have thousands of people contacting members of Congress in a very short period of time that that had an impact.” Jennifer Snow of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) explained.

Yet even as SAMHSA was saved, another key pillar of his MAHA agenda was collapsing under the weight of public scrutiny. 

The health newsletter Inside Medicine exclusively obtained previously unpublished protocols for a U.S.-funded study that would vaccinate some newborns against hepatitis B at birth — but not others — in the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau, where prevalence of the highly contagious communicable disease is high. When the U.S. first implemented vaccination doses at birth beginning in 1991, hepatitis B infections in American children plummeted by 99%. The new $1.6 million study was awarded without any competition from any other scientists, giving it “the appearance of blatant cronyism,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist and professor at the University of Saskatchewan, told the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy. Additionally, none of the vaccines in the study are FDA-approved.

“This is another Tuskegee,” an unnamed Centers for Disease Control whistleblower told Inside Medicine, comparing the planned study to an experiment in which the U.S. government let syphilis go unchecked in African Americans in Alabama from 1932 to 1972. “We are allowing children, infants, to be exposed to Hepatitis B when we could prevent it, and then follow them for five years to see what happens. That’s not long enough to see the long-term benefits, but might be long enough to find some non-specific effects.” The publication identified numerous “scientific problems” with the protocol. Hepatitis B acquired by newborns isn’t expected to cause mortality for years, so trying to detect decreased all-cause mortality at 42 days or even six months is, as Inside Medicine noted, “like doing a trial of chemotherapy and asking if the patient is alive a week later.”

Hours after the final protocol was published last Thursday, setting “alarm bells ringing in the global health community,” in the words of one London medical professor, the administration blinked. A senior official at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the study had been canceled. 

Kennedy’s other dangerous theories, like linking autism to contact with Tylenol in utero, are also receiving significant pushback. Scientists in the UK, Sweden, Italy and elsewhere in Europe published their conclusion Friday in The Lancet Obstetrics, Gynecology, & Women’s Health analyzing data from 43 high-quality studies ​​that found no connection between maternal acetaminophen use and a greater risk of neurodevelopmental conditions in children. The findings echo those of a similar review published last November, which also failed to find convincing evidence of a causative link between Tylenol and autism.

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Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that this study, or any other independent research, will deter the bull-headed secretary, who, at a White House Cabinet meeting in October, acknowledged that the government did not have proof that acetaminophen can cause autism. “We’re doing the studies to make the proof,” he said, unintentionally capturing a worldview in which science is not a process of inquiry but a tool to be bent until it yields a predetermined conclusion. Kennedy’s Freudian slip also helps explain why he fired CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez, a widely respected microbiologist and public health leader who reportedly refused to lend her agency’s credibility to research obviously designed to validate non-evidence-based claims.

The consequences of this approach are already visible. Vaccine hesitancy has taken hold across the country, which has led to resurgent diseases like measles outbreaks in states including South Carolina, Texas, Arizona and Utah. That is why a lawsuit filed on Monday by groups including the American Academy of Pediatrics — which lost about 65% of its federal funding under Kennedy — the American College of Physicians and the American Public Health Association is so important. The action challenges Kennedy’s Jan. 5 announcement that the CDC would no longer recommend that all children receive six out of 17 previously recommended vaccines, calling the change “the most egregious, reckless, and dangerous” immunization-related action undertaken by the Trump administration. Kennedy adopted the new vaccine schedule, the lawsuit alleges, without considering the most basic questions about health and access. If successful, the suit would disband the secretary’s hand-picked advisory board on vaccines, which he stacked with anti-vaccine activists after firing all 17 previous members. 

The first year of Trump’s second term has been unbearably long. But over the past several weeks, thanks to dogged reporting, whistleblowers willing to risk their careers and an outraged public that remains focused on what is at stake, key elements of this administration’s dangerous public health agenda were stalled, reversed or outright scrapped. The lesson from last week is clear: Resistance works when it’s sustained and strategic. Kennedy backed down on defunding SAMHSA because the political cost became too high. The Guinea-Bissau study faced international condemnation after scientists and advocates fought back. The Tylenol narrative is being demolished by rigorous peer-reviewed research. 

What’s become of Kennedy’s plan to make America healthy again is a testament to the power of exposure and collective outrage. A line in the sand has been drawn, a declaration that the public health community will not quietly acquiesce to the politicization of science and the endangerment of children. In the era of Trump, defined by authoritarian overreach and cynicism, this may be the most hopeful story of all.

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