RFK Jr.’s CDC Delays Report Proving the Covid Vaccine Worked

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has delayed the release of a report showing that the Covid-19 vaccine cut hospitalizations and emergency room visits for healthy adults by half last winter.

The Washington Post reports that acting CDC director Jay Bhattacharya made the decision because he was purportedly concerned about the report’s methodology, even though it has been used by the agency for years to examine vaccine effectiveness for other respiratory viruses like the flu.

In fact, the agency published a similar report about the flu vaccine with the same methodology on March 12 in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The Covid-19 vaccine report had cleared the CDC’s scientific review process, and was scheduled to be published in the MMWR before Bhattacharya’s decision.

The same methodology is also used to evaluate vaccines by numerous medical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA Network Open, the Lancet, and Pediatrics, according to the Post.

The newspaper obtained a copy of the report, which states that between September and December 2025, healthy adults who got the vaccine cut their likelihood of visiting urgent care or the emergency room by 50 percent and of Covid-related hospital stays by 55 percent, compared to those who didn’t get a Covid vaccine in 2025.

Bhattacharya was a staunch critic of the CDC’s Covid-19 response, calling for an early end to lockdowns in the “Great Barrington Declaration” he helped write, and said that calling for masking was “pseudoscience.” However, he did tell a Senate committee in February that he didn’t think vaccines cause autism.

On the other hand, Bhattacharya’s boss, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a longtime anti-vax activist, calling the Covid-19 vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made” in 2021. Last year, Kennedy announced that the CDC would no longer recommend the vaccine to healthy pregnant women and children.

In Trump’s second term, vaccination has been discouraged, resulting in rising and more severe illnesses. Meanwhile, the administration, under the thrall of Kennedy’s MAHA pseudoscience, is burying anything that proves their ideology wrong.

U.S. immigration judges have essentially been told that they cannot grant asylum to immigrants, The New York Times reported Thursday.

In a previously unreported whistleblower letter to Congress, a military lawyer who served as a temporary immigration judge before being fired, quoted an official who’d offered a frank—and dark—description of the standard for granting asylum under the Trump administration: “Maybe if you were Jewish and escaping Nazi Germany in 1943, you should get it.”

Illegally denying immigrants their lawful pathway to citizenship is just one way that President Donald Trump transformed the country’s immigration court system into the engine of his mass deportation agenda. Since Trump reentered office, his administration has carried out an unprecedented purge of the country’s immigration judges, culling 100 judges from a body of about 750 officials, according to the Times.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has sought to replace these officials with a class of so-called “deportation judges” and has announced the appointment of 143 permanent and temporary judges, many of whom previously worked as immigration prosecutors or military lawyers. As a result, deportation rates have skyrocketed and the number of successful asylum claims has seen a precipitous drop.

An analysis by the Times found that many of the judges who were fired under the Trump administration had been appointed under Democratic administrations, and tended to approve more asylum cases than their peers. Some immigration courts, such as one in San Francisco, that were viewed as friendly to asylum claims were shuttered altogether. Judges who were fired as part of Trump’s purge approved about 46 percent of asylum claims, while those who remained approved roughly 15 percent.

By comparison, the administration’s new hires have approved roughly 6 percent, according to an analysis by the Times.

The Trump administration wanted immigration judges to act as “puppets for the administration with a singular goal of deporting as many people as possible as quickly as possible,” Shuting Chen, an immigration judge who was dismissed last November, told the Times.

The immigration judges who remain have found themselves in a precarious position. More than two dozen immigration judges who spoke with the Times said they felt pressure to go along with the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda or risk losing their jobs.

Last June, a memo from a top DHS official accused certain judges of tolerating bias so long as it was “in favor of an alien,” and warned that judges who favored one side “may be subject to corrective or disciplinary action.”

“All of us are looking over our shoulders,” said Holly D’Andrea, an immigration judge in Texas who spoke with the Times in her capacity as president of the National Association of Immigration Judges union.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reportedly attempting to frame Army Secretary Dan Driscoll as a “resistance figure” in an effort to oust him from the Trump administration. 

Multiple sources told The Hill that Hegseth, who has ousted multiple senior military officials both before and during the war on Iran, sees Driscoll as a rival of sorts. Sources noted that Hegseth’s paranoia had been heightened in recent weeks following Trump’s firing of his two Cabinet colleagues, Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem. And Driscoll has previously been floated as a potential successor to Hegseth if he ever gets canned.    

“He’s just really uncomfortable with anyone who could potentially be outshining him,” a current Pentagon official told The Hill. The Pentagon itself denies this, stating that Hill sources were “serving up fake news to anyone gullible enough to write about it.” And head Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell wrote that Hegseth “maintains excellent working relationships with the secretaries of every service branch.”  

But another Pentagon official claimed that Hegseth’s inner circle “believes they’ve uncovered proof that Driscoll has become a resistance figure within the Pentagon not only against Hegseth, but against President Trump as well”—raising major doubts about just how copacetic things really are inside Hegseth’s Pentagon right now.  

Hegseth has also made moves targeted at Driscoll’s support network, firing his chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, and two other high-ranking military officials. The new plot against Driscoll fits into a larger pattern with Hegseth, who at the start of his term was overcome by paranoia and suspicion so intense that he made Pentagon employees take polygraph tests and would only speak in confidence to his wife.

It’s unclear what exactly Driscoll has done to elicit this alleged treatment from Hegseth, other than to be reasonably well liked and respected. 

“From what I’ve seen in the press, and from whatever it’s worth, what I hear from people in the Army, it’s not like Driscoll is scheming and plotting to make Hegseth look bad. I mean, Hegseth takes care of that himself on a regular basis. It’s just, it’s all just very strange. And it’s just irresponsible,” retired Army reserve colonel and Pentagon staffer Kevin Carroll told The Hill. 

Driscoll has no plans to resign, and has stated that “serving under President Trump has been the honor of a lifetime.”  

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described a deadly Iranian strike in Kuwait as a rare “squirter” that had broken through the defenses of a U.S. military base, it didn’t quite sound right—especially to the service members who actually lived through it. 

“Painting a picture that ‘one squeaked through’ is a falsehood,” one of the injured soldiers told CBS News Thursday. “I want people to know the unit … was unprepared to provide any defense for itself. It was not a fortified position.”

The injured soldier, a member of the Army’s 103rd Sustainment Command who spoke to CBS News under the condition of anonymity, highlighted the valiant efforts of his fellow service members who were left in a dangerous situation by their leadership.  

“I don’t think that the security environment or any leadership decision diminishes in any way their sacrifice or their service,” the injured soldier told CBS in an interview. “Those soldiers put themselves in harm’s way and … I’m immensely proud of them, and their family should be proud of them.”

Ahead of Operation Epic Fury, U.S. troops in the Gulf region were instructed to move away from the “X,” or danger zone. But a group of soldiers were sent from Kuwait City to Port of Shuaiba, still well within striking distance for Iran. There, they would establish a makeshift portside tactical operations center in a series of small tin buildings.

“We moved closer to Iran, to a deeply unsafe area that was a known target,” another soldier told CBS News. “I don’t think there was a good reason ever articulated.”

The soldier described how the troops had been protected by only a thin layer of vertical standing blast barricades. “From a bunker standpoint, that’s about as weak as one gets,” he told CBS News. Images of the base showed that it had limited defenses against drone or missile strikes. 

When asked to describe the degree of fortification at the makeshift operations center, the soldier told the outlet: “I mean, I would put it in the ‘none’ category. From a drone defense capability … none.”

This runs counter to the Pentagon’s repeated assertions that the operations center was fortified. “Every possible measure has been taken to safeguard our troops—at every level,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell wrote on X in March. 

The Iranian strike on that base killed six U.S. service members, making it the deadliest Iranian strike of the first five weeks of the joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign in Iran. More than 30 military members were hospitalized, with dozens suffering from injuries, including burns, shrapnel wounds, and brain trauma. 

The Defense Department did not initially release information about how many were hurt in the strike, and U.S. Central Command initially claimed that five had been seriously wounded. This isn’t the only case of the Pentagon downplaying the toll of Trump’s reckless war in Iran The government has published outdated numbers in statements on casualties, resulting in an undercount of how many troops have been wounded or killed, and a U.S. official said last week that the Pentagon appeared to be engaged in a “casualty cover-up” in Iran.

Barack Obama could be about to one-up Donald Trump yet again.

Pope Leo XIV met with Obama adviser David Axelrod Thursday morning, reported Substack journalist Christopher Hale, marking a major progression in the quest to land the 44th president a meeting with the Chicago-born pontiff.  

Obama’s enthusiasm for meeting the pope was made apparent in February, when he joined Brian Tyler Cohen’s podcast for a Valentine’s Day episode.

“I’ll be honest with you, being president or even being an ex-president, I can kind of meet everybody, so I’ve met a lot of folks,” Obama said at the time. “The person who I have not yet met that I’m looking forward to meeting—and I hope I get an opportunity sometime in the future—is the new pope, who’s from Chicago, and a White Sox fan.”

Axelrod worked as Obama’s chief strategist on both of his presidential campaigns. It’s not clear what Axelrod and the pope discussed, but the shrinking degrees of separation between the global figures bodes well for Obama’s dream.

The effort to pair the two has been actively in the works since at least March, when Hale reported that the Holy See had been in communication with Obama’s team about arranging a meeting.

That could mean that Obama meets Pope Leo XIV before Trump does.

Leo became the first American-born pope on May 8, 2025, but Trump has not managed to meet him over the past year. Instead, the Vatican has shied away from the Trump administration, in no small part due to threats made by Defense Department officials who were unhappy with the pontiff’s various criticisms of Trump’s warmongering.

Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his “State of the World” speech in January, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door meeting at the Pentagon. The atmosphere was anything but friendly: Pentagon officials openly threatened the religious ambassador, asserting that the Catholic Church needed to get behind the Trump administration’s global whims due to the country’s military prowess.

One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the fourteenth century in which the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent death, and forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon.

The Vatican was so alarmed by the Pentagon’s warning that Pope Leo cancelled his plans to visit the U.S. later in the year, reported Hale, who noted that “many in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.”

The Vatican also rejected the White House’s invitation to host the pope for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4.