CDC Blocks Journal From Publishing Study Proving Covid Vaccine Worked

The Covid-19 vaccine significantly reduced emergency room visits and hospitalizations this past winter—but Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services doesn’t want the public to know that.

The public health agency blocked the publication of a report on the vaccine’s efficacy from its flagship scientific journal, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya had previously delayed the publication of the study in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report earlier this month. At the time, Bhattacharya claimed that he was skeptical of the researchers’ methodology, despite the fact that the same methodology is used to evaluate vaccines by numerous medical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA Network Open, The Lancet, and Pediatrics.

The decision to nix the report’s publication entirely was made in recent days, according to the Post.

It’s just another example indicating that Kennedy’s anti-vax ideology is spreading across the federal government. During his confirmation hearings last year, Kennedy pledged that he was not against vaccinations and was instead “pro-safety.”

“I believe vaccines have a critical role in health care; all of my kids are vaccinated,” Kennedy said at the time. “In my advocacy I have often disturbed the status quo by asking uncomfortable questions, and I’m not going to apologize for that.”

Yet Kennedy is a leader in a growing movement of anti-vax 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The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion.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, though, he has replaced independent medical experts on the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel and replaced them with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He railed against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamin A. In January, 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.

The 72-year-old has a lot to gain from pushing disinformation about the jab: the more doubt and division that Kennedy sows, the more money he’ll make. Ahead of his appointment, Kennedy disclosed that he made roughly $10 million in 2024 from speaking fees and dividends from his anti-vaccine lawsuits. He’s also made cash from merchandising handled by his nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, which bungled anti-vax messaging in Samoa so badly that it started a 2019 measles outbreak that resulted in the deaths of at least 83 people, the majority of whom were children under the age of five.

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.

President Donald Trump is once again attacking members of the Supreme Court.

Trump lamented that Democrats should be happy with their tight-knit minority on the Supreme Court in a post on Truth Social Wednesday morning. “The Democrat Justices stick together like glue, NEVER failing to wander from the warped and perverse policies, ideas, and cases put before them,” he wrote.

“They ALWAYS vote as a group, or BLOCK, even that new, Low IQ person, that somehow found her way to the bench (Sleepy Joe!),” the president wrote, referring to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“The Republican Justices don’t stick together, they give the Democrats win after win,” he wrote, complaining about the recent decision on tariffs and the upcoming decision on birthright citizenship. Trump continued to claim that no other country in the world “is stupid enough” to offer birthright citizenship, which is not true.

“No, certain ‘Republican’ Justices have just gone weak, stupid, and bad, completely violating what they ‘supposedly’ stood for,” Trump wrote. Clearly the president believes that justices should put their politics over their commitment to the law.

Trump’s post came shortly before the Supreme Court released its latest rulings Wednesday, neither of which was the birthright citizenship ruling. But it’s clear Trump is stressed.

He was first triggered Tuesday by James Carville, a fossilized political consultant who hasn’t managed a successful campaign since 1992. Speaking on his podcast last week, Carville said that if the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, they should grant statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, as well as expand the Supreme Court to 13 seats.

Trump called Carville a “wacko.”

“If they pull off adding these two States, these Country Destroying Sleazebags will dominate politics in America, if we even have a Nation left, for 100 years,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday.

Trump insisted in his Tuesday post that Democrats already had control over the Supreme Court, despite the obvious conservative majority. “They are an immovable force, and there is nothing that can be done to change that. Frankly, I respect that, a lot!”

President Donald Trump’s social media venture is sinking, and its MAGA CEO just bailed.

Trump Media & Technology Group, which oversees Truth Social, announced Tuesday that cow enthusiast and former Representative Devin Nunes is stepping down after more than four years with the company. The news of his departure was authored by Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who sits on the company’s board and runs a trust managing the president’s 115 million shares in the venture.

In a statement on Truth Social, Nunes said it was the “appropriate time” for new leadership with merger and media experience to “steer Trump Media through its current transition phase.” The company’s stock price has fallen from $58 per share on its first day of trading in March 2024 to $9.82 after closing Tuesday. Last year, the company had just $3.7 million in revenue against a staggering net loss of $712 million.

While Trump has made Truth Social his main communications platform, it doesn’t seem to have helped his company in any way. A $6 billion merger with TAE Technologies, a fusion power company, in December to create one of the first publicly traded nuclear fusion companies gave Trump Media stock only a brief boost.

As of February, the company was considering spinning off Truth Social in another merger with Texas Ventures Acquisition III Corp., a shell company designed for mergers. The new interim CEO of Trump Media, Kevin McGurn, happens to be the CEO of Texas Ventures. While Trump Media’s news release didn’t mention the merger, it seems like Trump might dump his once-promising cash cow pretty soon.

A federal judge has thrown out FBI Director Kash Patel’s defamation claim against former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi.

Patel claimed that Figliuzzi slandered him during interviews on MS NOW, where the legal commentator said that Patel had “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor” of the bureau’s Washington headquarters. That, according to Patel, was not technically true.

Figliuzzi counterargued that the embellishment was sarcastic—a mode of protected speech—and the judge agreed.

“The Court finds that Figliuzzi’s statement is rhetorical hyperbole that cannot constitute defamation,” U.S. District Court Judge George Hanks Jr. wrote in his Tuesday decision. “Accordingly, Dir. Patel has failed to state a claim against Figliuzzi, and his lawsuit must be dismissed.”

Figliuzzi further claimed that the lawsuit was intended to silence him and other criticism of the FBI director, an abusive litigation strategy known as SLAPP, or strategic lawsuit against public participation.

But Figliuzzi’s tongue-in-cheek commentary wasn’t far from the truth: Patel has already sparked several scandals in his position due to his wild habits. Over the last year, Patel has wantonly flown around the country with FBI jets on the taxpayer’s dime. His trips have included a jaunt to Las Vegas, a trip to Nashville, and at least one widely publicized instance in which he flew to Penn State to visit his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, who was performing at a wrestling event.

Patel also ruffled feathers when he appeared at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, where he was caught on video chugging beer and whooping it up with the U.S. men’s hockey team. (He later insisted he was celebrating with his “friends.”)

But the former conspiracy podcaster is trying to litigate his way out of the reports. On Monday, Patel sued The Atlantic, demanding $250 million after the magazine issued a damning report citing numerous internal sources familiar with the director’s drinking habits, which reportedly go “far beyond the occasional beer” and may be contributing to Patel’s erratic, paranoid behavior.

“FBI officials and others in the administration have privately questioned whether alcohol played a role in the instances in which he shared inaccurate information about active law-enforcement investigations, including following the murder of Charlie Kirk,” The Atlantic reported.

Donald Trump, a famed teetotaller, has not been happy with the reports. The president reportedly called Patel after the Olympics stunt to express his unhappiness with the scene.

The result could soon see Patel out of the Trump administration entirely.

“We’re all just waiting for the word” that Patel has been fired, one FBI official told The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick.

The Department of Justice rescinded a number of subpoenas Monday, just days after they were issued as part of the agency’s nascent perjury case against former CIA Director John Brennan.

Over the weekend, prosecutors issued subpoenas requiring witnesses to testify before a grand jury in Washington. This came as a surprise to some veteran prosecutors, as witnesses will typically be interviewed by the FBI before they are brought before a grand jury, according to The New York Times.  

The DOJ did not offer an explanation for the rescission Monday. Law enforcement indicated that they had opted to schedule voluntary interviews instead. 

Last week, Maria Medetis Long, chief of the national security section for the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, was removed from the investigation after she reportedly expressed doubts about the probe. The department then brought in Joseph diGenova, a Trump loyalist who has been outspoken about Brennan’s alleged guilt, to take over the case. He was sworn in on Monday, so it’s unclear whether he was involved in the decision to issue subpoenas. 

The prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida are looking into allegations that Brennan lied to Congress about his role in crafting an intelligence assessment about Russian efforts to interfere on Donald Trump’s behalf in the 2016 presidential election. The U.S. attorney’s office in southern Florida has already issued 30 subpoenas as part of a sprawling conspiracy investigation into Trump’s perceived political enemies. Those cases are set to land on the desk of the same judge who handed the president a get-out-of-jail free card: Aileen Cannon.

This sudden rescission is part of a wider trend of unprecedented prosecutorial missteps by Trump’s Department of Justice, undermining numerous civil and criminal cases.