NIH Chief Breaks With RFK Jr. and Admits Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism

The health secretary is at odds with his own agency.

The director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, appeared before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Tuesday to discuss efforts to modernize the public health sector.

But his appearance spilled a deeper truth when ranking member Senator Bernie Sanders insisted that Bhattacharya clarify his position on Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s deeply held belief that vaccines are linked to autism.

“Do you think that deep distrust … has something to do—when you have an organization like the American Medical Association telling us that vaccines do not cause autism, but you have a secretary of HHS who says the very opposite? Do you think that causes concern and mistrust among parents?” asked Sanders.

“In 2024 there was a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that said that only about 40 percent of patients still trust their doctors,” Bhattacharya said, noting the study was published before Kennedy’s appointment. “As someone who went to medical school myself, that’s absolutely shocking.”

“Let me ask you a simple question.… Do vaccines cause autism? Tell that to the American people: Yes or no?” pressed Sanders.

“I do not believe that the measles vaccine causes autism,” replied Bhattacharya.

“Nah. Uh uh. I didn’t ask measles,” insisted Sanders. “Do vaccines cause autism?”

“I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism,” Bhattacharya said.

Combating autism supposedly caused by vaccines is the cornerstone of Kennedy’s public health policy. Kennedy is a leader in a growing movement of anti-vaxx parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, falsely linked autism to the jab.

The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.

Since Kennedy took the reins at HHS, he has replaced independent medical experts on the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel and replaced them with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He warned against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamin A. And just last month, he overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, potentially affecting vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.

As a reminder: since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.

The Trump administration is targeting free speech with a little-known legal tool: administrative subpoenas.

The Washington Post reports that a retired Philadelphia man, Jon, 67, found himself in the government’s crosshairs after he emailed a lead prosecutor at the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph Dernbach, who was handling the deportation case of an Afghan refugee, identified as H, asking him to consider that the man’s life was in danger from the Taliban.

“Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life,” Jon wrote from his gmail account. “Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.”

Later that day, Jon received an email from Google notifying him that an administrative subpoena had been sent to them from the Department of Homeland Security “compelling the release of information related to your Google Account.” Federal agencies can issue such subpoenas without an order from a judge or grand jury, and Google gave Jon, who withheld his last name to protect his family from the government, one week to challenge it.

Laws are supposed to restrict the use of administrative subpoenas, but DHS has used the tool against dissent protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution. Jon could not find who in the agency issued the subpoena, let alone a record of it to show an attorney.

Days later, DHS agents showed up at Jon’s door. A naturalized U.S. citizen originally from the U.K., Jon was worried about potential violence. The agents showed him a copy of the email and asked to see his side of the story. They didn’t know about the administrative subpoena but said they received orders to interview Jon by DHS headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Eventually, the agents agreed that Jon had committed no crimes after he told them he found Dernbach’s email address through a simple Google search. Jon secured pro bono representation by ACLU attorneys, who argue that the government is violating a statute that limits how administrative subpoenas can be used for “immigration enforcement” and that the government targeted Jon for protected speech.

“It doesn’t take that much to make people look over their shoulder, to think twice before they speak again,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, one of Jon’s attorneys. “That’s why these kinds of subpoenas and other actions—the visits—are so pernicious. You don’t have to lock somebody up to make them reticent to make their voice heard. It really doesn’t take much, because the power of the federal government is so overwhelming.”

Both Google and Meta received a record number of subpoenas in the United States during the first half of 2025 as Trump’s second term began, with Google receiving 28,622, a 15 percent increase over the previous six months. Jon was fortunate to have his case picked up by the ACLU and later reported on by a national media outlet. How many others in the U.S. haven’t been so lucky and face legal challenges for exercising their right to free speech?

On Monday, President Trump suggested that Republicans should “take over” and “nationalize” voting. But House Speaker Mike Johnson isn’t too concerned.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We wanna take over, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places’; the Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump said on former Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino’s podcast Monday. “We have states that I won, that show I didn’t win … like the 2020 election, I won the election by so much. Everybody knows it.”

CNN’s Manu Raju made sure to ask Johnson about the president’s statements the next day.

“Mr. Speaker, the president had called yesterday for a takeover of federal elections; [he] said to nationalize in some states, is that something that you think he should do?” Raju asked.

Johnson proceeded to claim that Trump just didn’t really mean that.

“The president is expressing his frustration about the problems that we have in some of these blue states, where election integrity is not always guaranteed,” Johnson said, making a baseless claim about election security in blue states in order to defend a man who still lies about winning the 2020 election. “So we have to figure out solutions to that problem, and that’s what I think—”

“Take over?!” Raju interrupted, not allowing the speaker to ramble on without acknowledging the actual question.

“No, no,” Johnson said.

The U.S. Constitution orders that elections be governed by states and locales, not the executive branch. Even still, it’s hard not to hear Trump’s comment about taking over elections without immediately thinking about January 6. This time we should take his threats seriously—especially given the recent FBI raid of an election office in Georgia’s Fulton County.

A Maryland community has nixed a previously issued building permit for a private detention center that local officials said would be used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Howard County government revoked the permit Monday, ending construction for the proposed detention facility at 6522 Meadowridge Rd. in Elkridge, just across the road from a quiet residential neighborhood and within half a mile of several schools.

“The retrofitting of private office buildings for detention use without transparency, without input, without clear oversight, is deeply troubling,” said county executive Calvin Ball during a Monday press conference. “In this case, the proposed detention center sits in an existing office park in close proximity to health care providers, schools, parks, and neighborhoods.”

The Howard County Council introduced two pieces of emergency legislation later that evening intended to formally prevent private entities from operating detention centers within county lines.

The five-person council will hold an emergency public hearing on the bills Wednesday, which will be followed by a vote.

“Since there are four co-sponsors on the bill, it is about 99.99 percent likely to pass,” County Council chair Opel Jones said to a standing ovation, WTOP News reported.

The proposed Elkridge detention center is the latest ICE contract to be killed in light of the agency’s escalating violence. Landowners in Oklahoma City backed out of a similar deal with the federal agency late last month, citing community safety concerns should ICE move in following the extrajudicial killings of two U.S. citizens at the hands of federal agents.

It is far from the end of ICE’s encroachment in Maryland, however. The “Free State” already has three primary detention facilities, one of which is in Howard County. And last week, the Department of Homeland Security purchased a warehouse near Hagerstown, sparking concerns that the site could be used as yet another detention center for deportations.

ICE detained more than 3,200 people in Maryland in 2025, doubling the number of arrests of previous years, according to figures from the Deportation Data Project. Just one-third of the detainees had criminal convictions, while more than 50 percent had no criminal history whatsoever.

You’ll never guess which country launched a massive attack just hours after President Donald Trump announced yet another supposed temporary ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.

Sitting at his desk in the Oval Office Monday, Trump repeated his claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “agreed” to pause Moscow’s repeated strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, as the temperatures in Europe dropped dangerously low.

“I asked him if he wouldn’t shoot for a period of one week, no missiles going into Kyiv or any other town, and he’s agreed to do it, so it’s something,” said Trump, the king of wishful thinking—or more just utter bullshit.

Trump had initially claimed there would be a weeklong ceasefire during a Cabinet meeting Thursday, sparking some confusion in Kyiv about when the pause would actually begin, or what it would entail. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov clarified that Russia had only agreed to pause strikes until February 1 “in order to create favorable conditions for negotiations,” which are set to resume Wednesday in Abu Dhabi.

That would mean Trump’s supposed weeklong ceasefire was only in effect for two days.

True to its word, Russia resumed strikes overnight Monday, launching 450 attack drones and more than 70 missiles, hitting power plants in at least six regions and leaving more than 1,000 residential buildings in Kyiv without power. So, as much as Trump would like to play-act like he has Putin’s ear, that’s clearly not the case.

“Taking advantage of the coldest days of winter to terrorize people is more important to Russia than turning to diplomacy,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X, early Tuesday.

Ukraine’s Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said the attacks on “purely civilian” targets amounted to “another Russian crime against humanity.”

The FBI’s raid of a Fulton County, Georgia, elections office last week confused local authorities and caused a dispute, despite the FBI possessing a judicial search warrant.

Body camera footage from Fulton County police reveals that officials at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operations Center were not clear on what was going on and expressed confusion about the warrant, which was shown to them on their phones instead of as a hard copy. FBI agents on camera told the officials that they were having computer problems and trying to get an updated warrant.

The agents said that when the first warrant was issued, they didn’t realize that the records they were seeking from the 2020 presidential election weren’t held by the county elections board, but by the clerk of court.

While local officials ultimately cooperated with the FBI, interactions were tense. The acting head of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, Peter Ellis, said that he was letting county officials stay in the building during the search as a courtesy, but when county attorney Soo Jo said he was there to observe, another agent pushed back. The FBI said that the media and anyone taking video weren’t welcome inside.

“I want to remind you that this is a criminal search warrant and this location is kind of restricted at this point, respectfully,” an agent said at one point.

Agents also appeared willing to take the records by force if necessary. The Fulton County clerk of courts, Che Alexander, said that she was willing to unlock the storage areas where ballots were kept, but didn’t want to hand over records without knowing “what it is you’re looking for so you’re not taking other stuff.”

“They said they’ll break the lock and take ‘em,” Alexander told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In the end, more than 650 ballots were taken by the agents to an undisclosed location. What they will be used for is unclear, as President Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen have all been debunked in court. But for some reason, he has tasked Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard with the case, raising the question of whether Trump is attempting to create a pretext to take over future elections.

White House adviser and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is once again attacking the judicial branch after it ruined his plans to deport thousands of Haitian immigrants.

On Monday evening, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to terminate Haitians’ temporary protected status, which was supposed to end on Tuesday night.

“An unelected judge has just ruled that elections, laws and borders don’t exist,” said Miller—perhaps the most powerful unelected individual in the country—in reaction to the judge’s ruling.

Miller was quickly rebuked.

“Nope. A judge who was nominated and confirmed according to the constitutional process just issued a ruling interpreting the law, holding that the administration was lawless,” writer David French replied. “If you disagree with the ruling, you can appeal. That’s how the law works.”

This isn’t the first time basic judicial oversight has caused Miller to throw a tantrum. Last April, as judges ruled against President Trump for suspending due process to deport people, Miller complained about the “rogue, radical left judiciary.” And when judges blocked Trump from sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, Miller went online and called the ruling “one of the most egregious and thunderous violations of constitutional order we have ever seen.”

The shock, awe, and indignation Miller displays every time the judicial system does the whole “checks and balances” thing it’s known for only further affirms how little he cares about that process in the first place. He makes these statements because he knows there’s nothing he can really do to remove judges who simply won’t look away from Trump’s constitutional violations.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche couldn’t care less about exposing the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse. Don’t believe us? Listen for yourself.

During an interview on Fox News Monday, Blanche was asked to answer for the thousands of redaction errors in the Department of Justice’s latest release of more than three million pages of Epstein-related documents, which allegedly exposed the names of at least 100 survivors.

“These were reportedly women who were minors at the time, or haven’t come out publicly yet,” said Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. “How did those names slip through?”

“Yeah look, you’re right. I mean there—mistakes were made by, you have really hardworking lawyers that worked for the past 60 days,” Blanche stammered. “Think about this, though, you have pieces of paper that stack from the ground to two Eiffel Towers.

“We knew that there would be mistakes, we put that—I said that to the American people on Friday. Everything we did was to protect victims,” Blanche continued. “And what we’re talking about, by the way, is 0.002 percent—”

“But it matters to them, right?” Ingraham chided.

“It should matter to them, it matters to me too. Absolutely,” Blanche said.

The many excuses furnishing Blanche’s depraved attempt to downplay DOJ “mistakes” just don’t make sense.

The Trump administration had far longer than just 60 days to review the documents, as the DOJ supposedly began the process of declassifying documents related to the investigation over a year ago. The Epstein Files Transparency Act was also passed more than 60 days ago, and the DOJ then missed the deadline to release the documents, claiming that it needed more time to make redactions.

As for his claim that everything the DOJ did was to “protect victims,” it’s clear that the DOJ cared a lot more about protecting someone else. Nearly 40 nude photos of women, possibly underage, were mistakenly released uncensored, while an innocuous photo of President Donald Trump somehow was redacted.

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to upend temporary protected status for more than 350,000 Haitians.

In an unsparing 83-page decision issued late Monday, Judge Ana C. Reyes of the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., formally denied a motion to dismiss a lawsuit that challenges the Department of Homeland Security’s attempts to terminate the TPS program entirely.

Reyes didn’t miss the opportunity to completely pick apart DHS and its leader, Secretary Kristi Noem, for doggedly pursuing a newfangled, anti-immigrant agenda even when it runs afoul of U.S. law.

Reyes noted that Noem does not have the authority to unravel TPS, which was created by Congress through the Immigration Act of 1990. The judge further determined that Noem’s arguments for ending the program were not only flawed but also fundamentally unacceptable since they failed to address the economic component of the program.

“She ignores altogether the billions Haitian TPS holders contribute to the economy,” Reyes wrote.

From the very first words of the ruling, Reyes frames Noem as the polar opposite of America’s first leader, George Washington, pitting one of her vitriolic tweets against a letter in which Washington insisted that the U.S. must receive “the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions.”

“Secretary Noem complains of strains unlawful immigrants place on our immigration-enforcement system. Her answer? Turn 352,959 lawful immigrants into unlawful immigrants overnight,” Reyes wrote. “She complains of strains to our economy. Her answer? Turn employed lawful immigrants who contribute billions in taxes into the legally unemployable.

“She complains of strains to our healthcare system. Her answer? Turn the insured into the uninsured,” the judge continued. “This approach is many things—in the public interest is not one of them.”

Ultimately, Reyes concluded, Noem does not have the law or facts on her side and, as a result, has done little more than “pound the table”—which, in this case, is the social media platform X.

“Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants,” Reyes stated. “Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the APA to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.”

Elon Musk’s lewd image generator on his X platform has gotten him into trouble in France.

Prosecutors in Paris have asked Musk, along with former X CEO Linda Yaccarino, to appear for questioning over the spread of deepfake pornography and antisemitic content on the social media platform. The summons came after the prosecutor’s cybercrime division, along with Europol and the cybercrime units of the French police, searched X’s offices in the city Tuesday.

X is under investigation for criminal offenses such as complicity in the possession and distribution of “child pornography images,” violating personal rights with its generation of “sexual deepfakes,” the denial of “crimes against humanity,” and allegedly extracting data fraudulently from an automated processing system, the prosecutor’s office said.

“The voluntary interviews with the managers should enable them to explain their position on the facts and, where applicable, the compliance measures envisaged,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement. Yaccarino and Musk have been summoned to appear in Paris court the week of April 20.

While authorities in Paris have limited, if any, powers to compel Musk to appear in court, the move is a significant step against one of the world’s leading social media platforms. Musk has faced heavy criticism over X’s image-generation tool, which has allowed users to undress people using AI, even minors. X has also gained the reputation of being a haven for antisemitic content ever since Musk took over the platform. Could this be the first time Musk and X face accountability?