CDC Blocks Publication of Study Proving Covid Vaccine Works

The Covid-19 vaccine significantly reduced emergency room visits and hospitalizations this past winter—but Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services doesn’t want the public to know that.The public health agency blocked the publication of a report on the vaccine’s efficacy from its flagship scientific journal, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.Acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya had previously delayed the publication of the study in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report earlier this month. At the time, Bhattacharya claimed that he was skeptical of the researchers’ methodology, despite the fact that the same methodology is used to evaluate vaccines by numerous medical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA Network Open, The Lancet, and Pediatrics.The decision to nix the report’s publication entirely was made in recent days, according to the Post.It’s just another example indicating that Kennedy’s anti-vax ideology is spreading across the federal government. During his confirmation hearings last year, Kennedy pledged that he was not against vaccinations and was instead “pro-safety.”“I believe vaccines have a critical role in health care; all of my kids are vaccinated,” Kennedy said at the time. “In my advocacy I have often disturbed the status quo by asking uncomfortable questions, and I’m not going to apologize for that.”Yet Kennedy is a leader in a growing movement of anti-vax parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, falsely linked autism to the jab. The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.Since Kennedy took the reins at HHS, though, he has replaced independent medical experts on the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel and replaced them with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He railed against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamin A. In January, he overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, potentially affecting vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.The 72-year-old has a lot to gain from pushing disinformation about the jab: the more doubt and division that Kennedy sows, the more money he’ll make. Ahead of his appointment, Kennedy disclosed that he made roughly $10 million in 2024 from speaking fees and dividends from his anti-vaccine lawsuits. He’s also made cash from merchandising handled by his nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, which bungled anti-vax messaging in Samoa so badly that it started a 2019 measles outbreak that resulted in the deaths of at least 83 people, the majority of whom were children under the age of five. As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average health-conscious individual.