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At ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Summit, Vance Praises RFK Jr. For Defying Convention
Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday praised U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s willingness to question established science and embrace nontraditional voices in the health care space, saying that often throughout history, “all the experts were wrong.” In remarks in a fireside chat between the two men at a “Make America Healthy Again” summit in the nation’s capital, Vance also propped up Kennedy’s MAHA movement, saying it has been “a critical part of our success in Washington.”
Vance’s words show how Kennedy, whose wrecking-ball approach to public health agencies and longstanding vaccine skepticism have made him a polarizing figure among the public and in Congress, has been embraced by the White House as a needed force for change.
“Of all the specific initiatives that you guys have worked on effectively, the most important thing is that your team is willing to ask questions that people in government haven’t been asking in a long time,” Vance told Kennedy onstage.
How Two Top FDA Officials Are Quietly Upending Vaccine Regulations
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he does not want to take vaccines away from Americans. But at a closed-door meeting of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) vaccine scientists in September, a top official suggested doing just that.
Scientists listened as Tracy Beth Høeg, a lieutenant to FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, laid out her plan: She wanted to change the label of all COVID-19 vaccines to say the risks outweighed the benefits for men ages 12 to 24 — a move that would make it prohibitively difficult for men in this age group to receive the vaccine.
Her concerns about myocarditis, or inflamed heart muscle, had been censored before, she said, and now she wanted to take action. Høeg wanted to advance her proposal to a meeting later that month of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee.
US Vaccine Panel May Vote on Hepatitis B Shots in December
U.S. News & World Report reported:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) vaccine advisory committee is scheduled to meet on Dec. 4 and 5, and could vote on policy concerning shots for hepatitis B, a Federal Register notice from the agency showed on Wednesday.
The members of the panel, selected by health secretary and vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., abandoned a vote at their most recent meeting in September that would have delayed the first hepatitis B vaccine dose for most newborns under federal recommendations.
Kennedy, an appointee of President Donald Trump, has been moving rapidly to rewrite U.S. vaccination policy, including dropping recommendations for COVID-19 shots for pregnant women and children, directing states on limits to their vaccine mandates and cutting funding for mRNA-based vaccine research. Kennedy in June fired all 17 members of the CDC committee this year and replaced them with his own nominees.
Shutdown Deal Kills Food Safety Rules
Amid a lobbying blitz and a flood of campaign cash, senators inserted language into this week’s emergency spending bill that eliminates rules designed to prevent food contamination and foodborne illnesses at farms and restaurants, according to legislative text reviewed by The Lever. The bill would also limit the development of rules to regulate ultra-processed foods, despite such foods being derided by the “Make America Healthy Again Movement,” championed by President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
The Senate’s gutting of these rules coincides with a huge increase in hospitalizations and deaths from foodborne illnesses. The changes follow restaurant and food industry lobbyists spending more than $13 million in 2025 lobbying the White House, Congress, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and other regulators on food-tracking issues and other matters, disclosures show.
Two of these lobbying groups pressing for the changes delivered more than $750,000 to both parties’ congressional candidates and more than $145,000 to the two parties’ congressional election committees in the last election. That includes $17,000 combined to three of the seven Democratic senators who sided with Republicans to pass the funding bill.
FDA Chiefs Offer Roadmap to Expand Custom Gene-Editing Treatments Like Baby KJ’s
Top U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials on Wednesday detailed a roadmap for approving the world’s first personalized gene-editing treatments.
The perspective, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, comes six months after researchers announced they had crafted a custom gene-editing treatment to fix a unique mutation in KJ, an infant born with an ultra-rare, life-threatening liver disease.
KJ’s therapy was hailed as a milestone in the history of medicine, but one of debatable relevance to other patients facing devastating genetic diseases. It required dozens of scientists across several institutions and companies, working for free or at-cost, to come together around a single patient. Researchers have declined to disclose the exact cost, though it likely ran into the millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars.
