An internal memo from the Food and Drug Administration last month dubiously claimed that Covid-19 vaccines were responsible for at least 10 child deaths, based on unverified reports from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System — the federal vaccine injury database. The agency provided no further evidence, and the memo was sharply rebuked by 12 former FDA commissioners.
It is the latest evidence that the FDA is planning to curtail access to vaccines that have saved millions of American lives using a technology that has incredible potential against some of the worst diseases known to humanity.
Across HHS, science is under siege.
The memo’s author, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Dr. Vinay Prasad, was a YouTuber known for sowing doubt in Covid mitigation measures and vaccines. The VAERS reports were compiled by Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, a physical medicine expert and fellow public health contrarian who is now the Trump administration’s fourth director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.
The FDA is headed by Dr. Marty Makary, a key ally of the anti-vaccine secretary of the Department of Human and Health Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The agency has been in disarray on Makary’s watch, with most senior staff being replaced by fringe figures. Today, the FDA is no longer moored to evidence-based reality — and it is not alone.
Across HHS, science is under siege. The National Institutes of Health, led by Jay Bhattacharya, an economist who began the pandemic advocating against single-payer health care and for herd immunity through mass Covid infection, and eventually ended up on the conspiratorial fringes, has been gutting research and slashing its workforce. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine policy is now guided by a panel of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists and contrarians handpicked by Kennedy. Last week, the panel arbitrarily killed a decades-old recommendation that all newborns get vaccinated against hepatitis B, an incurable disease with deadly consequences when contracted in the first few months of life.
None of what we are seeing is unexpected. It is instead the endgame of a right-wing war on public health that began with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The reasons for the war are entirely political.
The modern conservative movement has always had a strained relationship with science, especially on issues like climate change and tobacco use, largely due to its having been organized and bankrolled by major profit-driven business interests. But until Covid, vaccines were generally areas of bipartisan agreement.
The pandemic ground the U.S. economy to a screeching halt, rankling the business funders of the conservative movement and, more importantly, imperiling GOP electoral prospects in a census year, when control of congressional and statehouse redistricting would be up for grabs.
As noted Tea Party organizer Richard Viguerie told The Washington Post in April 2020, “the sooner we get the economy going and back up, the better it’s going to be for conservatives and Republicans in this election year.” Covid presented a long-term threat to the conservative political project. Like all major upheavals, it created a need — and a demand — for the kind of active federal leadership that conservatives had been trying to kill since the New Deal.
It did not help the conservative cause that the GOP, in a scramble to do something, had sent the largest, albeit temporary, expansion of the social safety net in a generation to Trump’s desk with the Families First Coronavirus Response Act and the CARES Act. These helped slash poverty to historic lows with generous aid programs.
The tactic of deploying fringe scientists and doctors was an old one used by Big Tobacco and the fossil fuel industry,
The right-wing calls to reopen began immediately after states started shutting down in March 2020 — and included Trump. These, however, met pushback from medical experts and public health officials. By April, the anti-lockdown protests had begun, promoted by groups like Tea Party Patriots. The demonstrations were successful in fueling a media narrative of “pandemic fatigue,” but they did little to move the needle of public opinion. So right-wing organizers quickly adjusted.
On a private call in May 2020 — recorded audio of which was leaked to the Center for Media and Democracy and fed to The Associated Press — members of a influential and secretive Christian-right group called the Council for National Policy (CNP), along with a senior staffer of Trump’s reelection campaign, discussed a plan to give the reopening prescription the veneer of medical legitimacy.
“One survey that I heard about last week was two-thirds of the American people are not comfortable going back out, even if the country were opened wide up for business as usual,” said CNP member and conservative activist Nancy Schulze. “Doctors are seen by the American people … They have a 92% trust rate with the American people, according to polling.” Schulze told her colleagues that a coalition of doctors had “been preparing and coming together for the war ahead in the campaign on health care” and “could be activated … for reopening.” That doctors group is now widely understood to have been America’s Frontline Doctors, headed up by Jan. 6 rioter Dr. Simone Gold, which made its debut in July 2020. (Gold was later pardoned by Trump, along with almost all of the other would-be insurrectionists.) AFLDS, which included future Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, were major proponents of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug Trump seized on as a quick fix to the pandemic, despite evidence that it was not effective against Covid. The tactic of deploying fringe scientists and doctors was an old one used by Big Tobacco and the fossil fuel industry, and soon other contrarian doctors were propelled to right-wing stardom. Makary, Bhattacharya, Prasad and Høeg all began their rise to power as contrarian medical voices urging a return to normalcy. They were amplified by right-wing politicians; so-called politically heterodox media outlets that are clearly right-leaning (like The Free Press); dark money groups; and individuals like billionaire Trump campaign financier Elon Musk. The new strategy laid the foundations for the mainstreaming of anti-vaccine narratives on the right. Who needed vaccines when you had hydroxychloroquine, and later the similarly ineffective ivermectin? But it was the right’s embrace of “natural immunity” as the path to herd immunity that really set the course. A major audience for these appeals were people against vaccines. It was not long before contrarian doctors like Makary and Bhattacharya — and public health-focused right-wing groups like the Brownstone Institute, founded in 2021 — were pushing vaccine skepticism and forging alliances with anti-vaccine advocates like Kennedy. It gained them access to spaces previously considered liberal enclaves: Think crunchy granola. The melding of the conservative and anti-vaccine movements would be formalized finally under the mantle “Make America Healthy Again,” and would help propel Donald Trump to victory in 2024. Today, we are all paying the cost. The FDA is now planning to find adult deaths supposedly caused by the Covid vaccines. It is safe to say that nothing the agency produces on the matter will be reliable, given past statements from Makary, Prasad and Høeg, who gave away the game long ago. If the FDA does take additional steps to put mRNA vaccines out of reach for the American public, no vaccine will be safe — and that is probably the goal.
Walker Bragman
Walker Bragman is a New York-based investigative journalist and founder of the not-for-profit Accountability Journalism Institute. 
