covid vaccine

This is the story of two Republican doctor-senators named Bill.

One of them, as majority leader from 2003 to 2007, helped a self-described “compassionate conservative” Republican president pass a Medicare prescription drug plan and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), “the largest commitment by any nation to address a single disease in history.”

The other, as a member of the Senate Finance Committee, voted to send Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination as secretary of Health and Human Services to the Senate floor. It was a 14-13 vote, so his was a crucial “aye” that allowed a conspiracy theorist, disinformation spreader and anti-vaxxer to become the top public health official in America. He already has defunded world-changing mRNA vaccine research, imposed major restrictions on access to COVID vaccines amid a surging variant of the virus and triggered a crisis at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The firewall between science and ideology is completely broken down,” Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, former director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” He was part of the shocking CDC leadership exodus last week after the Trump administration forced out CDC Director Susan Monarez.

The trajectory from heart and lung transplant surgeon Bill Frist of Tennessee to gastroenterologist Bill Cassidy of Louisiana is emblematic of the dark Republican Party journey on science and health — from the Bush family to the Trump family, from American greatness to self-defeating denialism on everything from vaccines to cancer research.

There are four doctors in the Senate: Cassidy, orthopedic surgeon John Barrasso of Wyoming, obstetrician-gynecologist Roger Marshall of Kansas and ophthalmologist Rand Paul of Kentucky. All are Republicans and all voted in February to confirm Kennedy.

Eleven of the 17 medical doctors in the House are Republicans, and all of them voted for the nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts in the vast tax-and-spending law that Trump signed on July 4. So did the four dentists in the House, all of them Republicans. The American Dental Assn. endorsed three of them. The fourth is Arizona’s Paul Gosar, a top competitor with Kennedy in the medical disinformation space whose siblings have made ads urging voters to reject him.

Frist was the only doctor in the Senate when he served. After leaving the Senate in early 2007, he joined the Bipartisan Policy Center, where he is a senior fellow and co-chair of its Health Project. He has been on the board of directors of the Nature Conservancy since 2015, and was elected to a three-year term as global board chair in 2022.

Frist has sharply criticized the Medicaid cuts passed into law this year, saying they threaten rural hospitals and public health. Last spring, accepting a 2025 Earth Award from Time Magazine, he said climate health is crucial to human health, and he urged a personal approach to raise American awareness. He often describes his environmental and health missions as inseparable. “Planetary health is human health. Let’s lead with science, unity, and urgency,” he posted on X on Earth Day.

Good luck with that, at least in the short term. The same new law that cuts Medicaid also cuts funds for renewable energy projects and incentives, with conservationists predicting more pollution, fewer jobs and higher energy costs as a result. Only three Republican senators bucked the party tide on that bill, and Paul was the only doctor among them. His breaking point was a provision raising the U.S. debt limit to $5 trillion — not Medicaid or clean energy cuts affecting health.

Cassidy, of course, voted for it. And when Monarez found herself in Kennedy’s crosshairs over vaccines, Cassidy privately intervened for her, which backfired. Now, having failed to spare America this nightmare when he could have, the senator is threatening “oversight” by the health committee he chairs and trying to get a Sept. 18 meeting of unqualified Kennedy-appointed vaccine “advisors” postponed.

This is thin gruel, especially from a doctor once committed to public health and science writ large. Cassidy co-founded a clinic that gave free dental and medical care to the working uninsured, his website says, and created a public-private partnership that vaccinated 36,000 children for hepatitis at no cost to their families. During the Biden presidency, he voted for bipartisan gun safety and infrastructure bills and the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act to bolster the U.S. semiconductor industry. He was also one of five Republicans voting for a small-business COVID relief bill.

Even more notably, in the Senate impeachment trial after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, Cassidy voted to convict Trump of “incitement of insurrection.” “Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person. I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty,” he said then. The Louisiana Republican Party censured him the same day.

Now running for his third term, Cassidy is already facing primary challengers who don’t have that baggage. They include state Treasurer John Fleming, a former congressman who worked for Trump in the White House, and public service commissioner Eric Skrmetta, who chaired all three of Trump’s presidential campaigns in Louisiana.

Fleming has said Cassidy’s vote to convict Trump failed the people of Louisiana. And that’s the problem with today’s Republican Party. The truth is that since that brave vote, Cassidy has failed all Americans. He has also assured that his legacy will be the wreckage of our once world-class public health and medical research programs.

On the other side, there is the 314 Action group that is recruiting and funding Democratic doctors and other Democratic scientists to run for office. It’s an openly partisan operation, right up to a snarky-ish all-caps X post about its $1-million commitment to California’s fight to neutralize the five new House seats Texas is trying to add. What else can you do when the other major party, even its medical professionals, is leading, aiding and abetting in the GOP war on science?

“If @SenBillCassidy had a spine, a known anti-vax conspiracy theorist wouldn’t be destroying our public health,” the group posted last Wednesday on X. “He had an opportunity to thwart the confirmation of RFK Jr.,” 314 Action president and founder Shaughnessy Naughton told me in a recent interview. “Instead he chose to go down a different path and go against what his life experience and professional training told him was a dangerous nominee to lead our health services. And he did it anyway. … That is shameful.”

In February, before Kennedy was confirmed, the conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens rated him “worst nominee in U.S. Cabinet history.” And then Stephens suggested the person he preferred for the job: Bill Frist.

Jill Lawrence is an opinion writer and author of “The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock.” @jilldlawrence.bsky.social

As authorities identified the shooter in the deadly attack on CDC headquarters as a Georgia man who blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal, a union representing workers at the agency is demanding that federal officials condemn vaccine misinformation, saying it was putting scientists at risk.

The union said that Friday’s shooting at the Atlanta offices of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which left a police officer dead, was not a random incident and that it “compounds months of mistreatment, neglect, and vilification that CDC staff have endured.”

The American Federation of Government Employees, Local 2883, said the CDC and leadership of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services must provide a “clear and unequivocal stance in condemning vaccine disinformation.”

The 30-year-old gunman, who died during the event, had also tried to get into the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta but was stopped by guards before driving to a pharmacy across the street and opening fire, a law enforcement official told the Associated Press on Saturday.

The man, identified as Patrick Joseph White, was armed with five guns, including at least one long gun, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the investigation.

Here’s what to know about the shooting and the continuing investigation:

An attack on a public health institution

Police say White opened fire outside the CDC headquarters in Atlanta on Friday, leaving bullet marks in windows across the sprawling campus. At least four CDC buildings were hit, agency Director Susan Monarez said on X.

DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose was mortally wounded while responding. Rose, 33, a former Marine who served in Afghanistan, had graduated from the police academy in March.

White was found on the second floor of a building across the street from the CDC campus and died at the scene, Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum said. “We do not know at this time whether that was from officers or if it was self-inflicted,” he said.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said the crime scene was “complex” and the investigation would take “an extended period of time.”

CDC union’s call

The American Federation of Government Employees, Local 2883, is calling for a statement condemning vaccine misinformation from the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency is led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who rose to public prominence on healthcare issues as a leading vaccine skeptic, sometimes advancing false information.

A public statement by federal officials condemning misinformation is needed to help prevent violence against scientists, the union said in a news release.

“Their leadership is critical in reinforcing public trust and ensuring that accurate, science-based information prevails,” the union said.

Fired But Fighting, a group of laid-off CDC employees, has said Kennedy is directly responsible for the villainization of the CDC’s workforce through “his continuous lies about science and vaccine safety, which have fueled a climate of hostility and mistrust.”

Kennedy reached out to staff on Saturday, saying that “no one should face violence while working to protect the health of others.”

Thousands of people who work on critical disease research are employed on the campus. The union said some staff members were huddled in various buildings until late at night, including more than 90 young children who were locked down inside the CDC’s Clifton School.

The union said CDC staff should not be required to immediately return to work after experiencing such a traumatic event. In a statement released Saturday, it said windows and buildings should first be fixed and made “completely secure.”

“Staff should not be required to work next to bullet holes,” the union said. “Forcing a return under these conditions risks re-traumatizing staff by exposing them to the reminders of the horrific shooting they endured.”

The union also called for “perimeter security on all campuses” until the investigation is fully completed and shared with staff.

Shooter’s focus on COVID-19 vaccine

White’s father, who contacted police and identified his son as the possible shooter, said White had been upset over the death of his dog and had become fixated on the COVID-19 vaccine, according to a law enforcement official.

A neighbor of White told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that White “seemed like a good guy” but spoke with her multiple times about his distrust of COVID-19 vaccines in unrelated conversations.

“He was very unsettled, and he very deeply believed that vaccines hurt him and were hurting other people,” Nancy Hoalst told the newspaper. “He emphatically believed that.”

But Hoalst said she never believed White would be violent: “I had no idea he thought he would take it out on the CDC.”

Haigh writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Annual COVID-19 shots for healthy younger adults and children will no longer be routinely approved under a major new policy shift unveiled Tuesday by the Trump administration.

Top officials for the Food and Drug Administration laid out new requirements for yearly updates to COVID shots, saying they’d continue to use a streamlined approach that would make vaccines available to adults 65 and older as well as children and younger adults with at least one health problem that puts them at higher risk.

But the FDA framework urges companies conduct large, lengthy studies before tweaked vaccines can be approved for healthier people. In a framework published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, agency officials said the approach still could keep annual vaccinations available for between 100 million and 200 million adults.

The upcoming changes raise questions about people who may still want a fall COVID-19 shot but don’t clearly fall into one of the categories.

“Is the pharmacist going to determine if you’re in a high-risk group?” asked Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “The only thing that can come of this will make vaccines less insurable and less available.”

The framework, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the culmination of a series of recent steps scrutinizing the use of COVID shots and raising major questions about the broader availability of vaccines under President Trump.

For years, federal health officials have told most Americans to expect annual updates to COVID-19 vaccines, similar to the annual flu shot. Just like with flu vaccines, until now the FDA has approved updated COVID shots when manufacturers provide evidence that they spark just as much immunity protection as the previous year’s version.

But FDA’s new guidance appears to be the end of that approach under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, who has filled the FDA and other health agencies with outspoken critics of the government’s handling of COVID shots, particularly their recommendation for young, healthy adults and children.

Tuesday’s update, written by FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and FDA vaccine chief Vinay Prasad, criticized the United States’ “one-size-fits-all” approach and states that the U.S. has been “the most aggressive” in recommending COVID boosters, when compared with European countries.

“We simply don’t know whether a healthy 52-year-old woman with a normal BMI who has had COVID-19 three times and has received six previous doses of a COVID-19 vaccine will benefit from the seventh dose,” they wrote.

Outside experts say there are legitimate questions about how much everyone still benefits from yearly COVID vaccination or whether they should be recommended for people at increased risk. An influential panel of advisors to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is set to debate that question next month.

The FDA framework announced Tuesday appears to usurp that advisory panel’s job, Offit said. He added that CDC studies have made clear that booster doses do offer protection against mild to moderate illness for four to six months after the shot even in healthy people.

Perrone and Neergaard write for the Associated Press. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.