This piece has been updated from its original email version.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is giving several prominent right-wing and anti-vaccine medical groups a formal role in meetings of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee.

Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, has sought to completely reshape the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) since taking over at HHS. Last year, he replaced all original 17 members with contrarians and prominent anti-vaccine voices. Since then, the committee has made controversial moves like voting to recommend only flu vaccines without the organomercury compound thimerosal, which some anti-vaxxers believe is linked to autism despite research indicating otherwise.

In his latest move to control ACIP, Kennedy has reshaped the body’s charter. The changes follow a court order in a suit brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics temporarily blocking the committee’s work. The new charter broadens ACIP’s focus to identifying gaps in vaccine safety research and studying the cumulative effects of the childhood vaccine schedule and ingredients like aluminum.

It also adds four additional liaison organizations.

Liaisons are non-voting members of the committee who can comment and ask questions during presentations and assist the body with feedback. The groups Kennedy has added—Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, the Independent Medical Alliance, Physicians for Informed Consent, and the Medical Academy of Pediatrics and Special Needs—have each promoted anti-vaccine narratives in line with his long-held beliefs.

Dorit Reiss, a vaccine law expert at UC Law San Francisco who helped the public health advocacy group Defend Public Health draft amicus briefs in the AAP lawsuit, told Important Context that anti-vax groups have never been part of ACIP.

“Traditionally, liaisons included expert groups and other professional actors,” Reiss said. “Even in the days when the National Vaccine Information Center had members on federal committees, it was not an ACIP liaison. This is new.”

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons

AAPS is a right-wing political advocacy group founded in 1943 to fight government efforts to establish universal healthcare in America. The Republican-aligned group’s former members include Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and anti-vax former cardiologist Peter McCullough. McCullough, who lost his board certifications, is now part of a supplements company that sells his COVID vaccine detox. Kennedy’s HHS cited his work to justify cuts to mRNA vaccine research.

AAPS has long been on the medical fringes, promoting misinformation like HIV-AIDS denial and the long-discredited claim that vaccines cause autism, as well as staking out ideological positions against contraception and abortion rights. The group previously helped tobacco giant Philip Morris fight indoor smoking bans, and later came to the aid of President Donald Trump in downplaying the severity of the COVID pandemic.

In August 2020, as Trump and his allies were pushing back on the Food and Drug Administration over its revocation of the emergency use authorization for the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine against COVID, the group sued the agency. The EUA had been withdrawn due to evidence showing the drug was ineffective against COVID, and potentially harmful, but the president had billed it as a quick fix to the pandemic ahead of his 2020 reelection bid.

AAPS has targeted the lifesaving mRNA COVID vaccines in particular, which extensive research has shown to be safe and to have saved millions of lives. The group, however, has suggested that they cause harm like kidney damage and even death.

AAPS has “enthusiastically supported” Kennedy and his anti-vax Make America Healthy Again movement, and has enjoyed ready access to leading officials. At a meeting in September, it hosted James O’Neill, then the HHS Deputy Director and Acting CDC Director, who authorized the recent changes to the childhood immunization schedule.

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Independent Medical Alliance

IMA has become a key player in the MAHA movement, working closely with Kennedy and his former anti-vax group Children’s Health Defense (CHD). It was originally founded in early 2020 as the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) by former critical care physicians Paul Marik and Pierre Kory, who earned reputations for spreading COVID misinformation and, like McCullough, had their board certifications revoked.

The group became popular in pro-Trump circles—in part due to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) boosting Kory and Marik. It subsequently rebranded ahead of a campaign pushing Kennedy’s confirmation as HHS Secretary. IMA has since served as a feeder to the new administration with three of the secretary’s appointed ACIP members having been associated with the group, including its chair Kirk Milhoan.

The group is best known for championing the antiparasitic drug ivermectin as a COVID treatment, which large-scale studies have shown to be ineffective against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. IMA has also promoted the drug for a number of other ailments, including cancer—a connection Kennedy’s National Institutes of Health is now pursuing.

At the same time, IMA has spent years promoting doubt about mRNA vaccines and fighting mandates. It was one of the sponsors of the 2022 “Defeat the Mandates” rally at which Kennedy spoke, along with CHD.

IMA, which has its own international fellowship program, has affiliated with controversial medical figures domestically and abroad, including Brazilian endocrinologist Flávio Cadegiani, who became an advisor to the group in 2021.

That year, he was among 68 individuals recommended for indictment for crimes against humanity by a Brazilian parliamentary commission. A study he conducted evaluating the androgen receptor antagonist proxalutamide as a treatment for COVID reported roughly 200 deaths among hospitalized participants, particularly in control groups, and drew ethical scrutiny.

Cadegiani has denied any wrongdoing.

The following year, he and Kory co-authored two papers based on a 2020 city-wide ivermectin experiment in Brazil. Both were criticized for methodological problems and one received a correction after it was reported that Cadegiani and another author received funding from an ivermectin manufacturer.

In 2024, IMA gave Cadegiani a research excellence award.

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Physicians for Informed Consent

Formed in 2015, Physicians for Informed Consent is another anti-vaccine advocacy group that lists AAPS as a coalition partner along with Children’s Health Defense.

PIC’s activities over the years have included pushing back on COVID school mask mandates, HPV vaccine mandates in California, and sponsoring the 2022 Defeat the Mandates rally. The group was also behind a lawsuit against the State of California over its now-repealed anti-misinformation law, AB2098. The law empowered the state medical board to punish doctors who spread COVID and vaccine misinformation to their patients. Children’s Health Defense and IMA’s Kory were plaintiffs in the suit.

PIC’s website features a section called “Comparing 10 Disease Risks to Vaccine Risks,” which contains a graphic purporting to show that the risks of vaccination against diseases like hepatitis B, measles, tetanus, pertussis, and even polio potentially outweigh the risks those diseases pose to children.

It also includes a section on aluminum in vaccines, in which it casts doubt on long-established vaccines against diseases like hepatitis B.

The administration’s updated childhood immunization schedule no longer recommends hepatitis B vaccine for newborns.

Medical Academy of Pediatrics and Special Needs

The final new liaison is MAPSN, which boasts a number of corporate partners, including CHD, and promotes debunked anti-vaccine narratives.

On its website, under the tab “research,” the group features a report on the supposed risks of autism, including from vaccines. The report was published by the McCullough Foundation, founded by McCullough.

McCullough is listed as an author on the report along with disgraced physician Andrew Wakefield, whose fraudulent 1998 paper spawned the vaccine-autism panic. Kennedy has called Wakefield the “most unfairly maligned person in modern history" and suggested statues ought to be erected to honor him.

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The New Establishment

Since the pandemic and ensuing government response brought the U.S. economy to a halt, right-wing groups have been working to supplant the traditional public health establishment—like AAP. Some have even launched their own medical journals to counter established publications where anti-vax and contrarian researchers have faced retractions and hurdles to publication.

Important Context has previously reported that IMA, as well as the RealClear Foundation and the Brownstone Institute, started their own medical journals after Kennedy took office. AAPS has run its own publication for years, presenting its advocacy materials as reports and research.

With the rise of Kennedy’s HHS, the groups now have federal muscle behind them and are actively influencing public health policy in the U.S.

Reiss told Important Context in all likelihood, “ACIP is, functionally, going to be marginalized until real changes can be made,” so it does not matter who the liaisons end up being.

“This change contributes to undermining the legitimacy of ACIP, which is why most states—across the political spectrum—have already taken steps to detach from it, and this will likely continue,” she said.

This piece has been updated from its email version.

The leading candidate to become the nation’s next vaccine chief has a history of casting doubt on mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and attacking public health efforts to slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, drawing comparisons to Iran’s theocratic, authoritarian government.

FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary is reportedly backing Dr. Houman David Hemmati to lead the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. A Jewish Iranian refugee who came to the U.S. during the Iranian Revolution, Hemmati is a California-based ophthalmologist and a biotech veteran of several companies focused on vision loss.

Some media coverage has focused on this business background, even suggesting that Hemmati might signal a sort of return to normalcy after the tumultuous tenure of the outgoing CBER chief, Dr. Vinay Prasad, who drew criticism for delaying drug approvals and targeting mRNA vaccines. Prasad famously overruled his own staff to reject Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine and authored a controversial memo claiming that the COVID shots had killed ten children, without providing evidence.

Like Prasad, Hemmati lacks experience in vaccine development. A search of his name in the National Library of Medicine’s database PubMeb turns up no studies related to vaccines authored by the ophthalmologist. A review of Hemmati’s old social media posts and interviews reveals a pattern of public health and vaccine skepticism, as well as alignment with Trump.

Team Player

Hemmati has long been an admirer of Prasad and other top officials inside the department—namely Makary and NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who he has publicly asserted are his “most trusted friends.” All three men were on his “dream team” HHS roster, which he posted on X in May 2022. Hemmati included himself as FDA commissioner.

In multiple social media posts, Hemmati has thanked anti-vax HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and his top lieutenants for their leadership.

In May 2025, a month after Kennedy shuttered a number of Freedom of Information Act offices inside HHS, including at FDA, Hemmati praised the secretary and Makary for starting an official FDA podcast, writing “NEVER before have we seen this level of transparency & access from the @US_FDA !”

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Vaccines

As the head of CBER, Hemmati would be in a position to influence vaccine and drug approvals. For years, he has called the COVID vaccines “experimental” and maintained that they were inadequately tested for human use. Hemmati has called into question the safety and efficacy of the shots, claiming the data was hidden from the public, and suggested that the risks of COVID vaccination outweigh the benefits—particularly for children, teens, and pregnant people.

”It was always WRONG to hastily develop a vaccine using experimental genetic technology, claim without proof that it must be perfectly safe, and censor and cancel and shame anyone who questioned that,” Hemmati wrote in a lengthy post on X several weeks after the 2024 election.

Dr. Arghavan Salles, a clinical associate professor at Stanford University, noted that the COVID vaccines “have been tested extensively, and it is irresponsible to suggest otherwise.”

“Data are particularly strong for pregnant people, whose incidence of complications is quite high if infected with SARS-CoV-2,” she said.

In a March 2023 interview on the unDivided podcast, Hemmati said that if he ever had “the opportunity in the future…to change how the FDA approaches safety assessments and drug approval,” he would force drug companies “to really allow patients to make informed consent decisions, rather than just ramming products down their throat.”

That August, he criticized the Biden administration’s decision to buy more booster doses, telling Fox News the decision was made to benefit the manufacturers. The following August, he called for an “objective look” at the childhood vaccine schedule, insisting, “It’s about ensuring safety, not being ‘anti-vax.’” When the FDA required a new safety warning label on the mRNA vaccines last summer, he celebrated Makary’s commitment “to public safety & a level of transparency we have never seen before from this critical federal agency.”

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Masking

Hemmati was also a vocal opponent of COVID masking requirements, comparing them to Iranian theocratic rule. In a May 2022 thread about a Los Angeles student facing punishment for refusing to mask in the classroom, he wrote, “Belief in a sick new religion of the COVIDians. This is their form of extremism. Comply with our religious dress code or suffer. I left Iran when they started doing that…”

The term “COVIDians,” which Bhattacharya has also used, references the Branch Davidian cult and is a pejorative used by pandemic deniers and minimizers to describe people who took COVID seriously. Hemmati began using the term in February 2022. His May thread was not the only time he compared pandemic awareness to a religion.

In December that year, he accused mask-wearers of being in a cult, writing, “The concept of universal mask mandates is no longer just about respiratory viruses. That’s how members of mask cult got indoctrinated - they were drawn in by their fear of infection/death.”

”Now, however, it’s like [the hijab] mandate in Iran - about forcing strict obedience to ideology,” Hemmati added.

Salles, who is also Iranian American, rejected Hemmati’s comparison, noting, “hijabs have no health benefit, whereas masks do.”

“Hijab mandates come, at least in part, from a belief that men can’t control themselves if women’s hair is exposed,” she explained, adding, “Mask mandates, when they are used, are based on scientific data demonstrating they reduce the risk of transmission of infectious diseases that are spread through the air.”

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Herd Immunity

While casting doubt on the vaccines and opposing masks, Hemmati championed so-called “natural immunity”—meaning acquired through COVID infection—as the way through the pandemic.

In his list of post-2024 election grievances, Hemmati wrote, “It was always WRONG to deny that natural immunity, which is by all measures a better form of immunity as it is against the ENTIRE virus, not just one protein, doesn’t exist to force mandated treatments on people.” Vaccine immunity has consistently been shown to be more reliable and safer to acquire than infection-acquired immunity. COVID has killed over 1.2 million Americans.

Hemmati was a staunch opponent of closing businesses and schools to combat the rapid spread of the virus across the country. In the March 2023 unDivided podcast interview, he called for “reparations” for business owners and funding for private tutors for disadvantaged children forced to do remote learning.

Classrooms turned out to be vectors of viral spread, and long COVID in children has been linked to lower grades and poorer academic outcomes.

Despite his advocacy for natural immunity and general opposition to pandemic control efforts, Hemmati—like Makary, Bhattacharya, Prasad, and Kennedy—is a proponent of the idea that COVID emerged from a laboratory in China. On unDivided, he suggested that the NIH may have funded the research that supposedly created the virus.

Evidence strongly points toward the virus having natural origins.

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Right-Wing Politics

Like Prasad and current HHS leaders, Hemmati is broadly aligned with the political right. He has taken advantage of platforms like Fox News, The Daily Wire, and The Atlas Society, which was founded to honor the ideology of Ayn Rand.

He has been particularly active in California politics as opposition to Gov. Gavin Newsom, a prominent Trump critic who observers speculate is gearing up for a presidential run. Hemmati has compared the governor to the Iranian regime for policies like AB2098, a now-repealed state law that allowed the state’s medical board to strip the licenses of physicians who spread COVID or vaccine misinformation to their patients.

Hemmati has called to oust Newsom—as well as Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who he criticized for masking at her 2022 inauguration, declaring, “I feel like I’m looking at a political event in Iran.”

In an appearance on Fox and Friends that August, Hemmati blasted the governor over a Democratic bill to protect transgender youth seeking gender-affirming medical care.

“I think a lot of it is political posturing on the part of the governor during an election cycle and in preparation for a potential presidential run,” he said.

This piece has been updated from its original email version.

“I’ll tell you, it’s no longer Tony Fauci’s NIH,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya declared, standing at the podium of the 2026 Conservative Political Action Conference last month, with the event’s logo emblazoned behind him.

The National Institutes of Health Director and acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was there to promote the public health record of the Trump administration and his anti-vax Health and Human Services secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr.

The crowd erupted in applause.

It was an unusual moment—and not just because a serving federal public health official took a shot at the now-retired former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Launched in 1974 by the American Conservative Union and Young Americans for Freedom, CPAC has not traditionally featured leading HHS officials promoting public health policy. The nation’s largest gathering of right-wing activists, operatives, and politicians, the conference is known for spectacle, incendiary rhetoric, and controversial figures. It was at CPAC 2023 that conservative commentator Michael Knowles called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated.” The following year, Nazis were able to take part in the event without being ejected. In 2025, Steve Bannon did a stiff-arm salute at the conference.

In the past, public health officials have tended to avoid CPAC and similar events as their field aims to be above partisanship. There are examples of public health leaders wading into politics, but generally years before or after their time in HHS.

Prior to becoming NIH director, Dr. Francis Collins, then the former head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, endorsed presidential candidate Barack Obama. Dr. Harold Varmus, who served as NIH director during the Clinton administration, became an informal advisor to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Donald Trump’s former CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, participated in a Heritage Foundation event in 2024 with Dr. Martin Kulldorff, who is now the chief science officer for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HHS. Redfield later became a visiting fellow at Heritage.

A notable exception, however, was George W. Bush’s HHS secretary, Tommy Thompson, who served from 2001 to 2005. Thompson spoke to the American Legislative Exchange Council in 2002 and was booked as a speaker for CPAC that year. Thompson’s successor, Mike Leavitt, came under fire for blogging about abortion.

A review of archived CPAC website snapshots—conference highlights, agendas, and speaker lists going back to 1996—found no previous examples of NIH or CDC directors appearing at the conference. Agendas and speaker lists before that are not readily available online, and the organization did not respond to our requests for production.

“As a political appointee, NIH Directors have appeared at political events, usually around specific health-related issues where their insights and endorsements of specific policies may be politically helpful,” said Dr. Jeremy Berg, former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH. “But I do not know of other examples where an NIH Director has spoken at such political and partisan events, just to speak about his vision or alleged accomplishments.”

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Bhattacharya is not a typical NIH director. In many ways, he has more in common with the CPAC crowd than he does with his predecessors at the agency. His rise to power began with his involvement in right-wing political networks amid the COVID-19 pandemic, fighting government efforts to control the spread of the virus, which he argued ought to be allowed to spread for herd immunity. His subsequent Senate confirmation came down to a party-line vote.

Bhattacharya’s presence at the right-wing conference highlights how public health has been at the center of political debate in recent years—a shift heralded six years ago by the appearance of HHS Secretary Alex Azar at CPAC 2020, as the SARS-CoV-2 virus was beginning its spread across the country.

Bhattacharya was not the only HHS official to appear at CPAC this year. Others included Secretary Kennedy, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Director Mehmet Oz, and anti-vaxxer Dr. Robert Malone, a member of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee.

Despite this significant roster of HHS leaders at the conference, the department has been messaging about depoliticizing public health and restoring “gold standard science.” In September last year, Kennedy published an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, lamenting that “over the decades, bureaucratic inertia, politicized science and mission creep have corroded that purpose and squandered public trust.”

But as examples of the politicization, Kennedy cited a laundry list of right-wing and anti-vax grievances with U.S. pandemic policy: “cloth masks on toddlers, arbitrary 6-foot distancing, boosters for healthy children, prolonged school closings, economy-crushing lockdowns, and the suppression of low-cost therapeutics in favor of experimental and ineffective drugs.”

Critics have accused the Trump administration of doing a two-step on public health policy, claiming to combat the politicization of science while at the very same time, driving it. Colette Delawalla, founder of the advocacy group Stand Up for Science, compared the mismatch between official rhetoric and actions to George Orwell’s 1984.

“The Trump Administration banned words and are actively dictating the types of science that we can conduct, based on what aligns with their ‘priorities,’” Delawalla said. “This is Orwellian ‘ignorance is strength’ level censorship and…politicization of science.”

(The Accountability Journalism Institute, which publishes the Important Context newsletter, provided fiscal sponsorship to Stand Up for Science before it secured nonprofit status.)

For months, HHS has been targeting gender-affirming care, describing it as “sex-rejecting procedures”—a term not used in medical practice that originated from the Christian Right—and implementing policy changes to restrict access by transgender and nonbinary Americans. Lifesaving vaccines have also come under review, including the hepatitis B shot for newborns. The CDC updated its vaccine safety page to include untrue narratives about immunizations and autism favored by Kennedy’s anti-vax allies.

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Few have been as vocal about fighting supposed liberal politicization of science as Kennedy’s lieutenant, the soft-spoken Bhattacharya. But while the NIH director has railed against agenda-driven science, CPAC is not the only far-right platform of which he has availed himself. In December 2025, Bhattacharya was a speaker at “Americafest,” the annual conference of Turning Point USA. There, he joined a roster of speakers that included white nationalists to celebrate the life of the late Charlie Kirk. The previous month, Bhattacharya accepted an award from the Brownstone Institute.

In August that year, just weeks after telling PBS that “science should not be partisan,” he appeared on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, known for its promotion of COVID-19 misinformation. During the appearance, which came the day after a radicalized anti-vaxxer fired hundreds of rounds into buildings on the CDC campus, he cast doubt on mRNA COVID vaccines.

As Important Context has previously reported, Bhattacharya has faced growing dissension inside his agency over what staffers say is a naked politicization of science. His first agency town hall was plagued by disruptions as workers questioned research cuts. The NIH has terminated grants relating to topics like LGBTQIA+ health and mRNA vaccine technology—two targets of the political right and Trump administration. STAT News reported recently that researchers were forced to change hundreds of grant titles to receive NIH funding

In a public declaration released in June last year with the assistance of Delawalla’s group, hundreds of NIH workers charged that research cuts on Bhattacharya’s watch were being made “based on political ideology.”

“To achieve political aims, NIH has targeted multiple universities with indiscriminate grant terminations, payment freezes for ongoing research, and blanket holds on awards regardless of the quality, progress, or impact of the science,” it read.

Berg noted that Bhattacharya had previously “declined to speak at at least one other event because the event had been politicized by including local Democratic politicians who were going to speak of the importance of NIH in the local community and the country.”

The event in question was a rally following a meeting with some of the declaration signers. According to one of the organizers Important Context spoke with, the NIH director became angry and refused to join due to the participation of Democratic lawmakers.

“The hypocrisy is shocking but not surprising,” Berg said.

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For his part, the NIH director has defended his record, even bragged about how he’d “cured DEI”—a term he has not clearly defined—at his agency in an op-ed for The Spectator, a right-wing outlet.

In his CPAC speech, Bhattacharya also took a dig at “DEI,” declaring, “80 years ago, Vannevar Bush challenged us to build a scientific enterprise that served the entire country. We today have an opportunity to strengthen that system for a new era by embracing market-based approaches, by advancing drug repurposing, and are committing ourselves to scientific rigor, getting rid of DEI and all the other nonsense.”

Science policy experts have disputed Bhattacharya’s characterization of Bush’s argument, telling STAT News that the NIH director mischaracterized it to support the Trump administration’s record.

Delawalla said she was “rather surprised at the content of Jay’s speech because he has overseen the decimation of HIV research and drug repurposing efforts around the nation by cutting hundreds of active grants in these areas.”

“I implore Jay Bhattacharya to keep Vannevar Bush’s name out of his mouth while he is actively bringing about the destruction of the scientific ecosystem that Bush worked so hard to implement in the US,” she said.

Bhattacharya closed out his speech with Trump campaign slogans, telling the crowd, “Remember what President Trump and Secretary Kennedy is [sic] leading us toward—to make America great again—and to do that, we must make America healthy again.”

Earlier this month, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, testified at an oversight hearing before the House Appropriations Committee about the Trump administration’s cuts to medical research.

According to a recent investigation by Vox, the NIH has slashed research, almost across the board, including in fields like cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, mental health, kidney disease, and more. In 2025, the agency gave out 2,000 fewer grants than it did in 2024, and this year, it is on track to do even less. The National Cancer Institute has given out just a fraction of the funding it has been allocated to spend.

Meanwhile, the agency has lost thousands of workers and senior staff to workforce reductions, and sixteen institutes are currently headed up by acting directors. The Trump administration has also been targeting research funding for universities. The cuts are part of a larger White House anti-diversity agenda that has scientists looking outside the U.S. for opportunities.

During the hearing, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D–Conn.) asked Bhattacharya about the loss of opportunities for early-career researchers, noting “they’re looking at how they change their careers or where they go with this.”

“It’s been harder and harder for early-career scientists to get their grants funded,” the NIH director replied. “Once upon a time, in the 1980s, you were in your mid 30s when you got your first large RO1, large first grant, and now you have to be in your mid 40s. You have to do one, two, three postdocs. And I’m thinking of how to fix that as NIH, because the NIH has undertaken lots of activities to try to fix that.”

While the response was welcomed by the committee, many scientists remain skeptical of the director’s leadership. One is population health researcher Dr. Michael D. Green.

Green is an early-career scientist, having earned his PhD in December 2025. He studies healthcare discrimination, diversity and representation in clinical trials, and social determinants of health and cardiovascular disease. His motivations to do this work are deeply personal: his own family’s history with heart disease.

“I’m a Black man, and this is something that…it’s important to note because a lot of the experiences of my grandparents and other people in my family have…deeply…affected how I view…health care in America,” Green told Important Context. “And so a lot of them, they don’t really trust…traditional allopathic medicine—so we go to a hospital…they felt that they were kind of dismissed. Often, people weren’t listened to, especially some of the older ones.”

Green said that when his family members had issues like hypertension, they often went untreated and progressed to more serious conditions.

Critical—and personal—as his research is, Green’s focus on minority communities put him on a collision course with the Trump administration.

Green applied for an NIH grant in September 2023, under the Biden administration. He went for a F99/K00 Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Fellow Transition Award, aiming to study links between reported discrimination in healthcare settings and heart attacks, strokes, and cognitive health. F and K awards cover both research and training, and are meant to assist early-career researchers in the transition out of their PhD programs.

At 70 pages, the application took Green nine months to plan and write, and required four letters of recommendation. For good measure, he also obtained two letters of support for the proposals. Approval finally came in August 2024, two months before the election, and as far as Green was concerned, that was that. All the NIH requires from its grantees are progress reports on how the work is progressing.

But things changed under the Trump administration, which began re-reviewing grants to weed out anything it viewed as “DEI” using specific search terms. The NIH has denied having a list of banned words, though reporting has cast doubt on the agency’s claim.

Green began hearing about research cuts in March last year—one month before Bhattacharya took over at NIH. In July, he received emails about his awards, informing him that to “proceed with funding consideration, the scope…must be renegotiated to make it consistent” with the administration’s priorities.

Put simply, he would need to “remove any DEI language” from his applications.

The timing could not have been worse for Green. The emails arrived, he explained, as his family was planning the funeral for his grandfather, who had passed away from congestive heart failure.

“I get this, ‘Hey, you have one week to rewrite all of your woke science’ requests while I’m preparing for my grandfather’s funeral, who died of heart disease—the same condition that I’m being told arbitrarily, hey, ‘that experience doesn’t matter,’” Green said. “It’s almost perfectly poetic.”

For researchers like Green, waiting on already approved NIH grants is not merely an inconvenience. It is also a financial burden and injects uncertainty into budding careers.

“I’m waiting for the approval of my NIH grant, which I applied to because I was told it was going to be a seamless transition to a postdoc position,” Green explained. “And so in that process of being told, ‘Hey, I know that you applied to this thing in 2023, but you need to change your work now…that has cost me real income—I haven’t been paid the past two months. It’s cost me…health insurance. I’m paying for a catastrophic health insurance plan, so in case I get hit by a car, I don’t get put in…life-crippling debt, like we do in America.”

To Green, the new demands from the NIH were more than a headache—they were hypocrisy. For years, he noted, Bhattacharya has purported to be a champion of free speech and academic freedom, claiming to have been denied both during the pandemic when his infection-based COVID-19 herd immunity strategy was rejected by the scientific mainstream. He even unsuccessfully sued Biden administration officials, alleging that they had orchestrated this supposed censorship.

“For me…my biggest issue wasn’t him saying my science is bad,” Green said, explaining that he was most troubled by “the fact that this new administrative process has been put in front of me where it’s not just, ‘Hey, I don’t agree with you,’ it’s, ‘Hey, I don’t agree with you, and change everything here.’”

At the hearing, Bhattacharya faced questions about the anti-DEI push, but assured committee members that he was in no way making research funding decisions based on politics, but rather good science.

“So the NIH, if we don’t do research that improves the health of minority populations, we’re not accomplishing our mission. It is vital. We’re not accomplishing our mission,” he said. “We have to do research that improves the health of minority populations, right? So I don’t think there’s anybody that disagrees with that. Research that is not rigorous, not as overly politicized, that doesn’t actually have a chance of improving minority health, I don’t want to fund it.”

Bhattacharya’s conciliatory tone was markedly different from that of the December 2025 piece he penned with his principal deputy director, Dr. Matthew Memoli for The Spectator, boasting that they had “cured DEI” at the NIH. While Bhattacharya and Memoli did not define DEI, they suggested it was a ‘corrupting’ ideology requiring “de facto loyalty oaths.”

“Scientists learned that the best way to maximize their chance of a slice of NIH money was to promise that their work would help achieve racial nirvana, however remote from utopian ideological pursuits the proposed work actually was,” the pair wrote. “Most scientists obsequiously complied to avoid the risk of career harm, whether they were true believers or not.”

Bhattacharya’s ambiguous position on research affecting minority groups highlights the difficult line he has tried to walk, gesturing at the public health mainstream even while casting doubt on it and allying with fringe figures like Robert Kennedy Jr. Bhattacharya has previously faced pushback from inside his own agency for contradicting himself.

At his first town hall, Bhattacharya was heckled when he told staffers that studies of the impacts of specific policies like redlining that affect minority populations would not be cut.

”As the program officer who oversees this research, I will tell you my studies have been terminated,” a voice from the crowd protested.

Bhattacharya then clarified that studies on structural racism were meritless and would be cut, and the heckler responded, “What do you think redlining is?”

For Green, the administration’s anti-DEI push represents an “amorphous political agenda” that is fundamentally at odds with scientific discovery.

“I think that to say that there’s no situation where inclusivity matters, it’s not only…ignorant, it’s also just kind of you’re closing off a whole side of your scientific possibilities.”

He warned that the encroachment of the administration’s politics on research has created a new era of uncertainty—and a bad precedent for the future. Green noted that the loss of research opportunities has been driving scientists away from American universities and into the arms of the corporate sector.

“You can go to industry where you’re probably not going to do something that’s entirely mission aligned, but again, at least you can, you know, support your family and kind of keep doing your work,” he said.

This piece has been updated from its original email version.

In January, the Trump administration unveiled sweeping changes to the recommended dietary guidelines, promoting increased consumption of red meat and whole-fat dairy products, which are high in saturated fat. The recommendations followed a year in which beef and dairy industry groups spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying federal health agencies on nutrition policy.

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), released by the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Agriculture, not only provide nutritional advice for individuals, but also influence federally funded meal programs like school lunches and SNAP benefits relied on by tens of millions of Americans.

The new DGA represent a significant departure from previous years. Earlier guidelines recommended limiting saturated fat intake to less than 10 percent of daily calories and encouraged lower-fat dairy and reduced consumption of red and processed meat.

While the 2025-2030 DGA maintain the recommended limit on saturated fat, they substantially increase the recommended daily intake of protein, emphasizing animal sources, including red meat, and encourage the use of butter, full-fat dairy, and beef tallow as “healthy fats.”

The changes reflect the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” agenda of HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., who blames processed foods for fueling what he describes as a chronic disease epidemic. HHS has framed the new guidelines as a rebuke of corporate influence.

“For decades, the Dietary Guidelines favored corporate interests over common sense, science-driven advice to improve the health of Americans,” a fact sheet on the department’s website reads. “That ends today.”

However, federal lobbying disclosures show that in the year leading up to the revisions, major meat and dairy groups spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying the administration—including HHS and the FDA—on nutrition policy and the dietary guidelines specifically, among other issues.

When the changes were announced, STAT News reported that some of the researchers on the panel that helped shape the new guidelines had ties to the meat and dairy industries. The disclosures offer even more insight into how the guidelines came to be.

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Federal lobbying disclosures report total spending, the policy issues of concern, and the federal agencies contacted. While they generally do not indicate the positions taken by the lobbyists or how spending was allocated, they provide a broad snapshot of industry lobbying activity.

From the second quarter through the end of last year, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), the nation’s largest trade group representing the U.S. cattle and beef industry, spent $210,000 lobbying on a number of issues, including the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The group targeted the FDA and the White House Office, along with the House, Senate, USDA and U.S. Forest Service.

In February, Kennedy attended NCBA’s annual convention for the cattle industry, CattleCon 2026. The group’s media contact, Hunter Ihrman, reposted a tweet by the secretary from the event in which he touted the new dietary guidelines, declaring “The war on protein is over—and beef is back on the menu.”

In a statement, NCBA praised the new DGA for emphasizing “beef’s place in a healthy diet” and credited Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Kennedy for their “streamlined approach” that stayed true to science while being “far more practical.”

The Meat Institute, another major industry group representing beef producers, spent nearly $500,000 last year lobbying HHS, USDA, and Congress on issues including nutrition, and released a similar statement, lauding Rollins and Kennedy for having “simplified the Dietary Guidelines making it clear that meat is a protein powerhouse which plays a vital role in healthy diets.”

Lobbying disclosures for Q2 and Q3 last year from the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC)—the largest pork industry trade association in the country—list “engagement with the administration on Make America Healthy Again report.”

The report took aim at the DGA for “problematic reductionist recommendations” like advising limiting saturated fats and sodium, and was widely criticized for citing non-existent studies and containing other errors.

NCBA praised the report for highlighting the “positive role beef plays in a healthy diet.” The report noted that “beef contains protein that maintains skeletal muscle, which plays a key role in regulating metabolic health.” It also touted the benefits of dairy.

NPPC hailed the new DGA with the group’s president-elect Rob Brenneman declaring that they gave pork and other meat “their due when it comes to Americans’ health and dietary habits.”

The National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF), the largest dairy farmer organization in the U.S., spent nearly $600,000 in-house between the second and fourth quarter last year, lobbying on issues including the dietary guidelines, targeting the USDA and—in Q4—the FDA. NMPF released a statement from its president and CEO, Gregg Doud, thanking HHS and USDA for the DGA changes and declaring “we welcome the potential these guidelines hold for expanding upon dairy’s critical role in the diet.”

Along with industry groups, Tyson Foods, one of the so-called “big four” meat producers in the country, spent $1.6 million last year on in-house lobbying, targeting the FDA, HHS, and USDA among other agencies and Congress, focusing on issues including nutrition. The company did not lobby HHS in 2023 or 2024.

In May, Tyson handed Kennedy a political win by publicly committing to remove petroleum-based synthetic dyes from its food products—an issue the secretary has repeatedly highlighted.

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Nutrition experts have criticized the new DGA for their promotion of red meat and dairy. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics noted that such emphasis “is inconsistent with the recommendation of limiting saturated fat to 10% of total calories.” The American Heart Association expressed concern “that recommendations regarding salt seasoning and red meat consumption could inadvertently lead consumers to exceed recommended limits for sodium and saturated fats, which are primary drivers of cardiovascular disease.”

Dr. Jessica Knurick, a registered dietitian with a PhD in nutrition science, told Important Context that the visual representation released by HHS to explain the new dietary recommendations—with meat and dairy up at the top—was worse than the guidelines themselves.

“It’s nearly impossible to follow their visual representation of the guidelines and keep saturated down under 10 percent,” she said.

Knurick noted that lobbying on the DGA is normal, but the new guidelines—or at least the visual representation of them put out by HHS—made “very clear” that meat and dairy lobbying interests “had a huge role” in their shaping.

“If you know anything historically about the dietary guidelines, you know all of these different industries lobby quite hard, and this time, the meat and dairy industries were quite successful,” she said. ”Which is just absolutely ridiculous, considering that…the thing that [Kennedy] constantly talks about are conflicts of interest and corruption, as he calls it, with…lobbying interests and guidelines.”

“So it’s…kind of one of those things where every accusation is a confession with these people,” she added.

This week, NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was named acting director of the CDC. The appointment is the latest signal that more changes may be in store for the childhood and adolescent immunization schedule, which has long been a target of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and the anti-vaccine movement he is a part of.

Bhattacharya’s ascendance comes as the CDC has moved to limit access to vaccines. Last June, Kennedy replaced the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices with skeptics and anti-vaccine voices. In August, the Trump administration fired CDC Director Susan Monarez after mere weeks on the job after she refused to commit to green-lighting the new body’s vaccine recommendations.

Since then, the CDC has updated its vaccine safety page to link vaccines to autism—a narrative that research and major medical associations have repeatedly refuted—and adopted new guidance, reducing the number of recommended immunizations for children. Experts have warned that such changes threaten vaccine access as they inform what insurance companies will cover.

Bhattacharya, the fourth person to head the CDC under the new Trump administration, following Kennedy’s dismissal last week of the agency’s previous director, Jim O’Neill, as part of a larger reorganization. He has previously cast doubt on vaccine safety.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Bhattacharya questioned the need for COVID-19 boosters and claimed they were insufficiently tested prior to approval. In a 2024 documentary, he suggested that the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, which research has shown is not effective against COVID, had been suppressed to secure vaccine approval.

Even before his NIH appointment, the new acting CDC director was an ally of Kennedy. When the secretary ran for president in 2024 as an independent, Bhattacharya spoke at the campaign event announcing his running mate. That summer, Bhattacharya also organized a public health conference at Stanford University featuring individuals like writer and COVID vaccine critic Alex Berenson.

There are already indications that Bhattacharya will support Kennedy’s anti-vaccine push. In January, he co-authored a memo with FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary and CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz endorsing the vaccine schedule changes the CDC adopted.

“Not only does Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a health economist, have zero expertise in controlling infectious diseases, he has used his voice to help spread them,” warned Dr. Jonathan Howard, author of the book We Want them Infected, who has followed Bhattacharya’s career closely for years. Howard, an AJI scientific advisor, noted Bhattacharya’s involvement in the vaccine schedule memo.

Bhattacharya’s interim appointment comes just two weeks after he would not fully rule out vaccines as a cause of autism while testifying before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Instead, he would only say he was not aware of any study linking a single vaccine to the neurodevelopmental disorder, leaving open the possibility that multiple shots may be a trigger. Later, he said some vaccines were not as well studied as the measles shot in relation to autism.

In a podcast appearance from September 2024, Bhattacharya was even more explicit, expressing openness to alternative immunization schedules and suggesting more research into the debunked autism-vaccine connection was warranted.

”I think there is a legitimate increase in autism in the population at large and the question of why—we should be moving heaven and earth to answer it,” he said at the time. “And I don’t think it’ll likely end up being the vaccines, but I don’t know that for a fact. So it should be part of the scientific conversation as a hypothesis that looks at—because we’re asking parents to vaccinate their children with…several vaccines; many vaccines…Each of them could have a different combination of effects.”

He also said he thought that it was “also reasonable to ask questions about the particulars of the vaccines that are on the schedule one at a time,” he added. “I don’t see how, in this post-COVID era, you can just simply say ‘trust the experts.’”

Since Bhattacharya has been NIH director, HHS has slashed mRNA vaccine technology research. In August 2025, the day after a gunman who believed he was injured by the COVID vaccines fired multiple rounds into buildings on the CDC’s campus, he appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, which has trafficked in conspiracy theories and misinformation, to declare that the lifesaving mRNA vaccine platform was “no longer viable.”

“It’s not a surprise that measles is spreading uncontrollably today, and not only can we expect this to continue in 2026, it will take decades to begin to repair the damage he has done,” Howard said. “If we have another pandemic, heaven forbid, we’ll be on our own.”

This piece has been updated from its original email version.

Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a press release praising the American Society of Plastic Surgeons for being the first major medical organization in the country to come out against gender-affirming surgeries for anyone under the age of 19.

“HHS Leaders Commend the American Society of Plastic Surgeons for Disavowing Pediatric Sex-Rejecting Procedures,” the release read, employing terminology absent from the ASPS position statement.

HHS has been referring to gender-affirming care for transgender and non-binary Americans as “sex-rejecting procedures” since November. The term has appeared in at least three separate press releases from the department, including the announcement of its final 410-page peer-reviewed report on gender dysphoria. ASPS relied on the report to inform its position on gender-affirming surgeries—though multiple reviewers criticized it as unscientific and political.

The term has no basis in medical or clinical practice. It originates instead from a conservative Catholic group called the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), which has been advocating for its usage for nearly a year, including through a direct appeal to HHS.

In a statement provided to Important Context, the group said it was pleased to see its language used in official HHS briefings.

“Public policy needs to be grounded in reality, not ideology,” the statement read. “We are very pleased that the Department of Health and Human Services has adopted our language, which accurately describes the procedures in question.”

Over the last year, the department has moved to curtail access to gender-affirming care by transgender and non-binary Americans and slashed related research. Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. has claimed that he is restoring “gold-standard” and “evidence-based” science. But HHS’s adoption of terminology from the Christian Right underscores the extent to which ideology dictates policy under the Trump administration.

Founded in 1976, EPPC has a stated goal of promoting Judeo-Christian values in law, culture, and politics. The group was formed as a sort of alliance between ultraconservative Christians and Jews to advance religiously motivated social policies, which often target the LGBTQIA+ community. It previously published the non-peer-reviewed, religious journal The New Atlantis, and was identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as part of an anti-LGBTQIA+ pseudoscience network.

EPPC was on the advisory board of Project 2025—the policy roadmap crafted by the far-right Heritage Foundation that appears to be guiding the Trump administration. In May 2025, President Trump appointed EPPC president Ryan Anderson, previously a Heritage fellow, to his Religious Liberty Commission.

The group’s former president, legal activist Edward Whelan, came under fire for his defense of Brett Kavanaugh amid sexual assault allegations in which he suggested a case of mistaken identity.

EPPC’s board of directors includes names like Robert George, a Princeton professor and leading voice of the Christian right, as well as right-wing legal activist Leonard Leo. Leo’s The 85 Fund funneled $5.3 million to EPPC between 2020 and 2024, according to federal tax filings. Other major right-wing donors include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which gave $1.8 million between 2019 and 2024, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which gave nearly $1.9 million over the same period.

EPPC’s attempt to rebrand gender-affirming care goes back to last April. In a public comment submitted that month to Kennedy in support of an HHS proposal to eliminate “sex-trait modification” from the Affordable Care Act’s list of essential health benefits, the group urged HHS to use its term.

“We suggest that HHS adopt the term ‘sex-rejecting procedures’ to avoid several significant problems inherent with the term ‘sex-trait modifications,’ which we outline below,” the comment read.

The following month, EPPC published a report on why “gender-affirming care” and “gender-affirming treatment” ought to be replaced with its preferred term. The group claimed that the medically accepted terms were “biased in favor of gender ideology.”

In its statement, EPPC credited the authors of this report for HHS’ adoption of its language, “It is a testament to the quality of Rachel Morrison’s, Eric Kniffin’s, and Mary Hasson’s work that a growing number of officials, experts, and organizations are putting biological truth first when considering how best to respond to people who express discomfort with their sex.”

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“Sex-rejecting procedures” is not the only anti-trans Christian Right term HHS has adopted. The department also uses “gender ideology” to refer to the recognition of transgender existence—a phrase that traces back to conservatives in the Catholic Church in the 1990s.

The medical consensus recognizes transgender and non-binary identities as legitimate. The American Medical Association, which this week followed ASPS in walking back support for gender-affirming surgery for minors, has previously noted that “Empirical evidence has demonstrated that trans and non-binary gender identities are normal variations of human identity and expression.”

EPPC’s attempt to stigmatize transgender medical care is part of a larger right-wing campaign targeting transgender people. Last month, several genocide scholars warned that escalating right-wing efforts to marginalize transgender people—both legally and rhetorically, including actions by the Trump administration—meet the criteria of genocidal processes.

The transgender population already has a higher rate of suicidality than the general population and there is evidence suggesting anti-trans policies make the problem worse.

While “sex-rejecting procedures” is a new term, the idea that transgender individuals are either rejecting or denying their biological sex goes back years. A 2016 Heritage Foundation commentary argued that “many [people] have strong grounds to hold that one’s sex is an immutable characteristic that should be respected, not rejected or treated as a disease.”

In his January 2023 testimony before the Montana Senate Judiciary Committee, Jay Richards, today the vice president of social and domestic policy at Heritage and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, declared that “gender affirming is in fact sex-denying.”

EPPC’s May 2025 report advocating for the use of “sex-rejecting procedures” argued that “sex denial” was imprecise, as "those who pursue a ’gender transition’ might not ‘deny’ their biology; indeed, the term ‘transgender’ itself concedes that the person’s asserted identity conflicts with the person’s sex.”

Correction 2/10/26: A previous version of this article said that EPPC currently publishes The New Atlantis. The journal has been independent since December 2017.

The National Institutes of Health Director stopped short of saying that vaccines do not cause autism during his appearance before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Tuesday.

Jay Bhattacharya, known for casting doubt on public health measures to control COVID-19, appeared before the committee to testify about his agency’s efforts to “modernize” and restore trust in science. He said public confidence had tumbled in recent years.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) asked the official if he believed that having a Health and Human Services secretary—Robert Kennedy Jr.—who promoted the discredited claim that vaccines cause autism negatively affected public trust in science.

Bhattacharya deflected, citing research suggesting the decline in trust began before Kennedy’s tenure. Sanders pressed, asking directly if vaccines cause autism. Bhattacharya replied, “I do not believe that the measles vaccine causes autism.”

When Sanders repeated his question—“Do vaccines cause autism?”—Bhattacharya responded, “I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism.”

The NIH director later clarified to Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) that “When you’re studying anything like this, you can’t just say vaccines. You have to say vaccine-by-vaccine.” He claimed that on the autism question, some vaccines were “less well studied” than measles shots.

The idea that vaccines are linked to autism originated with a fraudulent 1998 paper by disgraced researcher Andrew Wakefield, which was published in The Lancet. Although the paper has long since been discredited and retracted, anti-vaxxers like Kennedy have continued to promote the narrative. They suggest that certain ingredients in particular vaccines—or a combination of vaccines—causes the neurodevelopmental disorder.

Bhattacharya has previously expressed his openness to the idea that multiple shots in concert with one another may be linked to autism. During a podcast appearance in September 2024, he suggested more research into the childhood immunization schedule was warranted to rule out vaccines as a trigger.

“I think there is a legitimate increase in autism in the population at large and the question of why—we should be moving heaven and earth to answer it,” he said. “And I don’t think it’ll likely end up being the vaccines, but I don’t know that for a fact. So it should be part of the scientific conversation as a hypothesis that looks at—because we’re asking parents to vaccinate their children with…several vaccines; many vaccines…Each of them could have a different combination of effects.”

Bhattacharya has associated with anti-vaccine activists for years as part of his advocacy against COVID mitigation measures. In November, he accepted an award from the Brownstone Institute, a group with which he was once affiliated, and he spoke at a March 2024 presidential campaign event for Kennedy at which Kennedy’s vice presidential pick was announced.

On Bhattacharya’s watch, the agency has directed $50 million to research to identify the causes of autism, aligning with Kennedy’s priorities.

This piece has been updated from its original email version.

On Saturday, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital. The 37-year-old had been involved in grassroots efforts to track the immigration crackdown in his city. His was the second such fatal shooting this month.

Footage of the incident shows Pretti holding up a cell phone to record a confrontation with CBP agents outside a donut shop. Within minutes, Pretti is pepper sprayed, restrained on the ground, and struck repeatedly. Amid the struggle, one agent reaches into Pretti’s waistband and removes his legally-carried SIG Sauer P320 pistol from a rear holster. Simultaneously, another agent draws his own weapon and aims it at the disarmed nurse. As the agent with Pretti’s gun runs off, a shot rings out. Seconds later three more are fired in quick succession as Pretti goes limp. The agents continue firing—a total of six more shots—at his still body.

Weeks earlier, Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was fatally shot as she attempted to drive away from agents yelling conflicting orders at her. Trump administration officials have thus far defended the immigration officers, fabricating the events that led to the shootings and painting the victims as terrorists.

Across Minneapolis, residents have responded to the escalating immigration enforcement actions and violence with mass mobilization, forming a decentralized rapid response network to track the movements of the federal agents and keep their communities alerted.

Hours after the Pretti shooting, Important Context spoke with one person involved in those efforts: former Minnesota House candidate Will Stancil, an attorney and housing policy researcher. Stancil had just gotten home from the scene.

Below is transcript of the conversation, which has been edited for clarity and abridged. Paid subscribers can also listen to the audio of the full unabridged two-part interview at the bottom of this piece.

Since this interview was conducted, the Trump administration has reportedly ousted Greg Bovino as Border Patrol commander-at-large and is taking him out of the state and sending in Border Czar Tom Homan.

Transcript

Bragman: Will, I want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I wish it were under better circumstances, but, you know, I’m glad, I’m glad to talk to you anyway.

Stancil: Yeah, just for context, I got back from, you know, the shooting of Alex Pretti was this morning, and so I have literally got back from—yeah, I kind of raced out there, and I’ve been out there since, you know, pretty quickly after it happened, and I just got back, literally four minutes ago. So I still have a lot of tear gas on my clothes, and I’m, like, dealing with some unprocessed trauma right now. So really, a great interview subject, I think.

Bragman: Yeah, let’s start there. That’s the latest grisly update.

Stancil: So for context here, I’ve been doing this rapid response, you know, community watch thing. This happened within my hyper local—is what we call it—rapid response area. So this appeared to be someone who was doing essentially the exact same thing I had been doing—at least that’s my best information. There’s a very good chance I know his pseudonym. We all work pseudonymously, mostly. So while I know his real name, I’m not 100% sure what his name was. There’s a couple people I suspect that might be, both of whom I like quite a lot. And so I’ve been trying to figure out who he was. There’s one guy in particular that I was just telling my friend yesterday. He’s, like, my favorite guy out there. He’s out there all the time and…very good at this. And I’m a little scared it might have been him, but I don’t know. I met him one time, but it was sort of a drive by where he introduced himself, and we kind of did a little wave.

And so it may not be him. I don’t know for sure who it was.

Bragman: Can you tell me a little bit more about these operations to track ICE and keep tabs on what they’re doing?

Stancil: So basically, what Minneapolis has done in response to ICE is essentially organize into neighborhood groups. People get a little upset when you describe it, but it’s all in the press anyway, and I also don’t think the secrecy is all that helpful. ICE obviously knows what we’re doing. So what we do is we organize into neighborhood groups. And it’s all on signal. You join a signal chat for your neighborhood. There’s kind of nested Signals all the way up to the top. But most of it happens locally. At any given time, you’ll have 500 to 1000 people in the neighborhood group, which is—for a neighborhood of probably 30,000 people—pretty good.

So you have people watching; you have people foot patrolling with whistles; and then you have people who are doing the commute—it’s called commuting, which is when you drive around in a car and you basically look for vehicles that appear to be ICE vehicles. We have people serving as dispatch and plate checkers. We have open-source directories of known ICE plates, and so when you see something suspicious, one thing you do is you call it in—the plate—and see if it’s confirmed ICE. I mean, a lot of times though, we don’t have the plate or we’re not sure, so and you’re trying to scope out the car, usually it’s like, at least fairly obvious if we should be suspicious. And sometimes it’s completely obvious--they’re in uniform or they’re wearing masks, that’s pretty often.

I mean, a lot of times though, we don’t have the plate or we’re not sure, so and you’re trying to scope out the car, usually it’s like, at least fairly obvious if we should be suspicious. And sometimes it’s completely obvious—they’re in uniform or they’re wearing masks, that’s pretty often. And once you know that it’s ICE, we try and keep eyes on them. We get some observers on them. The car commuters will typically tell them, as long as they’re in the neighborhood, and really, as long as they’re in the city—and they work pretty hard to get out. They do not like being watched, and so they work pretty hard to get out of our site. And so you end up these...kind of long, slow car chases, which they often end by egregiously running a red light or something, which, [would] be high risk for us to do.

Bragman: We’ve seen videos of ICE agents threatening people for doing this activity.

Stancil: It infuriates them. They hate it. They really can’t stand it. Clearly they’re putting a lot of resources into not being detected. I mean, part of it is because of the nature of their nominal immigration enforcement operation here. They will pull up on the intersection or alley or somewhere, and just jump out and grab someone, stuff them in a van. Sort of secret police style. There’s no attempt to talk to the person, or gather information. They’re not talking to bystanders. They’re certainly sticking around afterwards. The van goes racing off. It’s very difficult for them to do this if there’s many people in the street watching them.

And so…if you’re following a car, they know that if they get it out of the car, an alert will immediately go up, and everyone within, you know, many blocks will race that way. And so it has been a major impediment, I think, to their operations because of how they’ve chosen to conduct their operations. They’re not acting like traditional law enforcement here in any way, and because of that, they really can’t abide the kind of citizen observation that traditional law enforcement sees as just part of the job.

Bragman: Have we ever seen anything like this?

Stancil: I mean, I haven’t seen anything like this. I don’t know. I know that these tactics were largely developed in Chicago. The initial training I received was from people who had organized in Chicago. With that said, the scale of our ice deployment—the scale for population is 25 times greater than Chicago’s was. And the aggressiveness of the tactics—I’ve gotten to a point where I’m getting tear gassed every other day. Very often stuff blows up. Because what will happen is that ICE will—if they get out of cars, the neighborhood will flock there. There’ll be a standoff where...the neighbors are whistling and shouting and then ICE has a standoff, and they all kind of load into a convoy of cars, and then as they leave, they will toss a bunch of tear gas out the back, basically. So it’s become a regular thing.

Also, many times they don’t appear to be even doing anything immigration related. The other day, Greg Bovino was here, and so I ended up tailing his big convoy like three times. He was just rolling from gas station to gas station. He parked all his cars in the gas station behind the pumps. They wouldn’t get gas, they wouldn’t buy anything, they wouldn’t go use the bathroom. And he’d get out, he’d have a little group of ICE guys around him, or Border Patrol, in his case, I guess. They’re heavily armed--like, look like they’re equipped for Fallujah, and all masked, obviously, everyone’s always masked. And he would just sort of strut, you know, stroll into the crowd or the street, and he would literally pose. He always had like, three or four photographers with him. And he would pose for the photographers as he sort of did this thousand-yard stare at his conquered territory. It was very strange.

I mean, it was funny: I wasn’t even really particularly trying to follow him. It was just as I was doing ICE Watch. I just kept running into this convoy at a different gas station. At one point, I did follow him for about 40 minutes, and he went through a residential neighborhood, and they stopped in front of a random house for like, half an hour. No one ever got out of the car, but they had some photographers run up and take pictures and stuff. So it may have been some sort of photo-op thing. They largely appear to be doing this to intimidate, to incite. Some people are being abducted, and it’s terrible, but you know, if you were here to do immigration enforcement, the way they’re doing it is financially, and logistically the worst possible way you could do it.

Bragman: You think the ultimate aim here is just intimidation?

Stancil: For some reason, they want to target Minnesota. And I think the prevailing theory that I’ve heard—I mean, there’s three things. First, Trump hates us because we don’t vote for him, and Tim Walz ran against him. Second, they hate Somalis. Somalis have become their minority of choice. They, you know, it’s they’re Black, they’re Muslim, they’re immigrants—so it’s like, the trifecta for Maga. And then finally, I think the thing is, they think about us as Minnesota from 2020. They think we’re on the edge of rioting. And I think that they have been looking.

Basically, if you look at their history over the last few months, what they’ve been doing is taking increasingly large ICE deployments to increasingly small cities, seeming to try and kick up some civil unrest. [Protesters] burned out a car or something in LA, but there wasn’t really success there, so they went to Chicago. And in Chicago, there weren’t mass riots. And so now they’re coming here with a force that’s just vastly larger. I mean, I think I heard it was 10 times larger than the one they brought to Chicago at this point...And, you know, I think the idea is like, ‘Well, of course, Minnesota riot that you know; everyone knows, from 2020, that Minnesota riots.’ And after that, I don’t know what their plan is exactly, but I suspect it’s: invoke the Insurrection Act, bring in the military, essentially declare martial law—these sort of really sweeping authoritarian plans that Stephen Miller appears to practice rehearsing in front of the mirror every night.

Bragman: What powers would Trump have if he invoked the Insurrection Act?

Stancil: Not really any. The reality is that what he can actually do is use it to support local law enforcement. But they have made it into this almost fetish object for MAGA, where once he invokes the Insurrection Act, then he can just roll tanks over liberals. I think Stephen Miller genuinely dreams of himself as this kind of right-wing authoritarian Goebbels figure, and he’s looking for an excuse to do roundups and put people in camps, and probably have us killed. I mean, honestly, I think he fantasizes about this. I think he has an almost sexual attachment to this idea. You can see it every time something happens, and he’s like, ‘We will crush these little liberal…‘ and you can tell that he’s practiced his speeches entire life.

Yeah, with the jaw-jutting and the—

Stancil: It’s like the comic book version of a fascist. One of the things I think you see with the Trump administration is that—you know, I truly believe these men are fascists, but they’re not fascists in the sense that the old style fascists were developing what fascism meant. They are looking back at those people and seeing them as sort of historical, anti-heroes—protagonists of history—and they are trying to play the role. So that’s why, even after all this, American 2025 is nothing like Germany in 1933. But they’re in a rush to get to the end. They want to get to that stage because that is what they fantasize about. And I really think that they think Minnesota can be their turning point where they can do it.

Bragman: There’s something distinctly American about this iteration of fascism, right? Like, yes, there’s the German model, but there’s plenty of American history that we can look back on to say, like, ‘Oh, they’re clearly drawing from that.’ There’s sort of the sundown town kind of thing going on, where they’re where they’re clearly targeting people of color.

Stancil: I mean, I genuinely think that their inspiration is European fascism. But I do absolutely agree that the form it has taken is this sort of American nativism and racism. I mean, I think it’s interesting when you watch—I’ve had at this point, a front row seat. I was a lead pursuit car between two convoys that abducted people, and then I showed up right before another big abduction happened. What appears to be happening is that they are just indiscriminately targeting people of color. The two that I was the first car there, they just jumped out and grabbed a pedestrian who happened not to be white. I don’t how—I can’t think of any possible way they could’ve known who they were grabbing. They didn’t have a conversation. They didn’t verify their identity as far as anyone could tell. I had a journalist with me and he saw the same thing. It was just literally you’re a non-white person on the street, ICE is hunting you.

And what is happening here in Minnesota as a result is that basically the entire non-white population is afraid to go outside. It’s awful. Our schools are about 50 percent absenteeism. Sometimes it’s 70 percent. Our school system is basically in the COVID state of being mostly empty, kind of collapsing our schools. But we don’t have any federal support this time. There’s no, there’s no resources for remote learning or anything like that. So they’re just trying to make it work. They’ll assign, like, one third-grade teacher to remote learning, and the other one gets all the students. So they both end up in these totally untenable situations where they have massive classes and stuff.

The other thing is people won’t go out to get food. We have the rapid response networks, which is what everyone wants to talk about, but there’s also this huge network of neighbors assisting each other. You can call them mutual aid or whatever, where basically you’re doing food deliveries to many, many, many families that are afraid to go out and get food—just so they can stay alive. Many of our businesses lock their doors all day. You have to ring a bell or knock or maybe a doorman to watch the door and make sure it’s not ICE.

We try and put observers out at particularly vulnerable businesses—like immigrant owned businesses or businesses that employ a lot of immigrants—for shift change and also at close and open. You know, six in the morning, seven the morning. Sometimes, if it’s like a bakery, we’ll need a bunch of people there watching. Two in the morning sometimes, if it’s a restaurant or a bar...and then the big shift changes, we try and have people there so that there’s observers ready if ICE decides to grab someone who’s on their way in and out. So the entire city’s in this sort of state of siege.

Bragman: How significant is the ICE presence? Like, how many agents are there in Minneapolis and throughout the state? I mean, is this, like, every corner you’re gonna find agents?

Stancil: No, it’s not every corner. It’s 3000 agents. So for comparison, our local police force is 600 officers. So it vastly outnumbers the police. They are not always concentrated in Minneapolis. There have been a couple of times where I thought they were potentially moving out of Minneapolis—recent days have shown me I was wrong--where they seem to depart for the suburbs or St. Paul or outstate. You’ll hear about them in Wilmar, Minnesota, which is a little town. We have many diverse suburbs, and they’d be out there taking people. But the primary focus I think, has been Minneapolis.

They tend to move as a wave. They don’t like to send in, like, one or two cars at a time. So, as a patroller, you will be out there, and you’ll have a day where you don’t see a single ICE car. You’ll see one that’s confirmed. And then, the next day, or maybe even three hours later, suddenly they all arrive in force. And when that happens, it’ll be a situation where, if you sit on a major intersection for 15 minutes, you’ll probably see one. But they tend to drive unmarked cars, kind of what you think—dark menacing SUVs, but unmarked, tinted windows. Often plates are obscured or taken off. Sometimes the front windows are very tinted, so you can’t even tell it’s them there.

They kind of lurk around the neighborhood like secret police. But when they’re in the neighborhood, when this is a hub, when this is the focus, you will find them. You know, as a New York Times article says, paranoid Minnesotans “see ICE around every corner,” and it’s like almost literally around every corner. They like to lurk in the alleys—we have alleys between our city blocks, which is how our neighborhoods [are] designed; how Minneapolis is designed. Very, very common for them to lurk in the alleys, just idle in the alleys. We have to check the alleys, and they’ll go racing out when you notice them. They like to lurk in front of businesses.

I think today, if I remember correctly, it was chaotic this morning, this whole incident where someone was killed—was really murdered, executed—started because there was an ICE car that was lurking in front of this particular donut shop. It was just sitting there, I think.

And sometimes, when they lurk, you see them and they race off. But then sometimes, a bunch more cars will suddenly show up and people come out. And it seems like this time maybe the second thing happened—some sort of confrontation happened, where I believe that they shoved an observer, and [Pretti] may have gone up to separate them, and then they start beating him, pistol whipping him, push him to the ground, and shot him, I think, five times. I don’t know exactly how many shots.

Bragman: How ubiquitous is the violence then? Do you have lulls or is it a pretty high baseline of violence from ICE?

Stancil: Yes, it is. You know, obviously if they’re just not in the neighborhood at all, you’re not going to see anything. I mean,I don’t think there’s been a day since they’ve gotten here where they haven’t deployed tear gas somewhere.

Days where things are really popping off…you essentially go from one massive incident with tear gas and pepper spray and rubber bullets to the next. Because they will pull up, a crowd will gather, people start throwing ice and snow, shouting. The observers are trained to de-escalate, although it’s tough. But obviously just random people in the street are very, very angry. Anger here is pretty much universal, and so things will kick off and they’ll start spraying pepper balls at people; almost always will drop tear gas before they leave. Maybe lots of it.

It’s become very common for them—and I have many, many videos of them just directly pepper spraying people right in the face. You know, someone gets a little too mouthy with them, a little too aggressive, and they will just shoot that person like, from six inches away, right in the eyes. And I’ve seen that personally, like many times.

I own several gas masks now. It’s funny because Bondi was on TV, I saw earlier on social media, saying, ‘These guys are so organized. They’re terrorists. They have all gas masks. Who has a gas mask?’ And it’s like, yeah, the reason I got gas masks is, you guys tear gas me, like, two times in 36 hours, after which I thought, ‘that’s awful, I don’t want to do that again,’ and I went out and bought a gas mask. And now I’ve used it many times. I mean, I’m covered with tear gas right now. I can smell it on my clothes from earlier today…Minneapolis winter gear is now: coat, gloves, hat, gas mask.

Bragman: So you mentioned on BlueSky that ICE is targeting children, and that it’s something that everybody knows. And you got into it a little bit on the site, but can you explain why you think that is?

Stancil: There’s been a noticeable uptick in them targeting very small children. One thing they’re also doing a lot is hanging around schools. They’ll circle the school parking lot around pick-up or drop-off time—have a car full of masked men.

I just want to emphasize that even I, when I first heard this, I thought that’s crazy. But it’s like, no, it’s not. They’re doing it. And I think that the reason why is because they are intentionally engaging in the most aggressive; the most horrifying; the most enraging immigration enforcement possible—the absolute, maximalist approach—because their goal here isn’t really to deport people or catch criminals. Their goal here is to incite violence and to enrage us and to terrorize us.

I mean, one of the things that they keep saying is ‘Oh, you know, we’re trying to find sex traffickers.’ It’s like, you’re deporting five year olds. I watched them abduct two, sobbing, sixteen-year-old young girls who I believe were citizens.

The other thing I’d say about Minnesota is that people don’t realize this, because you hear a lot about our Somali population, or Hmong population, the Somali population is almost entirely citizens. Most Somalis in Minnesota are citizens. Almost everyone else is a lawful permanent resident. But I’m talking like 85% plus are citizens. The Hmong population is even more. I think the population is probably 95% plus citizens. This is the immigrant population that’s been here for like, three generations at this point. The Somali one has been there about one and a half. These are not populations with high numbers of undocumented immigrants at all.

And so they are sort of relying on a sense that, ‘Well, you have Somalis in America—they can’t possibly be American citizens,’ but they are. There’s very few people here you can lawfully deport. And so it doesn’t make any sense as a place you would go to if that’s what you’re looking to do. The other thing they’ve said—the initial excuse was about a fraud in the Somali community and daycares. You know, there’s viral videos about Somali daycares being fraudulent. And I’m going to say there is some fraud in immigrant communities the same way that you have any sort of small, close knit immigrant population, it’s a good environment for small scale fraud and crime. This is sort of the storied history of Italians in America. But it’s not like a huge social problem here in Minnesota. Minnesotans don’t feel broadly threatened by Somalis. They’re part of our communities, their great neighbors. There’s been a couple major frauds. But like, by and large, these are people who are extremely entrepreneurial; extremely friendly neighbors—peaceful, quiet, friendly.

Also, if you’re here to investigate fraud, you didn’t bring accountants, you didn’t bring an auditor. I don’t think there’s a guy in the back of the blacked Ford Expedition, scrolling through a spreadsheet of revenues. It’s literally just an army full of poorly trained dudes with machine guns. Every reason they have given for this is just absurd. I mean, it’s absurd, and no one here believes it. Like, no one believes it. There’s no debate here. One of the things that I really would like to also emphasize—I know I’m just kind of doing my own interview at this point, going off…

Bragman: No, it’s fine. I signed up for this.

Stancil: Yeah, you can add any questions later to make it like, you know, I give it to you prompt off. But one of the things I’d like to emphasize about this is the uniformity of the opposition here in Minneapolis. Like every business, every street post, every conversation here is about ICE, ICE, ICE, and it’s just gotten worse, and worse, and worse. I wasn’t remotely surprised that we got 30,000 people or whatever at the protest yesterday, despite it being negative 20, because the entire city is opposed to ICE right now.

Bragman: I’ve heard this, that it’s not just progressives and liberals—it’s conservatives, it’s everybody.

Stancil: It’s everybody. I mean, it’s like an invading force. Outside, they’re telling all these lies—you know, agitators, protesters, fraud, ‘we’re here taking sex traffickers.’ But on the ground, that’s not what we’re seeing. And no one thinks that. They’re lying, and everyone here knows they’re lying. No one here is confused about what they’re doing. You can’t see this for one second and think, ‘Oh yeah, they’re just taking away a violent sex trafficker.’ They’re harassing our neighbors. They’re stalking through our alleys. They’re lurking around our schools. And every once in a while, they’ll shoot someone dead for no reason. It’s unbelievable to hear the idea that there’s some sort of valid government purpose behind any of this. We are being targeted, and everyone knows we’re being targeted.

Bragman: So do you think this is a test for the rest of the country? Like if they’re successful here, then they’ll export this model?

Stancil: Yes, I absolutely do. I think that they think if they can knock one domino over—you know, break us—then they will move on and then just go one by one down the list. And so, you know, I really think that this is why we have to stop them here. I keep saying on social media, this will be their Gettysburg.

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This piece has been updated from its original email version.

Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy group founded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., has filed a racketeering lawsuit against the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The suit alleges that the 67,000-member AAP—the nation’s largest pediatric medical trade group—engaged in a conspiracy to mislead the public about the safety of the childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule while taking donations from vaccine manufacturers for its charitable efforts. The case comes as the AAP and other medical organizations are embroiled in their own federal court lawsuit against Kennedy and HHS over changing vaccine recommendations.

In an amended complaint filed Monday, the AAP alleges that the recent updates to the U.S. childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule were made “without following the evidentiary-driven, and legally required processes for issuing recommended vaccine schedules in the United States.”

Those changes include the CDC’s decision earlier this month to end its universal recommendations for meningitis, RSV, hepatitis A, rotavirus, and flu vaccines as well as its December move to drop the universal hepatitis B vaccine recommendation. The latter followed advice from the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which Kennedy reshaped last year, replacing the original 12 members with handpicked medical contrarians and figures known for casting doubt on vaccines.

The AAP is seeking to block the schedule changes, invalidate ACIP on the grounds that its new members were unlawfully appointed, and overturn its previous recommendations. The new lawsuit from CHD frames these efforts as attempts by AAP to derail Kennedy’s “reform” of the childhood immunization schedule.

“When the Department of Health and Human Services has attempted reform, AAP leads the opposition: it sued to restore the childhood COVID-19 vaccine recommendation after the CDC removed it and issued inflated statistics about the effects of the December 2025 ACIP hepatitis B decision,” the complaint reads. “AAP and its enterprise associates’ lawsuit to derail the CDC’s January 5, 2026 announcement bringing its vaccine schedule more in line with other industrialized countries (and U.S. states) is the latest evidence of its racketeering activities.”

According to CHD, which has been identified as a major source of online vaccine misinformation, the cumulative safety of the childhood immunization schedule has never been tested—a common anti-vax talking point that misunderstands how vaccines are tested and approved in the U.S.—and the AAP is to blame.

The group takes specific aim at a 2002 article in AAP’s peer-reviewed journal Pediatrics by renowned vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit, evaluating the safety of administering multiple immunizations to children.

The complaint calls the article the “foundational fraud” of the racketeering enterprise on the grounds that it “contained theoretical and modeling extrapolations” and has been widely distributed by the trade association—supposedly to silence dissent and prevent further research.

CHD alleges that the AAP, relying on Offit’s work, has blocked efforts to study the cumulative schedule. Experts have pointed out that denying children vaccines and potentially exposing them to dangerous pathogens is unethical, but the suit argues there are other research models available.

Kennedy’s HHS recently tried to fund a study of hepatitis B vaccines in African infants that was ultimately suspended by Guinea-Bissau amid outcry from scientists over the ethics of the research.

The CHD lawsuit claims that “independent researchers worldwide have conducted…comparative analyses, consistently finding superior health outcomes in unvaccinated children.” As proof, it cites papers by former cardiologist Peter McCullough, researcher Anthony Mawson, and CHD chief scientific officer Brian Hooker. Each has authored vaccine-related research that was later retracted, according to Retraction Watch.

The lawsuit also repeats the long-discredited, fraudulent narrative that vaccines cause autism and cites as evidence the CDC’s vaccine information page, which was updated in November on Kennedy’s watch. That page, which now endorses the debunked claim, relies on a paper by one of CHD’s co-plaintiffs: Dr. Paul Thomas, whose positions on vaccines lost him his medical licenses.

The CHD lawsuit ultimately alleges that AAP works to protect the profits of major pharmaceutical companies that have donated to its charitable work. In a statement, CHD president Mary Holland called the trade association “a front operation in a racketeering scheme involving Big Pharma, Big Medicine and Big Media, ready at every turn to put profits above children’s health” and said “It’s time to face facts and see what the AAP is really about.”

Dorit Reiss, a professor at UC Law San Francisco and leading expert in vaccine law, told Important Context that CHD “using RICO to target AAP’s vaccine policy is a pretty blatant misuse.”

“The lawsuit makes it clear that Children’s Health Defense complaint is that they do not agree with AAP’s position on vaccines,” Reiss explained. “But that’s not racketeering activity.”

Reiss said that the plaintiffs’ injury claims bore a “very weak connection to anything AAP does,” highlighting the cases of Dr. Thomas and Dr. Kenneth Stoller, a California physician who lost his license for writing unnecessary vaccine exemptions. She noted that the issue the doctors faced in their disciplinary actions was not AAP but rather “the schedule recommended at the time by ACIP.”

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Kennedy resigned from CHD in December 2024, anticipating his HHS role. During his Senate confirmation hearings, the longtime anti-vaccine activist shared a tense exchange with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who pressed him to disavow anti-vax merchandise on the CHD website and to call on the organization to stop selling it. In response, Kennedy claimed he had “no power over that organization, I’m not part of it, I resigned from the board.”

Yet during Kennedy’s tenure as HHS secretary, CHD has come to his aid on several notable occasions. The suit is the latest example, but last year, when measles outbreaks rocked Texas, killing two unvaccinated children, the group began running interference by casting doubt on the causes of death.

In March, after Kennedy came under fire for a CHD-launched anti-vax web page resembling the official CDC vaccine information page, the group removed it following the secretary’s request. Additionally, Important Context reported, the group hosted Cheryl Hines as a guest of honor at its annual conference’s Champion Dinner this November.

CHD did not respond to our request for comment.

This week, Daily Show host Jon Stewart heaped praise on an attorney who spent years opposing COVID-19 mitigation efforts and promoting vaccine skepticism.

“Jenin, I wanted to talk to you because we are in a moment where consistent courage seems in short supply,” Stewart told guest Jenin Younes, the national director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “You’re a civil rights attorney who has been canceled by both the right and the left, which means you must be doing something right.”

Younes was on the program to discuss the state of civil liberties in Donald Trump’s America, and Stewart thanked her for her principles and for trying to protect vulnerable people.

What he did not mention was her long record of working with right-wing groups and close associates of Donald Trump, challenging public health measures, promoting unproven scientific claims, and pursuing legal action against Democratic officials.

Younes has been at her current job since September. Her previous title was litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a right-wing lawfare group known for challenging federal regulatory authority. There, she fought COVID mitigation policies, including a vaccine mandate at Michigan State University and testing and mask requirements for unvaccinated employees at George Mason University.

Her highest-profile cases, however, challenged government efforts to combat pandemic misinformation.

In Missouri v. Biden (later Murthy v. Missouri), Younes represented a group of private plaintiffs alleging that Biden administration officials had unconstitutionally coerced social media companies into suppressing content that challenged government narratives on COVID and other issues.

Younes’ clients included two future Trump HHS officials: Dr. Martin Kulldorff, now the chief science officer in the department’s planning and evaluation office, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the current National Institutes of Health director.

The case reached the Supreme Court, concerning legal experts. The Brennan Center for Justice filed an amicus brief urging the justices “not to adopt a rule that prevents or chills communications between social media companies and local, state, and federal government officials.” The court found that the plaintiffs lacked standing to pursue their claims.

Younes tried again in 2023, bringing a similar suit on behalf of people allegedly injured by COVID vaccines. The complaint named Biden officials as well as a former Stanford disinformation researcher, Renee DiResta, alleging that she participated in the administration’s censorship conspiracy. A magistrate judge in that case has recommended that defendants’ motions to dismiss be granted.

That year, Younes briefly worked for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and his congressional subcommittee on the “weaponization of government,” which later released a report titled, “The Censorship-Industrial Complex: How Top Biden White House Officials Coerced Big Tech to Censor Americans, True Information, and Critics of the Biden Administration.”

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Younes built her audience and right-wing alliances through the pandemic, posting as @leftylockdowns1 on Twitter. She presented herself as a disillusioned liberal who agreed with Republican calls to reopen the country. In a September 2020 article for the libertarian think tank American Institute for Economic Research, Younes wrote that lockdowns “cause more death than the coronavirus itself.”

The virus has killed over 1.2 million Americans.

Younes has also suggested that COVID emerged from a Chinese laboratory—a narrative favored by Trump but disputed by many experts. She claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and frequent right-wing target, worked to cover up the leak because of his “culpability in gain-of-function research.” In January 2022, she tweeted that if she lived to see “St. Fauci…held accountable for what he’s done to Americans, that will be enough for me.”

Available evidence points to natural origins as a World Health Organization scientific advisory group noted last June.

Amid the Biden administration’s vaccine rollout, Younes promoted doubt. She called mRNA shots “experimental” and claimed boosters offered “no benefit” to young adults while implying a blood clot risk. In a piece for the right-wing Brownstone Institute, she suggested they could damage the immune system long-term.

She later supported Robert Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services Secretary, rejecting the notion he was “anti-vaccine.”

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During her Daily Show appearance, which largely focused on ICE, Younes again said the Biden administration violated American freedoms.

“I’m not actually super hopeful because whoever wins, we continue to see a denigration of our civil liberties,” she said about the midterms. “This administration is very blatant, but the one that came before was kinda bad too that’s why I was suing them all the time.”

The Daily Show segment sparked pushback. “I wonder if Jenin Younes had told Stewart about how she did interrogations for Jim Jordan’s Weaponization committee of academics accused of being part of a ‘censorship industrial complex’ that never existed,” DiResta wrote on BlueSky.

Stewart is no stranger to public health controversy. In 2005, he interviewed Kennedy, praising him for raising awareness about vaccines and autism. The paper behind the supposed connection had already been discredited. Stewart has since done segments criticizing anti-vaxxers, but he endorsed the COVID lab leak narrative and recently joked about people masking in public for their health.

This piece has been updated from its original email version.

Genocide scholars are sounding the alarm over what they describe as escalating attacks targeting transgender, nonbinary, and intersex Americans in the United States.

Experts, including two former presidents of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), warn that the nation may already be in the early stages of committing genocide.

“I am concerned about genocide against trans people in the United States in the near future,” said Dr. Henry Theriault, who served as IAGS president from 2017 to 2021.

Under international law, genocide refers to acts aimed at destroying, in whole or in part, religious, national, ethnic, or racial groups. But experts Important Context spoke with argued that these legal categories may be too narrow—or too narrowly interpreted—today.

Theriault said that increasingly, attacks are aimed at groups that are socially defined rather than those explicitly covered by the UN Convention. Haley Brown, a former genocide researcher focused on attacks on transgender people, said “there’s very little scholarship on this topic at all.”

Dr. Gregory Stanton, a former IAGS president who serves now as founder and president of the group Genocide Watch, said the attacks on transgender and nonbinary people in the U.S. represent a “genocidal” attempt “to destroy a gender group.”

Stanton noted that Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” in the 1940s, also understood it to have a broader definition beyond religious, national, ethnic, and racial contexts.

“His view was that political groups, cultural groups, social groups, economic groups…should all be included in the definition of genocide,” Stanton said, adding, “I think he also would have included gender groups.”

“I think what they’re doing here is they’re trying to destroy a gender group,” he added. “And so I do think it’s genocidal. I think that the objective here is literally, physically to destroy this group.”

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For years, the political right has been ratcheting up eliminationist rhetoric against transgender Americans and dismissing their identities as ideology. At the 2023 CPAC, conservative commentator Michael Knowles called to “eradicate” so-called “transgenderism” from public life.

In its first year, the second Trump administration has quickly moved to marginalize gender-nonconforming Americans. The president issued a number of executive orders aimed at eroding nondiscrimination protections and access to healthcare. The NIH defunded LGBTQIA+-related research amid a larger rollback of so-called “DEI” initiatives.

Republican lawmakers have been on a similar crusade. More than half of all states now restrict youth access to gender-affirming care and transgender participation in youth sports. Twenty states now have explicit regulations on transgender bathroom use.

Transgender existence and gender-affirming care are evidence-based and supported by virtually every major medical organization in the country.

Haley Brown also told Important Context that the bathroom bills effectively give non-state actors tacit approval to commit violence.

“It’s always been about policing,” she said, explaining: “It’s this idea that I am going to create and reinforce my ideal values of society and the state, down to the very physiological characteristics and features of the humans that exist within that state.”

Theriault said he is concerned about “the kinds of legal shifts that are happening and the kind of blatant hatred being expressed by [Trump] and his followers and government leaders—and at the way they’re acting on it.”

“I think we’re already at the point for trans folks, for immigrants, where the damage is being done,” Theriault said. “So it’s not so much ‘will genocide happen?’ as ‘we got to stop it from happening.’”

Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, founder and executive director of the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, said she believes the U.S. is now in the “early-to-mid stages of a genocidal process against trans and nonbinary and intersex people.”

She said Republicans are using trans people to generate fear—particularly surrounding children, family, and their ideal concept of masculinity—which is priming their base for genocide.

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Stanton said the U.S. was undergoing “a hardening of the categories” with people being either male or female—a binary, he noted, that does not exist in nature nor within many other cultures. He called it “totalitarian” and driven by “Nazi ideology,” explaining that the Nazis also held a binary view of men and women and killed many LGBTQIA+ individuals.

Brown pointed out that the conspiracy theory of so-called “cultural Marxism”—that leftists, feminists, Marxists, and LGBTQIA+ people are trying to destroy western civilization—was borrowed directly from the Nazis and their antisemitic claims of “Cultural Bolshevism.”

“The Trump administration and its bases…have identified a set of ‘enemies’ or ‘objectionable people’” and have fomented public prejudice against them “in a way that is escalating toward violence,” Theriault said.

He cautioned that transgender Americans are more vulnerable than other groups due to their population size. Today, they make up roughly one percent of the total U.S. population—a rough equivalent to Jews in 1933 Germany.

Anti-trans incidents and violence have risen over the years, with 2021 the worst year on record for homicides. Reported gender identity hate crimes show an increase from 2020 through 2024, according to FBI data. Transgender Americans are also at an elevated risk for suicide, and a 2024 study from The Trevor Project suggests that anti-trans laws may be worsening the trend.

Von Joeden-Forgey said that the LGBTQIA+ community, “as other very small minority groups, tends to be a kind of canary in the coal mine,” noting that states throughout history “use certain communities as testing grounds” to desensitize their populations to violence.

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“The genocidal process is really about destroying identities, destroying groups through all sorts of means,” she said, explaining that even those that result in mass deaths have “started out with other techniques that are less violent—at the beginning.”

Brown discussed possible coming measures that would accord with such historical patterns like rolling back “laws that prevent people from using certain legal defenses,” like the “Trans panic defense” in murder cases. “The right has always hated hate crime laws,” she said.

Theriault said the U.S. might see policies aimed at making life “intolerable” for transgender Americans to live authentically such that the suicide rate dramatically goes up. “There could be all sorts of things that we would do that are not like what’s happened in the past, but would still be destructive of trans people as a group,” he said.

Whatever lies ahead, von Joegen-Forgey said the situation was “terrifying,” adding, “no one goes to war…on behalf of the victims of genocide.”

“You don’t have a democracy that’s committing genocide against one group,” she warned. “That is not a democracy anymore, once genocide is in the mix. The state in question will commit other mass atrocities.”

—

This article is the first in a multi-part series examining genocidal patterns and historical parallels during the second Trump administration.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article said Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey was the president of the Lemkin Institute. Her title has been corrected to executive director and founder.

UPDATE 1/7/26: The paragraph on anti-trans violence has been updated and expanded for clarity.

This piece has been updated from its original email version.

A prominent free speech organization helped two right-wing dark money nonprofits score a legal win last month against an Ohio school board and its anti-bullying policy protecting transgender and nonbinary students.

In an en banc ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit granted a preliminary injunction to Defending Education (formerly Parents Defending Education). The group, labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as “anti-student-inclusion,” had sued the Olentangy Local School Board of Education in 2023 over its anti-bullying policy prohibiting “discriminatory language” about immutable traits, including gender identity. It argued the policy violated the First Amendment rights of students who wished to misgender their transgender peers.

The court found Defending Education would likely succeed on its claims, reversing a previous denial by the district court, which had been upheld by its own three-judge panel.

Supporting Defending Education was the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a group dedicated to free speech on college campuses. FIRE filed an amicus brief with the Manhattan Institute—a right-wing think tank the SPLC has identified as part of an anti-LGBTQIA+ pseudoscience network—backing the lawsuit and calling for a reversal of the lower court’s injunction ruling.

The Ohio case is not the first time FIRE has sided with opponents of transgender equality. It wrote a letter of concern in 2023 to Long Island University, for example, after the school punished a student group for social media posts critical of transgender women. More recently, FIRE defended the rights of parents to protest the inclusion of transgender student athletes in high school sports.

FIRE has longstanding right-wing ties. A former member of the State Policy Network, it has received support from major conservative funders like the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and groups tied to Charles Koch, the Coors family, and Leonard Leo. Some of its large right-wing funders have also given to Defending Education and Manhattan Institute.

FIRE’s focus on campus speech aligns with right-wing efforts to reshape higher education. The group has collaborated with the far-right Turning Point USA and defended its University of Maryland chapter after the school required additional security for a speaker event in the wake of founder Charlie Kirk’s murder.

The group publishes a rankings list of schools based on their supposed openness to free speech—a project it launched with the research firm College Pulse and right-wing RealClear Education. For the last two years, it has ranked Harvard poorly, citing grievances from mainly conservative students, including one who complained of having “to introduce ourselves by stating pronouns.”

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The FIRE/Manhattan Institute brief treated transgender students’ preferred pronouns as a matter of political debate, arguing that prohibiting intentional misgendering amounted to government-compelled speech.

“Olentangy School District seeks, through a web of interconnected anti-harassment policies, to compel all students to use another student’s chosen pronouns,” it read. “Students are required to do so even if they have religious, moral, or philosophical objections to doing so, as do the student members of plaintiff organization Parents Defending Education.”

The American Medical Association notes that “Empirical evidence has demonstrated that trans and non-binary gender identities are normal variations of human identity and expression.”

The brief’s argument echoed Civil Rights Act opponents like the late Sen. John Tower (R-Texas), who said the law would deny business owners “any freedom to speak or to act on the basis of their religious convictions or their deep-rooted preferences for associating or not associating with certain classifications of people.”

Students do not lose their First Amendment rights in school, but courts allow officials to limit their speech under certain circumstances like harassment. In the landmark case of Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), the Supreme Court held that officials may regulate student speech that is—or is likely to be—substantially disruptive or that “invades the rights of others.” According to FIRE and the Manhattan Institute deliberate misgendering did not inherently meet this standard.

D Dangaran, an assistant law professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and co-chair of the National Trans Bar Association, told Important Context that “the harm experienced by trans people when they are intentionally misgendered runs deeper than the Sixth Circuit acknowledged” and said “the trial court was in a much better position to weigh that harm.”

Research has shown that misgendering is associated with feelings of psychological distress and stigmatization among transgender people—a population with high suicide rates.

Civil rights attorney and Harvard Law professor Alejandra Caraballo compared misgendering to slurs, warning, “Once you make the distinction that one group’s dignity is insufficient to curtail behavior to ensure an orderly classroom, you erode those protections for everyone else.”

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In recent years, transgender Americans have faced escalating political and legal attacks from the right. The Trump administration has been particularly hostile, rescinding federal protections, moving to ban them from military service, and taking steps to restrict access to gender-affirming care, among other actions. According to Trans Legislation Tracker, over 1,000 anti-trans bills were introduced across 49 states this year—124 passed.

FIRE was not the only speech-focused group supporting Defending Education. The American Civil Liberties Union filed an amicus brief arguing that the anti-bullying policy was overly broad but noted that intentional misgendering might “rise to the level of such severe or pervasive harassment that it creates a hostile environment and may be regulable on that basis.” The ACLU also rejected the compelled-speech argument because accommodations existed for students who wished to use different pronouns.

Dangaran told Important Context that the Sixth Circuit’s interpretation of the Tinker standard was “not the only path courts can take” regarding misgendering and anti-trans messages in schools, explaining that in 2024, the First Circuit found that a student wearing a shirt reading “there are only two genders” was disruptive.

“One could say that there’s a split,” they said while cautioning that the means of communication in the two cases “could make a difference.”

Kenneth White, of the law firm Brown White & Osborn, said he thought the Sixth Circuit dissent in the Ohio case made a “very plausible case that allowing students to misgender peers is inherently disruptive in the way that using racial slurs at them would be.”

“But school speech caselaw is a bit of a mess so it’s not an absolute clear call,” he added, noting that disruption is the standard for school speech—not morality, manners, or decency.

On Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. announced new policies to restrict transgender and nonbinary youths’ access to gender-affirming care.

Accompanied by his top lieutenants, including National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Director Dr. Mehmet Oz, Kennedy declared, “Under my leadership, and answering President Trump’s call to action, the federal government will do everything in its power to stop unsafe, irreversible practices that put our children at risk.”

The promised changes include leveraging CMS participation rules to stop hospitals from performing gender-related medical procedures on minors and using the FDA to target companies that market breast binders to children. HHS will also move to reverse a Biden-Era rule that classified gender dysphoria as a disability subject to federal civil rights protections.

According to a press release, the HHS policy changes to prevent what it called “sex-rejecting procedures on minors” were based on a peer-reviewed report claiming such care did not meet “professionally recognized standards.” But Important Context looked into the peer reviews, which are available on the HHS website, and several offer stark criticism and warnings that the document is not a credible basis upon which to set policy.

One of the most authoritative reviews came from the American Psychiatric Association, which wrote that “the Report’s claims fall short of the standard of methodological rigor that should be considered a prerequisite for policy guidance in clinical care.” The APA highlighted a number of serious methodological problems with the report. It noted, for example, that the document failed to “clearly articulate how the studies were selected, what criteria governed their inclusion or exclusion, or how their quality was assessed.”

Most seriously, the APA warned that the report failed to account for confirmation bias. It noted that “There is no indication that key stakeholders—namely, transgender individuals, their families, and clinicians—were consulted or that their perspectives were considered.”

“A comprehensive review of best practices would include input from recipients (both those for whom treatment was beneficial, and those for whom it was not), families, and providers of the treatments under evaluation,” the review read.

The APA further noted that the report failed to “apply any kind of rational scrutiny to potential harms that have been associated with withholding intervention, including higher rates of depression, anxiety, suicidality, and social withdrawal” and relied heavily on the so-called Cass Review “which itself has been criticized by experts for its methodological flaws and biases.”

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A second review, published in the Society of Adolescent Health and Medicine’s Journal of Adolescent Health, was similarly critical. It warned of its “extensive violations of scientific norms, misrepresentations of science, and wanton disregard of the expert standard of care for [transgender] youth” and called it “a dangerous incursion of politics into science and medicine.”

The review noted that because the report had been commissioned by an executive order that described “expert clinical guidelines as ‘junk science’ and uses incredibly incendiary language…the possibility that the findings…were predetermined…must be considered.”

It further noted that “Over 20% of the references in the HHS report are of lay press articles, blogs, or social media posts,” adding “Such citations fall far short of the minimum standard of evidentiary credibility typically expected of a scientific review because they skew toward personal opinion rather than observations supported by peer-reviewed scientific literature.”

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A third review by a team of researchers led by Nic Rider, Ph.D., an associate professor and a licensed psychologist at the University of Minnesota, concluded that the HHS report was “replete with factual errors, distort[ed] current scientific evidence, and defi[ed] expert medical consensus,” warning that it “joins a growing list of White House-endorsed actions that platform harmful practices against [transgender and nonbinary] children and adolescents and their families, as well as the healthcare professionals who support them, with little regard for their civil rights and for the expertise that protects and promotes their well-being.”

The review added that the report reflected the White House’s “politically motivated and biased agenda” and similarly noted that “more than a fifth of its references are from popular media articles, blogs, or social media…compromising the transparency, accountability, and rigor central to scientific best practices.”

The HHS report does have favorable reviews as well. Several of the writers behind those positive appraisals, however, have no publications related to gender-affirming care listed on PubMed, the database of the National Library of Medicine. One individual had even assisted in the crafting of the HHS report.

As STAT News reported last month, some of the report’s original authors had involvement with anti-LGBTQIA+ groups. More than half disclosed receiving payments or honoraria for consultations, speaking engagements, or testimony about “pediatric gender medicine,” including Leon Sapir, a senior fellow at the far-right Manhattan Institute, and Evgenia Abbruzzese, co-founder of the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. The latter was labeled a pseudoscience group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Marty Makary, promoted several conspiracy theories on a recent podcast, including claims about the origins of AIDS, Lyme disease, and a dead raccoon.

Last month, Makary sat down for an interview with right-wing podcaster Patrick Bet-David to discuss a range of topics, from vaccines and autism to Tylenol. During the conversation, Bet-David asked the nation’s top food and drug regulator where AIDS originated.

“You know, speaking of the film Thank You, Dr. Fauci, they explore a non-traditional narrative which has not gotten the attention it deserves, and that is that it may very well have come from a lab in Africa,” Makary said, referring to a 2024 pseudoscientific documentary in which he appeared.

Directed by Jenner Furst, known for projects like Murdaugh Murders, Thank You, Dr. Fauci makes the case that AIDS, Lyme disease, Ebola, and COVID-19 were the result of human experimentation rather than natural spillover—claims that are not widely accepted by experts nor supported by available evidence.

Pressed on his response, Makary conceded, “I don’t know where HIV came from,” before citing the film’s lab leak narrative about Lyme disease.

“Where did Lyme disease come from? I can tell you with a high degree of probability it came from Lab 257 on Plum Island…25 miles from Lyme, Connecticut, where the first case was described,” the FDA commissioner said, explaining that Lyme disease was really the work of a Nazi scientist who had been recruited by the U.S. and spared from execution at Nuremberg.

Makary also cited as further evidence of scientific malfeasance the so-called “Montauk Monster”—a partially decomposed carcass that washed up on Ditch Plains Beach on the east end of Long Island in 2008. A photo of the carcass went viral due to its unusual appearance, with some observers speculating that it might have been an escaped experiment from Plum Island, about 10 miles offshore from Montauk. While the remains were never tested, experts concluded it was most likely a raccoon.

“[Lyme disease] was not the only thing that showed up nearby,” Makary said. “They found half-rat, half-deer carcasses on…Montauk…What the hell is going on there? Again, a bunch of mad scientists doing things.”

(Video from the “PBD Podcast” used pursuant to fair use for news reporting.)

“Makary’s claims are not new and are completely baseless,” molecular biologist and science communicator Dan Wilson told Important Context. Wilson, who is a scientific advisor to the Accountability Journalism Institute, noted that “HIV has been genetically determined to have first jumped to humans in Central Africa in the early 1900’s, before any genetic engineering was possible” while “Lyme disease has always been present in the Americas with cases having been recorded in Native Americans before colonialism.”

“Not only are these ideas wrong, they are shameful and disrespectful to everybody suffering from these diseases,” Wilson added. “We should not accept this blatant denial of reality from anybody in public health, let alone the head of the FDA.”

The Trump administration has broadly embraced lab leak narratives, which the president and his allies popularized in 2020 as the pandemic spiraled. Makary is one of two Trump-appointed public health officials to have been affiliated with the controversial COVID lab leak group BioSafety Now. The other is National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. In April, the White House replaced the federal COVID.gov website with a page titled “LAB LEAK: The True Origins Of COVID-19.” The following month, Bhattacharya publicly endorsed the lab leak at his first agency-wide town hall.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. not only subscribes to the COVID lab-leak narrative but has also repeatedly promoted the idea that Lyme disease began as a bioweapon. Earlier this week, Scientific American reported that the president was expected to sign a defense bill that includes language ordering an investigation into the origins of Lyme disease.

On Thursday, Important Context revealed that actor Liam Neeson, a longtime Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF, narrated a recent anti-vaccine documentary celebrating the rise of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., whose tenure has seen rising deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases.

As we reported, the pro-Kennedy film, Plague of Corruption: 80 Years of Pharmaceutical Corruption Exposed, is overstuffed with false narratives related to vaccines and features interviews with fringe figures, including the secretary himself.

Our story, however, only scratched the surface in terms of the misinformation promoted in the film. Now, we have broken down, in detail, more of the various misleading claims promoted in the film.

“There is no liability for vaccine makers”

Central to Plague’s conspiratorial narrative is a claim that vaccine manufacturers are immune from liability for the harm caused by their products.

Kennedy confidently declares that the “companies have no incentive to make a safer vaccine because they cannot be sued.” He asserts that the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, passed in 1986, gave manufacturers blanket liability immunity “no matter how grievous your injury is, no matter how toxic the product, no matter how negligent the company.”

Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California San Francisco College of the Law and leading expert in vaccine law, explained that his assertion is false.

“Mr. Kennedy knows that the Vaccine Act does not give manufacturers absolute immunity,” Reiss told Important Context. “You can sue manufacturers for a range of claims—including negligence—after going through vaccine court. Mr. Kennedy has made money off litigation against Merck over their Gardasil (HPV) vaccine, so when he says there is absolute immunity, he is lying and he knows that.”

The case of Alexis Lorenze

Throughout its 90-ish-minute runtime, Plague bombards the viewer with graphic images of blood clots, animal experimentation, and alleged vaccine injuries.

The film features an interview with Alexis Lorenze, whose story of supposed vaccine injury went viral on TikTok in 2024. Lorenze claims that she had a severe allergic reaction to vaccines administered to her in the hospital, which worsened her Paroxysmal Nocturnal Hemoglobinuria (PNH), a rare blood disorder. She is shown with severe swelling, bruising, and pain, claiming her symptoms began 10 minutes after receiving the shots.

Although vaccines can contribute to a PNH flare up, Lorenze also tested positive for parvovirus B19, which was a more likely cause of her severe symptoms, according to Science Feedback.

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Experiments on orphans

One of the more visceral narratives presented in Plague centers on Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Kennedy, who wrote a conspiratorial book about Fauci, accuses the scientist of greenlighting unethical experiments on Black and Latino orphans during the 1980s AIDS crisis. He calls the drug trials “the most barbaric, brutal experiments that you can possibly imagine” and claims Fauci “just got rid of all the guardians and let those companies do whatever they wanted to those children.”

“He should be in prison for what he did to those babies and those little kids,” Kennedy says.

Fauci did oversee the funding of clinical trials on HIV positive children—some of whom were in foster care—between the late 1980s and 2005. Over 80 percent were conducted by the NIH, not pharmaceutical companies. There were recordkeeping and other issues with the studies, but an independent review found that safety protocols were followed and no children died as a result of the treatments.

The children, however, were incredibly sick and experimental drugs were their only option for what was a near-universally fatal illness. Kennedy based his claims on a 2004 BBC documentary that the broadcaster itself apologized for, admitting it was biased toward the views of AIDS denialists.

Military “Experimentation”

Another misleading narrative in Plague surrounds the military’s COVID vaccine requirement implemented under President Biden. That suggests that servicemembers were illegally used as test subjects for un-approved, experimental COVID vaccines.

Again, the reality is starkly different. By the time the mandate order was issued in August 2021, the FDA had fully approved the Pfizer vaccines.

In Plague, Army Chief Warrant Officer 2 Sam Shoemate (Ret.) claims that the FDA-approved, and Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) versions of those shots were used interchangeably. This is significant, Shoemate explains, because the president is the only person who can waive a servicemembers’ informed consent for a non-FDA approved treatment under a national security purview, which Biden did not do.

“These were not harmless mistakes,” Neeson narrates.

Yet, the FDA-approved and EUA vaccines had the same formulation.

Plague suggests that the result of the ‘experimentation’ was an increase in certain chronic conditions, including cancer and miscarriage, among servicemembers. The apparent increase, however, was attributed to underreporting in the Defense Medical Surveillance System in 2016–2020. The mRNA shots are not linked to cancer or miscarriage.

This report has been updated to reflect a post-publication comment provided to Important Context by Liam Neeson’s publicist.

Liam Neeson has a very particular set of skills—skills he recently lent to a new anti-vax documentary that glorifies the rise of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.

The Academy Award-nominated actor, known for leading roles in Schindler’s List and the Taken franchise, narrated the film, which includes interviews with Kennedy and other prominent anti-vaccine activists.

Plague of Corruption: 80 Years of Pharmaceutical Corruption Exposed features a bevy of discredited claims about vaccines, including that they cause autism and aluminum toxicity, and frames Kennedy’s leadership of U.S. health policy as hopeful.

The film is based on a book co-authored by disgraced researcher Dr. Judy Mikovits—known for her role in the Plandemic series—and attorney Kent Heckenlively. The book was published by Children’s Health Defense, the multimillion‑dollar anti-vax group founded by Kennedy.

Neeson’s involvement comes at a pivotal moment as Kennedy’s HHS dismantles U.S. public-health infrastructure, including the childhood immunization schedule, as vaccine-preventable diseases reemerge.

For the A-lister, who has been a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF since 2011 and assisting with global vaccine efforts, this is a U-turn.

In 2022, Neeson said vaccines were “a remarkable human success story” and recorded a video thanking scientists, including Hungarian biologist Katalin Karikó, who was instrumental in the development of mRNA COVID vaccines. In Plague, Neeson calls those vaccines “dangerous experiments,” and frames the mainstream scientific community as “fanatics” and “defenders of…orthodoxy” who “demand unconditional submission.”

“Liam Neeson should not lend his name to promoting an anti-science, anti-public health documentary,” said professor Dorit Reiss, a vaccine law expert at the University of California San Francisco College of the Law. Reiss noted that children have already died this year as a result of preventable outbreaks fueled by policies under Kennedy and Trump.

Teal Cannaday, a publicist for Neeson, declined to comment by the time of publication. UNICEF did not respond to our inquiry.

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“Consciousness-infused storytelling”

Plague is the first project of Amigo Film Studios. The nascent company’s website provides no information about the people or funding behind it.

Amigo’s CEO, Turu Sukhotin, is a producer on the film and self-described “multi dimensional healer” based in Los Angeles. According to her personal website, she offers “personalized transformation experiences that honor each person’s unique path back to authentic power” while Plague is “consciousness-infused storytelling that heals while it reveals.”

Director Michael Mazzola is better-known for his presence and work in the U.F.O. community. Last month, he and Heckenlively, who is an executive producer on the film, released a new book, “Catastrophic Disclosure: The Deep State, Aliens, and the Truth.” Several other members of Plague’s production team have worked on documentaries about paranormal phenomena.

Neeson is by far the biggest name attached to the production.

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“All of the sudden, it wasn’t”

Plague opens by revisiting the events of Mikovits’ professional downfall. Neeson narrates that her 2009 paper in Science “rocked the scientific community” with its conclusion that “a deadly virus known as XMRV had infected millions of people and contaminated the global blood supply.”

”The source? Mouse tissue used in countless medical products for decades, starting most notably with the polio vaccine of the 1950s,” he says. “XMRV, reported as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, was the biggest health crisis since HIV and AIDS, and then, all of the sudden, it wasn’t.”

The XMRV panic ended when Mikovits’ paper was retracted. Mikovits ultimately lost her job and was subsequently arrested after reportedly trying to steal notebooks from the lab where she worked.

The film paints the episode as a Big Pharma cover-up with Neeson suggesting two researchers who published papers debunking Mikovits’ paper were compromised by “pharma.” In reality, the 2009 paper’s results could not be replicated despite numerous studies attempting to do so, including an analysis by the original investigators.

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“Dangerous experiments”

Near Plague’s end, Neeson veers into familiar pandemic talking points.

In a monologue he asserts that the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from a U.S.-funded lab in Wuhan, China. “The National Institutes of Health…avoided taking responsibility, bypassed oversight, and intentionally misled Congress, the American people, and the global community,” he says, adding that the agency “withheld crucial information about their activities and funding connections to gain-of-function research.”

Publicly available evidence points to natural spillover as COVID’s most likely origin—a conclusion reaffirmed in June by independent experts on a WHO panel investigating the matter.

Neeson also hits emergency COVID “lockdowns” implemented to halt the spread of the virus, which killed more than 1.2 million Americans. The measures have been a favorite target of GOP politicians as well as right-wing media, dark money groups, and business interests. He declares, “Thousands of lives were lost, not to the virus, but to the mental anguish brought on by these harsh restrictions.”

He then turns to COVID vaccines, estimated to have saved millions of American lives.

Preventable U.S. deaths resulting from vaccine-refusal number in the hundreds of thousands. Neeson, however, says, “these vaccines, rushed to market, were dangerous experiments.”

He continues, “...those responsible…continue to evade accountability.”

(Plague of Corruption clip used pursuant to fair use for news reporting.)

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“A new chapter”

Plague is ultimately pro-Kennedy, presenting the anti-vaxxer as a truth-teller and letting him promote numerous falsehoods. The film ends with Kennedy’s appointment as HHS secretary, treating the moment as a national reckoning—using Neeson’s vocal timbre to great emotional effect.

“We cannot change the past, but we can demand transparency and accountability for the future,” the actor says. “We cannot bring back every loved one we lost, but we can honor their memory by seeking and upholding the truth.”

The film fades to black, returning on a dramatic straight-on shot of Kennedy sitting for his confirmation with reporters buzzing around him. To triumphant background music, Neeson wraps.

“This is not the end of our story,” he says. “This—is the beginning of a new chapter.”

—

UPDATE: After initially declining to comment, Cannaday provided the following statement to Important Context:

We all recognize that corruption can exist within the pharmaceutical industry, but that should never be conflated with opposition to vaccines. Liam never has been, and is not, anti-vaccination. His extensive work with UNICEF underscores his long-held support for global immunization and public-health initiatives. He did not shape the film’s editorial content, and any questions about its claims or messaging should be directed to the producers.

NOTE: Dr. Peter Daszak, who Plague suggests is implicated in funding the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, sits on the board of directors of the Accountability Journalism Institute, which runs Important Context. He had no involvement in, influence on, or advanced knowledge of this article.

Topping off weeks of reported chaos and staffing shakeups, the Food and Drug Administration has named a prominent opponent of COVID-19 vaccines as its latest top drug regulator, drawing backlash from the scientific and medical communities.

On Wednesday, the FDA announced that Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg had been appointed to head the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which regulates prescription and over-the-counter drugs in the United States.

A sports medicine physician and epidemiologist who rose to political prominence amid the pandemic opposing viral mitigation measures, Høeg previously served as a special assistant to FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, an ally and fellow COVID contrarian. She also represented the FDA at meetings of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices where she questioned vaccines.

“Dr. Hoeg is the right scientist to fully modernize CDER and finish the job of establishing a culture of cross-center coordination there,” Makary said.

Høeg is the fifth person to head up CDER this year and the fourth of the Trump administration. Her predecessor, Dr. Richard Pazdur, a longtime agency veteran, announced his retirement on Tuesday after just weeks on the job. Pazdur had been appointed last month after Dr. George Tidmarsh, who came on in July, resigned under pressure amid a lawsuit alleging that he attempted to use his position to extort a former business associate.

Makary’s FDA has become infamous for personnel turmoil. Most senior staff have left or have been pushed out. Over the summer, Dr. Vinay Prasad, the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research and ally of Høeg and Makary, was unceremoniously fired and rehired.

The last few weeks, in particular, have seen a mix of dramatic and dire headlines about the FDA—from leadership scandals and power struggles to claims of political pressure on staffers; from accusations of “make-a-deal” drug review processes to external concerns about internal instability threatening innovation.

On Friday, public health experts were rattled by a leaked FDA memo written by Prasad containing proposed changes to the FDA’s vaccine approval process and claiming that the COVID-19 vaccines killed ten U.S. children without providing data. The supposed vaccine-induced deaths were reportedly identified by Høeg from an unverified database. The memo drew sharp criticism from a dozen former agency commissioners.

Now, just five days after the memo leak, the vaccine skeptic on whose work it was based is the nation’s top drug regulator. Høeg’s promotion has launched a fresh wave of public criticism at the FDA during an already turbulent time.

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Dr. David Gorski, a surgical oncologist who runs the Science-Based Medicine blog and is a scientific advisor to the Accountability Journalism Institute, which runs Important Context, said he had grave concerns about her “lack of qualifications” for the critical role, which he said “will further degrade CDER and endanger Americans.”

“Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg is utterly unqualified to lead CDER,” Gorski told Important Context. “She has none of the deep experience in clinical trial design and management for drugs that this job requires, nor does she have deep regulatory experience.”

Virologist Angela Rasmussen, PhD, another AJI scientific advisor, offered a similarly dismal take on the FDA’s new hire, speculating that the agency’s leadership “must be either desperate or intent on ensuring FDA’s total destruction” to put Høeg, who she called a “completely unqualified and inexperienced anti-vaccine medical skeptic,” atop CDER.

Høeg does not have a background typical of CDER directors. She has no history in drug development and limited experience in government regulation. Her path to the top of a critical center inside of the FDA began with the COVID-19 pandemic, when Høeg emerged as a prominent contrarian voice on Twitter, gaining popularity with the political Right as it sought to restore economic normalcy.

Høeg became known for her focus on the supposed unintended consequences of mitigating the virus, particularly the costs for children, and won key allies—and collaborators—on the medical fringes like Makary and Prasad. When Makary was appointed head of the FDA, it was predictable that Høeg would join him in some capacity.

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Despite her COVID-era work, Høeg’s resumė has overwhelmingly been focused on physical medicine and rehabilitation. When the pandemic hit, she had just gone into private practice in sports medicine in California, selling non-FDA approved platelet rich plasma injections, after completing fellowship training in 2019. Høeg had earned a PhD in epidemiology in Denmark in 2015, but her research focus had been ophthalmology.

A Wordpress blog she published about her personal life around that time advertised her “scientific interest in vision loss, vision loss during exercise, exercise, running during pregnancy, MAF training as well as nutrition and health for athletes.” She and her husband also ran a subscription coaching business for high endurance athletes. The website included her academic publications, all of which dealt with physical medicine.

As Important Context previously reported, her first COVID-related publication in PubMed came in January 2021.

“This seems like a bad idea,” remarked Colette Delawalla, CEO of the science advocacy group Stand Up for Science, regarding Høeg’s ascension. “Maybe we should be sure our political appointees overseeing life or death policy decisions have the qualifications for the work they have been appointed to do.”

It is unclear what changes may come to CDER under Høeg. Weeks before her appointment, the Trump administration announced that Tylenol taken during pregnancy was a potential cause of autism. The link was unproven, but President Trump still publicly discouraged pregnant people from taking the drug, which is one of their only options for fever reduction. Public backlash saw Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy walk back the claim.

In her new role, Høeg will be in a position to impose new regulatory requirements on drug manufacturers. Høeg has also continued serving as the FDA representative at ACIP, having participated in Thursday’s meeting about the hepatitis B vaccine.

The new head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which makes vaccine recommendations, has ties to an anti-vax group known for promoting unproven treatments for COVID-19 and other conditions.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a shakeup: Martin Kulldorff would be leaving his post as ACIP chairman, which he’d held for less than a year. Kulldorff was one of several contrarians appointed to the committee in June by Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. after he’d fired all original 17 members. Kulldorff is set to take on a new role as chief science officer for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, which directly advises the secretary.

Buried at the bottom of the announcement was the name of Kulldorff’s replacement: Dr. Kirk Milhoan, a Hawaii-based pediatric cardiologist and pastor appointed to ACIP by Kennedy in September.

Since May 2024, Milhoan has been a senior fellow at the so-called Independent Medical Alliance, an anti-vax group originally known as the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. His wife and fellow physician is also affiliated with the group.

IMA is best known for its promotion of the anti-parasitic ivermectin as a treatment for COVID—and for continuing to endorse its use long after research has proved it ineffective for that purpose. Ivermectin was the second false COVID cure seized on by the MAGA movement, following the anti-malarial hydroxychloroquine, which President Donald Trump touted as a pandemic quick fix as he sought to downplay the pandemic threat ahead of his 2020 reelection bid.

Milhoan has promoted both drugs, providing them to Maui patients during free house calls to treat and prevent COVID. In 2021, the Hawaii state medical board filed complaints against him but later dropped them.

IMA, which was founded in 2020 by former intensivists Drs. Paul Marik and Pierre Kory, has become a key player in the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” movement. It is closely allied with Kennedy, announcing its name change and rebrand from the FLCCC ahead of his Senate confirmation hearings and leading advocacy efforts in support of his appointment as HHS secretary.

Today, the group serves as a connection point between the world of anti-vax nonprofits and more traditional right-wing groups. The partners IMA listed for its annual conference earlier this year included the anti-public health Brownstone Institute, Kennedy’s former anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense, and the Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank behind the Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s second term.

ACIP Chairman Milhoan is one of two IMA affiliates serving on the vital CDC committee. Vice chair Dr. Robert Malone, an infamous anti-vaxxer, is listed as an IMA senior advisor on the group’s website. Celebrating the news of Milhoan’s promotion, IMA wrote that their fellow “represents the very best of medicine, and his leadership of ACIP will restore a patient-centered balance to the nation’s vaccine panel.”

It is unclear exactly what impact this week’s ACIP shakeup will have on the critical CDC advisory committee. Outgoing ACIP chairman Kulldorff was a COVID vaccine refuser and rarely served as a moderating influence on the anti-vax impulses of his fellow Kennedy appointees. At the June ACIP meeting, for example, he voted with the majority to recommend only flu shots without thimerosal, an organomercury compound used as a preservative in some vaccines that anti-vaxxers like Kennedy have falsely suggested causes autism. When the American Academy of Pediatrics blasted ACIP’s decision, Kulldorff accused the organization of being “pro mercury.”

The former ACIP chair had also expressed openness to delaying the hepatitis B vaccine for babies born to mothers not infected with the virus—something the new ACIP is poised to vote on this Thursday. The shot is currently given universally at birth to protect newborns against a deadly disease that can cause liver cirrhosis and cancer.

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Milhoan is perhaps more extreme in his anti-vaccine views than Kulldorff. He has called the mRNA platform “our clearest enemy of health currently,” compared COVID vaccination efforts to the Holocaust, and made false claims that infection risk increases with each booster and that the shots cause cancer and miscarriages.

His past research on the COVID vaccines has been dubious. In April, the new ACIP chairman appeared on Sinclair’s National News Desk to promote a paper he’d published with prolific anti-vaxxer and former cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough about the risk of myocarditis from COVID vaccines. The condition is a rare side effect of the shots that occurs more often from COVID infection itself. However, the paper, published in an open access “medical journal” that lists McCullough as both its editor-in-chief and an editor, claimed that the shots had led to a 620 percent surge of myocarditis in young men.

IMA cited the paper in their anti-mRNA vaccine “Smart Moms Ask” campaign, which targeted parents and expecting couples with misinformation, including claims that the shots led to miscarriage and lower rates of conception. In May, Milhoan appeared on the pro-Trump One America News to discuss the initiative.

In August, Milhoan co-hosted a webinar for the group touting its new back-to-school “Parents’ Healthcare Bill of Rights,” a document featuring seven demands on topics from gender and sexuality education to food choices and vaccines. The first enumerated “right” was the “Right to Vaccine Autonomy.”

“Parents hold ultimate authority to decide on vaccinations for their children, free from school-based coercion including School Based Health Centers, misinformation, or threats of exclusion,” the document read. “This safeguards against industry-driven requirements that may overlook individual health risks and family preferences.”

Since the outbreak of the COVID pandemic, vaccine hesitancy has been increasing as right-wing groups like IMA have worked to politicize public health. Uptake of routine vaccinations has correspondingly declined. This year alone has seen several children die from vaccine-preventable diseases.

David Vickrey was not a professional journalist when, as he put it, Robert Kennedy Jr. “absolutely tried to silence” him. He was a retiree, a grandfather, and a regular blogger on the liberal website The Daily Kos where he had written hundreds of posts over the span of two decades under the pseudonym DowneastDem. But a post he’d written in August 2020 would put him in the crosshairs of the notorious anti-vaccine activist.

It was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and like millions of Americans, public health was on Vickrey’s mind. Fluent in both English and German, he was a regular reader of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, which he read online. That August, an article caught his eye: Kennedy, the failson of a Democratic political dynasty and long-time anti-vaccine activist, had spoken at a protest in Berlin against the country’s COVID mitigation measures that had been organized by, and featured elements of, the German far-Right.

The day before, Kennedy had hosted a press conference announcing the launch of a European branch of his well-funded and lucrative anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, joined by members of far-right and anti-vaccine groups.

Vickrey took to his DowneastDem blog to write up a post summarizing the Der Spiegel story in English. Titled “Anti-Vaxxer RFK JR. joins neo-Nazis in massive Berlin ‘Anti-Corona’ Protest,” Vickrey’s piece noted that the rally “was organized by right-wing extremist organizations including the AfD party and various anti-Semitic conspiracy groups as well as the neo-Nazi NPD party.” (Daily Kos blog posts are not reviewed by the site’s editors prior to publication.)

Other outlets, including the BBC, reported on Kennedy’s involvement in the rally, and Vickrey’s post was not widely shared. Nevertheless, the anti-vaccine activist, who has long sought to position himself as a champion of free speech, singled out the retiree blogger, embarking on what can only be described as a legal crusade against him, aiming to pressure him into retracting his post.

That crusade, which finally came to an end in September, would eat up five years of Vickrey’s life and include multiple lawsuit filings in multiple states.

“It was awful,” Vickrey said. “I mean, I was just angry, but my wife, my family, was afraid that he was asking for millions of dollars in damages. And who knows, you know? He could have gotten a MAGA judge that would say, ‘Yeah, let’s go after this guy.’”

Vickrey described Kennedy’s legal pursuit of him as “a message for anyone else,” but noted, “I don’t think it stopped anyone. If you go online, there’s so many things written about him—which are also coming from his own family—which are much worse than anything that I ever said.”

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In November 2020, Kennedy sued The Daily Kos seeking to obtain DowneastDem’s identity in New York and California. The legal attempt to unmask Vickrey alarmed organizations like the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and Public Citizen, but Kennedy was relentless. Upon finding out Vickrey’s identity, reportedly through his own investigations (Children’s Health Defense would credit its “sleuthing”), Kennedy launched a defamation suit against him seeking, at minimum, $1 million in damages.

Children’s Health Defense provided financial help for the suit—something the organization noted in its coverage of the lawsuit on its own blog, “The Defender.” Kennedy stepped down from his position as Children’s Health Defense’s president in late 2024 in preparation for his Senate confirmation hearings for his health secretary nomination, though his legal battle with Vickery continued as he assumed office.

Originally, in the fall of 2023, Kennedy filed in state court in New Hampshire where Vickery had previously worked, despite the blogger being based in Maine. New Hampshire notably does not have a law protecting its residents against strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP). Maine, on the other hand, does have an anti-SLAPP statute. The New Hampshire case was ultimately dismissed on jurisdictional grounds last January after being removed to federal court, and Kennedy subsequently refiled with an amended complaint in Maine that October.

“I wrote the five sentence blog in like two minutes in August of 2020, and he claimed I wrote it to derail his presidential campaign in New Hampshire, even though he didn’t declare until three years later,” Vickrey said.

In his legal filings, Kennedy did not dispute the central premise of Vickrey’s blog post that he had appeared onstage with groups linked to neo-Nazis. Rather, his lawyers argued that the post was libelous because Kennedy had not become a member of those groups—something the blogger never claimed. Kennedy also argued that Vickrey had made other defamatory statements about him because he had posted links to articles about him on social media without additional comment.

Despite the questionable merits of the suit, Vickrey said Kennedy’s legal campaign was a constant stress on him and his family. “It was scary,” he said. “All of a sudden, out of nowhere, this powerful guy files a lawsuit against you. You never know, right?”

Vickrey said he had even reached out to his senator, Republican Susan Collins, who sat on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, ahead of Kennedy’s confirmation hearings to inform her of the situation and ask for her to reject his nomination. Collins voted to advance and later confirm the anti-vaxxer anyway.

Vickrey called his confirmation “sickening,” “awful,” and “a tragedy for the nation.”

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Luckily, Vickrey, told Important Context, he had an insurance policy that covered him in the event of a defamation lawsuit. That insurance ended up paying out to cover his legal fees. In the U.S., there is no right to an attorney in civil suits and even frivolous lawsuits can end up costing winning defendants big money upfront, especially if the plaintiff is well-resourced. As there are few avenues for recourse for defendants against bad faith or doomed legal campaigns, plaintiffs will file with the ultimate goal of obtaining an out-of-court settlement. Sanctions against attorneys are seldom asked for and even less frequently imposed and recovery of legal fees is not a guarantee.

President Trump has filed multiple dubious defamation lawsuits against media companies—seemingly to extract settlements, as it is difficult for public figure plaintiffs to win such suits. They have to show the defendant acted with “actual malice” under the precedent set in the Supreme Court case of New York Times v. Sullivan (1964)—a higher bar aimed at protecting open discourse which Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to eliminate. Two right-wing Supreme Court Justices have also expressed openness to reviewing the standard.

In 2024, the president filed a $20 billion suit against CBS over what he claimed was a deceptively edited ‘60 Minutes’ interview with his presidential rival, Democrat Kamala Harris. The suit ultimately settled for $16 million with observers noting that at the time, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, was in the process of merging with Skydance Media and needed approval from the Federal Communications Commission. Trump also The Wall Street Journal and has recently threatened to sue the BBC for up to $5 billion.

Vickrey noted the cases brought by Trump, explaining that when it came to the media outlets, “They can fight” because the cases will “be tossed eventually,” adding, “But guys like me, we don’t have those resources, right?” He noted that Kennedy’s case against him had been brought as “a nuisance.” As The Daily Beast reported, Kennedy did come to him with a settlement offer before the court handed down its ruling.

“Towards the end, I think he realized the futility of the whole case and said, ‘Okay, I’ll drop the case if you retract everything you said and delete every post that you ever made,’” Vickrey told Important Context. “We said, basically, you know, ‘Go pound sand, we’re not going to do that.’”

On September 10, the court handed down its decision granting Vickrey summary judgment. Children’s Health Defense has not posted anything about the defeat.