Trump’s Health Bureaucrats Are Undermining Confidence in Vaccines

Back in November, when Vinay Prasad, then-director of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, asserted in an internal email that “at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination.” He provided no evidence to back up his claim then, and none has since been forthcoming. Prasad left the agency at the end of April. Good riddance.

In the meantime, other Trump administration officials have continued their efforts to undermine the American public’s confidence in the safety of previously vetted and approved vaccines. Jay Bhattacharya, who is simultaneously head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has been notably active in that endeavor.

In April, Bhattacharya delayed and eventually spiked publication of a study in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) on the effectiveness of 2025–2026 COVID-19 vaccination against emergency care and hospitalization. The researchers found that real-world vaccination effectiveness among adults over age 18 was “50% against COVID-19–associated emergency department and urgent care encounters and 55% against COVID-19–associated hospitalization, compared with not receiving a 2025–2026 vaccine dose.”

In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Bhattacharya characterized his suppression of the report as being due to a “scientific disagreement” over the methodology used by researchers. In particular, Bhattacharya objected to the “test negative design” used by researchers to probe the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines updated for 2025–2026.

Test negative studies are widely used by researchers around the world (including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and across Europe) for studying respiratory virus vaccine effectiveness. A test-negative study checks how well a vaccine works by comparing sick people who show up at medical facilities who test positive for a disease (COVID-19) with sick people (other respiratory illnesses) who test negative. Researchers see who was vaccinated in each group. If fewer vaccinated people test positive for COVID-19, the vaccine is helping protect against the disease.

The suppressed study found the vaccines were around 50 percent effective in protecting against emergency room encounters and hospitalization. Because so many Americans have already been vaccinated or have had COVID-19 infections, the researchers also observed that vaccine effectiveness should “be interpreted as the added benefit of 2025-2026 COVID-19 vaccination in a population with high levels of infection-induced immunity, vaccine-induced immunity, or both.” In addition, the suppressed study forthrightly acknowledged some of the limitations noted by Bhattacharya.

Bhattacharya implies that the articles in the CDC’s MMWR are somehow faulty because they are not “peer reviewed” by outsiders. It is, however, worth noting that peer-reviewed articles on COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness have, in the past, generally come to the same basic estimates as those published in the CDC’s MMWR.

Trump administration health officials are evidently not just satisfied to suppress information on the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination. Yesterday, The New York Times reported that the FDA has now blocked the publication in peer-reviewed journals of several new agency-supported studies vetting the safety of COVID-19 and shingles vaccines. A preprint of one of the suppressed COVID-19 studies looked at 14 different possible deleterious side effects among 7.5 million Medicare beneficiaries. The study found that “there were no new safety signals identified following 2023–2024 COVID-19 vaccinations among U.S. Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 years and older.”

Another now-canceled FDA study examining the incidence of 17 possible health outcomes among 4.2 million people vaccinated against COVID-19 reported, “No new safety concerns were found following 2023–2024 COVID-19 vaccination among U.S. health plan enrollees aged 6 months–64 years.”

The Times further reports that in February, the FDA refused to allow agency staff to submit short reports on the Shingrix vaccine to a drug safety conference. Numerous previous studies have found that Shingrix is basically safe, although there is a slightly increased post-vaccination risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome. Vaccination not only protects against shingles, but studies also find that it is also associated with a lower risk of heart disease, dementia, and death in people aged 50 and older.

Although the authors of the suppressed COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness study demurely omitted it, prior MMWR reports on COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness generally concluded their findings “support CDC and ACIP [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] recommendations that all persons aged ≥6 months receive 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccination.”

Consequently, it seems likely that the speculation by the person who leaked the suppressed COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness report to Inside Medicine is correct:

Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his underlings like Bhattacharya—might be hoping to further weaken CDC recommendations for seasonal Covid-19 vaccines this year. It’s possible that the CDC may even weaken its recommendations for high-risk patients above age 65.

In his disingenuous op-ed in The Washington Post, Bhattacharya declared, “Scientific integrity demands rigor, openness to challenge and a willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads, especially when it is inconvenient.” Yet, he and other Trump administration health bureaucrats clearly see fit to suppress evidence they find inconvenient. So much for “scientific integrity.”