{"id":248046,"date":"2025-09-23T04:49:26","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T04:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/248046\/"},"modified":"2025-09-23T04:49:26","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T04:49:26","slug":"rfk-jr-flying-blind-into-next-outbreak-with-rookie-vaccine-advisors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/248046\/","title":{"rendered":"RFK Jr. \u2018Flying Blind\u2019 Into Next Outbreak With \u2018Rookie\u2019 Vaccine Advisors"},"content":{"rendered":"

America\u2019s health system is flying blind and not prepared for the next big outbreak of infectious diseases, thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.\u2019s radical views and his handpicked \u201crookie\u201d vaccine advisors, some of his former top experts have warned.<\/p>\n

Weeks after quitting their jobs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three of the agency\u2019s former leaders have spoken out to warn about the dangers imposed by Kennedy and some of those who are advising him.<\/p>\n

\"PresidentPresident Donald Trump and RFK JR have been accused of killing the health system with “death by 1000 cuts.” Kevin Lamarque\/Reuters <\/p>\n

Accusing the Health Secretary of pushing policies that are not grounded in evidence, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases Director Dan Jernigan said on Monday: \u201cThis administration has done a death by a thousand cuts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose cuts have led to cuts in staff, cuts in resources, undercutting the science, and because of that, we find ourselves now without the people to do a big deployment (if an outbreak occurs),\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases\u2019 Demetre Daskalakis agreed, warning that health officials were \u201ccompletely flying blind.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"FormerFormer Centers for Disease Control (CDC) officials Dan Jernigan, Deb Houry, and Demetre Daskalakis after President Trump fired CDC Director Susan Monarez. Elijah Nouvelage\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no plan for what\u2019s going to happen in January 2026 when the CDC and the rest of the US government pull out of WHO (the World Health Organization), and so we\u2019re going to be flying both blind and deaf,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat is what I think we\u2019re the most worried about.\u201d<\/p>\n

The comments were made days after Kennedy\u2019s handpicked Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices met last week to reshape policies for vaccines covering COVID-19, hepatitis B, measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella.<\/p>\n

The group was formed after Kennedy fired all 17 members of the CDC\u2019s vaccine advisory committee and installed several allies and vaccine skeptics in their place.<\/p>\n

\"FormerFormer Director of the Centers for Disease Control Susan Monarez testified before the Senate HELP Committee on September 17, 2025 where she said she was fired for “holding the line on scientific integrity.” Kevin Dietsch\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

But their meeting came at a tumultuous time for the CDC after the agency\u2019s boss, Susan Monarez, was forced out of her job<\/a> for resisting Kennedy\u2019s controversial policies.<\/p>\n

Monarez\u2019s departure sparked a mass exodus at the top of the agency, with Jernigan, Daskalakis, and Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry also leaving.<\/p>\n

Speaking on a Zoom call on Monday, the trio said last week\u2019s vaccine panel meeting\u2014in which the group admitted they were \u201crookies\u201d\u2014confirmed their fears about how vaccine policy is being shaped.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people deciding vaccine policy for the United States should not be rookies. That was beyond disappointing and disheartening,\u201d said Houry.<\/p>\n

Daskalakis agreed. \u201cOver 60 percent reduction in flu samples means that we don\u2019t know what the next pandemic strain is going to be. We\u2019re not going to be able to develop vaccines to be ready for seasonal flu or pandemic flu,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The chaos at the CDC has led to calls for Kennedy to resign. But the Health Secretary has defended the overhaul, telling a fiery Senate hearing this month that the agency had failed in its central mission: protecting Americans from infectious disease.<\/p>\n

\"HealthHealth and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. Andrew Harnik\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

\u201cAmerica is home to 4.2% of the world\u2019s population, yet we had nearly 20% of the COVID deaths,\u201d said Kennedy, a known conspiracy theorist and vaccine sceptic.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe literally did worse than any country in the world, and the people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last week, Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices chairman Martin Kulldorff hit out at critics he said were falsely claiming they were made up of \u201cunscientific and dangerous anti-vaxxers.\u201d <\/p>\n

Kulldorff, a former Harvard professor of medicine who lost his job after refusing the COVID vaccine, also challenged ex-CDC heads to debate him to prove they could be trusted.<\/p>\n

\u201cI suggest that you should only trust scientists that are willing to debate fellow scientists with different views,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"America\u2019s health system is flying blind and not prepared for the next big outbreak of infectious diseases, thanks…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":248047,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[17993,77,210,28186,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-248046","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-centers-for-disease-control-and-prevention","9":"tag-donald-j-trump","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-robert-f-kennedy","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115251811240855266","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}