“The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommends a 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine for most adults ages 18 and older. Parents of children ages 6 months to 17 years should discuss the benefits of vaccination with a healthcare provider.
“The COVID-19 vaccine helps protect you from severe illness, hospitalization, and death. It is especially important to get your 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine if you are ages 65 and older, are at high risk for severe COVID-19, or have never received a COVID-19 vaccine. Vaccine protection decreases over time, so it is important to get your 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine.”
That message from the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel was posted on the agency’s website on June 6th. On June 9th, Secretary of Human Health Services Robert Kennedy Jr. ousted all 17 members of the panel and appointed a new eight-member panel that included several vaccine skeptics. Two weeks later, that panel posted a revised policy that limited Covid shots to people who are 65 or older or have other health issues. The new guidelines will make it harder for the average American — including the great majority of Memphians — to get the shot, due to insurance coverages and pharmacy guidelines that are pegged to CDC/FDA recommendations.
“The American people demanded science, safety, and common sense. This framework delivers all three,” said Kennedy, the brain-worm-infected former heroin addict, vaccine truther, and general all-around lunatic who was appointed by Donald Trump to lead the federal department responsible for securing our healthcare.
Kennedy was just following his boss’ lead, meaning the only qualification needed for appointees, no matter the position, is loyalty to the one doing the appointing. It’s why — to name just two of many unqualified clowns now in positions of power — former World Wrestling Entertainment executive Linda McMahon is secretary of education and Fox News nitwit Pete Hegseth is secretary of defense.
The Covid policy revision is particularly troubling because it’s an intrusion between patients and their doctors. It’s one thing to require everyone to get a shot, quite another to prevent people from getting a legal medicine. Under the new guidelines, a 62-year-old who calls their local CVS to set up a Covid shot may find themselves getting turned down if they don’t have a prescription or if their insurance doesn’t cover drugs that are noncompliant with CDC recommendations. A mother who wants to get her three kids vaccinated will have an even tougher time.
To reiterate: If you are someone who denies the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine and chooses not to get it, you go, bub. No one’s going to make you do anything that might keep you or your family off a ventilator. But the government has no business contradicting medical/scientific opinion and intervening between doctor and patient. What’s next? Stopping cancer trials and heart disease research? Curbing influenza vaccines? Sadly, the answer to those questions is yes. Billions of dollars in grants and funding to universities and medical research organizations have already been cut by this administration.
Susan Monarez, the CDC director Trump appointed in January, is also being forced out for resisting the new vaccine dictates. Her proposed replacement, a tech executive named Jim O’Neill, who has no medical or science background, is unlikely to give Kennedy much pushback. In a 2014 speech, O’Neill, who was then working for Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital, suggested the U.S. should allow drugs into the market without being tested. “Let people start using them at their own risk,” he said.“Let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized.” I am not making this up.
Like the FBI, CIA, Justice Department, Homeland Security, State Department, IRS, ICE, and FEMA, the CDC is about to become little more than a propaganda arm of the Trump administration.
Here’s Demetre Daskalakis, who just resigned as director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases: “I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health. … I have never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end rather than the good of the American people.”
Former President Ronald Reagan liked to say: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” That sentence never rang more true.