Trump Appoints CDC Critic as Temporary Agency Head

Jay Bhattacharya has been tapped to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—after spending years criticizing its pandemic response.

Bhattacharya will continue his role as the director of the National Institutes of Health, as well as leading the CDC on an acting basis, four people familiar with personnel decisions told The Washington Post Wednesday.

Bhattacharya has a history of undermining the CDC’s pandemic guidance. In 2020, the then NIH head, Dr. Francis Collins, labeled the former Stanford University physician and economist “fringe,” after Bhattacharya helped author the “Great Barrington Declaration,” which called for the end of the coronavirus lockdowns. In 2024, Bhattacharya criticized the CDC’s recommendation for widespread masking during the Covid-19 pandemic, calling it “pseudo science.”

Bhattacharya will replace former Deputy Health Secretary Jim O’Neill, a market-fundamentalist Silicon Valley investor and longtime associate of billionaire Peter Thiel. Bhattacharya also has the support of powerful figures among Trump supporters, including Thiel, Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk, who claims Twitter suppressed Bhattacharya’s views before the Tesla founder bought the platform.

O’Neill replaced Susan Monarez, the last Senate-approved CDC director, who was fired last summer after only 28 days in office. Monarez was ousted after she refused “to commit, in advance, to approving every” recommendation by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, “regardless of scientific evidence” and “to dismiss career officials responsible for vaccine policy without cause.”

But Bhattacharya may not be in lockstep with his boss, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., either. Earlier this month, Bhattacharya put himself at odds with the health secretary when he testified that he’d seen no evidence that vaccines cause autism.

This story has been updated.

President Donald Trump’s sons are so far past trying to dispel accusations of corruption that they’re actually blaming everyone else for making them so crooked.

Speaking to CNBC Wednesday from a gilded ballroom at their father’s Mar-a-Lago resort, Don Jr. and Eric Trump, co-founders of World Liberty Financial, didn’t bother to push back on claims that the rich and powerful had swarmed their family business in order to “curry favor” with the president. 

“The great irony here is they didn’t give us much of a choice,” Eric said.  

“They created this monster,” Don Jr. interjected. 

Skipping past ethics concerns, Eric claimed that the brothers had been forced to turn to decentralized finance after they were “canceled” by every major bank in the world, simply by virtue of wearing their “Make America Great Again” hats. 

Members of the Trump family were denied some financial services after the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol in 2021. Both Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank reportedly refused to continue working with the Trump Organization, while Capital One and JPMorgan shuttered many of his personal and business accounts.

“They were pulling these accounts from us like we were absolute dogs,” Eric said. So, essentially, their blatant corruption was a kind of revenge on those who’d wronged them. 

CNBC also asked the Trump brothers to explain what was likely the most blatant instance of corruption since their father reentered office: the president’s sudden reversal to permit the United Arab Emirates to import 500,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips every year, after World Liberty Financial pocketed $2 billion from an investment firm with ties to an Emirati family member. 

The duo acted like everything was business as usual.

“(a) My father has nothing to do with, (b) It has nothing to do with AI chips, and (c) We met in the Middle East the first time,” Don Jr. claimed. “There’s not a person in that room, there’s not a banker, there’s not a fund manager that doesn’t go to the Middle East.

“We’ve been dealing with the conflict of interest stuff for years,” he continued. “They tried all this nonsense the first time around, frankly it’s gotten old. They were the ones who put us in the position by creating legislation to try to put us out of business. We just fought back.”

Eric claimed that it was simply the “law of unintended consequences.” When the big banks had canceled them, that forced the Trump family to embrace decentralized finance. As consumers worldwide adopted cryptocurrency, those very executives were forced to come crawling back to the Trump family, he said. 

The Trump brothers’ answers conveniently ignored the simple truth that those executives had come calling not only because daddy had been reinstalled in the White House, but because he’d already shown that he’d be more than willing to pull favors for anyone who wrote him a check. 

The Food and Drug Administration is caving to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine conspiracies.

The FDA quietly removed a web page warning against therapies and treatments making “false claims” about autism, ProPublica reported Wednesday.

The Department of Health and Human Services told the investigative outlet that it had retired the web page “during a routine clean up of dated content at the end of 2025.” The page had not been updated since 2019, according to the agency.

The decision to ax the web landing has outraged autism advocates, who argue that there was nothing inaccurate about the information posted on the page, regardless of the last time it was updated.

The deceptive “treatments” for autism that the nixed FDA page warned against include raw camel milk, clay baths, and chlorine dioxide, a bleaching agent sometimes used in mouthwash (though it’s typically accompanied by labels warning against its ingestion), according to an archived version of the website.

“It may be an older page, but those warnings are still necessary,” Zoe Gross, a director at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, told ProPublica. “People are still being preyed on by these alternative treatments like chelation and chlorine dioxide. Those can both kill people.”

The decision has also added to mounting fears that Kennedy’s appointment to run the Health and Human Services Department—and his virulent perspective on vaccines—is taking a vicious toll on America’s public health policy.

America’s diminishing herd immunity is due to a growing movement of anti-vax parents—whom Kennedy currently champions at the federal level—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, linked autism to vaccines.

The researcher who sparked the myth that vaccines cause autism did so with a fraudulent paper. As a result, he 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.

During Texas’s deadly measles outbreak last year, Kennedy dodged vaccine recommendations by urging concerned locals to take more vitamins. He also justified a local religious community’s decision not to receive the vaccine by claiming that the measles vaccine contains “aborted fetus debris” as well as “DNA particles.” Fact check: It does not. Even Kennedy’s own officials have denied his health conspiracies, potentially at cost to their employment.

President Trump will be holding his State of the Union address next Tuesday evening, and some Democrats have decided to skip the event and hold a rival gathering instead. 

“The People’s State of the Union” will be held on the National Mall at the same time as the president’s speech, and several Democrats in the House and Senate have already committed to the event. Organizers say that Senators Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, Chris Murphy, Tina Smith, and Chris Van Hollen, as well as Representatives Yassamin Ansari, Becca Balint, Greg Casar, Veronica Escobar, Pramila Jayapal, Delia Ramirez, and Bonnie Watson Coleman will be attending. 

Organizers include liberal activist group MoveOn and pro-Democrat media network MeidasTouch, and they describe the event as “counterprogramming” for “President Trump’s night full of lies and misplaced priorities for the American people.”  

“These aren’t normal times and showing up for this speech puts a veneer of legitimacy on the corruption and lawlessness that has defined his second term,” Murphy said in a statement. 

On X, Van Hollen said Wednesday, “Next week, Trump will deliver his State of the Union address. I won’t be there. Trump is marching America towards fascism, and I refuse to normalize his shredding of our Constitution & democracy. This cannot be business as usual.”

Other Democrats plan to protest during the event or walk out during the speech, including Representative Jared Huffman, who told Axios last week, “The only question for me is which of his disgusting lines prompts me to get up and leave, because at some point I will.” 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told Democrats in a closed-door meeting last week to either skip the State of the Union or attend in “silent defiance.” It will be interesting to see if any Democrats attending the event listen to him. Last year, Representative Al Green raised his cane and shouted, “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!” at Trump before being removed from the chamber, and was later censured by the Republican-led House. 

This year, as Trump mismanages the economy and becomes increasingly unpopular due to violence perpetrated by federal agents carrying out his immigration policies, it’s extremely likely that he will face protests during his speech. What will they look like, and how will they be handled?

The Vatican will not be joining Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace,” announcing Tuesday that it was turning down a January invitation from the White House.

“For us, there are … some critical issues that should be resolved,” said Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state. “One concern is that, at the international level, it should above all be the U.N. that manages these crisis situations. This is one of the points on which we have insisted.”

Pope Leo XIV has not been afraid to criticize Trump since being named pontiff last year. He told reporters in September that “someone who says ‘I am against abortion but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

He expanded upon those views in November, saying, “I think we have to look for ways of treating people humanely, treating people with the dignity that they have. If people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to treat that. There are courts, there’s a system of justice.

“But when people are living good lives, and many of them for 10, 15, 20 years, to treat them in a way that is extremely disrespectful, to say the least—and there’s been some violence, unfortunately—I think that the bishops have been very clear in what they said,” Leo added. “I would just invite all people in the United States to listen to them.”

Leo has also spoken highly of the role of the U.N., which would go against Trump’s vision for the Board of Peace.

“In a world facing complex challenges such as geopolitical tensions, inequalities, and climate crises, the U.N. should play a key role in fostering dialogue and human support, helping to build a more just future,” Leo said in his State of the World address last month. “Efforts are therefore needed to ensure that the United Nations not only reflects the situation of today’s world, rather than that of the post-war period, but that it is also more focused and efficient in pursuing policies aimed at the unity of the human family instead of ideologies.”

The Board of Peace was established to oversee a transitional government in Gaza, which has been devastated by Israel in a three-year onslaught. But the organization appears to be a way to circumvent the United Nations and possibly line Trump’s pockets, as permanent membership on the board requires a $1 billion fee. Trump has refused to say where that money goes.

So far, 19 countries have signed up, including those with leaders close to Trump, such as Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, and the United Arab Emirates. Israel and Russia, each accused of war crimes, have both been invited, although only Israel has agreed to join. The Vatican and the pope’s rejection will hurt the board’s credibility, but that isn’t likely to change Trump’s mind.