RFK Jr. Forces Out Top Vaccine Regulator After Fight Over Data

The former top vaccine official at the Food and Drug Administration says he was forced out of his job for trying to protect vaccine data from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Dr. Peter Marks told The Associated Press Sunday he refused to hand over unrestricted access to a vaccine safety database to the Health and Human Services secretary and his team, fearing that the information might be misused, manipulated, or deleted altogether.

Initially, Marks said that he tried to be on good terms with his vaccine-skeptic new boss regarding vaccine safety, making plans to develop a “vaccine transparency action plan.” Marks also gave Kennedy and his team the ability to view reports from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, but drew the line at allowing them to edit the data.

“Why wouldn’t we? Because frankly we don’t trust [them],” Marks said, using an expletive. “They’d write over it or erase the whole database.”

Marks’s interview came the same day that Kennedy visited Seminole County in Texas, where a young child became the third person, and second child, to die from this year’s measles outbreak. None of the three had received the measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, vaccine. Kennedy has a long reputation of being anti-vaccine, which he tried to deny during his confirmation hearings.

But ever since Kennedy’s swearing in as secretary of Health and Human Services, his true colors have been on full display, as he has responded poorly to the initial deaths from the measles outbreak, expressed support for dubious measles treatments, ended support for vaccine initiatives, and even at one point claimed the measles vaccine was as bad as the disease itself.

Over the weekend in Texas, Kennedy attempted some damage control by saying, “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.” But, while on that visit, he also met with two doctors who claim to have treated children with measles using the steroid aerosolized budesonide and the antibiotic clarithromycin, calling them “extraordinary healers.”

Both treatments are considered unproven and aren’t accepted by the medical community, once again showing that Kennedy hasn’t actually given up his vaccine skepticism, even as the measles outbreak continues to grow and his government agency fires the people responsible for fighting diseases.

The Social Security Administration is falling apart at the seams as Elon Musk and his gang of reckless twentysomethings continue their never-ending pursuit to dismantle the federal safety net.

The agency’s website has crashed numerous times in recent weeks as people attempt to log into their Social Security accounts and access their benefits. Outages have lasted anywhere from 20 minutes up to a day, The Washington Post reported Monday.

The disastrous technical difficulties set off alarm bells for millions of Americans, and come as DOGE has cut more than 7,000 workers at the agency, including a 50 percent cut to the technology department. Musk and his cronies also plan to migrate Social Security data off its current programming language and rewrite the code in a matter of months, which could lead to further website outages, Wired reported last week.

The billionaire has long set his sights on attacking the program that provides benefits to more than 73 million Americans. He’s repeatedly called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and spread numerous baseless claims against the agency, including that Democrats are using Social Security to attract illegal immigrants.

“By using entitlement fraud, the Democrats have been able to attract and retain vast numbers of illegal immigrants and buy voters,” Musk said during a podcast interview with Senator Ted Cruz last month. “Basically bring in 10, 20 million people who are beholden to the Democrats for government handouts and will vote overwhelmingly Democrat.”

The recent website outages are likely due to an untested fraud detector system put in by DOGE that couldn’t withstand such a high number of users, the Post reported. Though users received messages onscreen that said they weren’t receiving payments, their checks were still deposited—for now. Starting April 14, SSA identity certification will get a lot stricter: Recipients will have to verify their identity online or in person, which will supposedly limit fraudulent claims. People could previously verify their identity over the phone.

The unnecessary change will no doubt cause confusion and technical issues to an already overloaded system, putting millions of Americans’ benefits further at risk.

The Trump administration has removed a picture of Harriet Tubman from the National Park Service page on the Underground Railroad, as first reported by The Washington Post. It also changed the words “enslaved African Americans” to “enslaved workers” and removed a section that discussed Benjamin Franklin being a slave owner.

Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland in 1822 and escaped in 1849. She had the courage to come back and help 70 other enslaved African Americans escape via the Underground Railroad. She also served as a scout and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, leading the raid at Combahee Ferry that freed 700 slaves. She is one of the most heroic Americans to ever live.

The Trump administration is downplaying the removal of Tubman’s picture and the softening of historically accurate language.

“We have dozens of pages about Harriet Tubman celebrating and memorializing her impressive role in American history,” an NPS spokesperson told The Hill. “The idea that a couple web edits somehow invalidate the National Park Service’s commitment to telling complex and challenging historical narratives is completely false and belies the extensive websites, social media posts, and programs we offer about Harriet Tubman specifically and Black History as a whole.”

But this move clearly aligns with the administration’s spiteful war on whatever it deems “woke,” as outlined in the Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History executive order that directs Vice President JD Vance to remove anything that portrays this historically racist country in a “negative light.” This is the same executive order that is bringing back Confederate statues that were removed in 2020.

The Trump administration is doing everything it can to keep a Maryland resident deported by mistake locked up in a notorious El Salvadoran mega-prison—and the Supreme Court is apparently happy to help.

Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily paused a deadline Monday for the government to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongfully deported to his birth country of El Salvador last month, to the United States. Donald Trump had asked the high court earlier in the day to block U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis’s order to return Abrego Garcia by Monday at 11:59 p.m.

Roberts ordered that a full response to the government’s filing must be delivered Tuesday by 5 p.m. Around the same time Roberts issued the order, Abrego Garcia filed an opposition to the government’s request to vacate.

In her ruling Friday, Xinis called Abrego Garcia’s deportation a “grievous error” and ordered his return, an order Solicitor General D. John Sauer called “unprecedented and indefensible.”

“Even amidst a deluge of unlawful injunctions, this order is remarkable,” the Trump administration’s filing to the Supreme Court reads. “The United States cannot guarantee success in sensitive international negotiations in advance, least of all when a court imposes an absurdly compressed, mandatory deadline that vastly complicates the give-and-take of foreign-relations negotiations.”

But the only reason “sensitive international negotiations” are even needed is because the White House deported Abrego Garcia due to an “administrative error” last month, despite repeated claims that no errors were made in determining deportations.

In 2019, a U.S. immigration judge ruled Abrego Garcia faced legitimate threat of persecution in El Salvador and was therefore barred from being sent back. The Trump administration deported him anyway, baselessly claiming that he has ties to the Salvadoran gang MS-13. Abrego Garcia is now being held in the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, the largest prison in Latin America and one notorious for human rights abuses.

The government’s attorneys had already asked the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to pause Xinis’s order, a request that the Fourth Circuit denied Monday.

“The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process,” the Fourth Circuit’s order reads. “The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.”

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump threatened Monday to escalate his trade war with China by ratcheting up tariffs on exports to a staggering 104 percent.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump threatened to impose an additional 50 percent tariff on China if it did not rescind the retaliatory 34 percent tariffs on U.S. imports Beijing announced Friday.

These tariffs would be in addition to the 34 percent “reciprocal tariff” Trump announced last week, which was already added on top of two rounds of 10 percent tariffs that had been announced last month. The White House confirmed that Trump’s tariffs on China would be 104 percent.

Trump said that if China’s new tariffs weren’t withdrawn by Tuesday, his new tariffs could be imposed the following day.

“Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated! Negotiations with other countries, which have also requested meetings, will begin taking place immediately,” he said.

Trump’s latest announcement is sure to send the already volatile stock market swinging. The Dow Jones plummeted more than 900 points at open Monday, after closing with 1,500-point losses for two consecutive days at the end of last week as investors reacted to China’s retaliatory tariffs.

Trump’s promise to once again increase the U.S. tariff rate on China is just the latest escalation in his ongoing mission to start a global trade war that he believes will send every world leader to his door, hoping to make a deal. In the meantime, major U.S. financial institutions predict an economic recession is on the horizon.