Vaccines save lives. Sowing distrust in them puts our children’s health at risk. If you’d like to learn more, I wrote about this subject in August: tomfrieden.substack.com/p/the-plain-...

Ignoring decades of evidence when making health recommendations not only endangers our children’s health, it also detracts from the important work of better understanding autism and supporting people with autism and their families.

Dozens of studies, tracking the health of more than 10 million children, have consistently shown no association between any vaccine, vaccine component, or vaccine schedule with autism.

Sowing distrust in vaccines puts the lives of American children at risk. The plain truth is that there is no evidence that vaccines cause autism. For more than two decades, scientists have studied whether vaccines cause autism.

Every American wants to be safer and healthier. The administration's assault on public health makes us less so. When the next crisis comes, we will have lost precious time, talent, and capacity to respond.

This comes after previous cuts to lifesaving environmental health, chronic disease, and tobacco programs, which address the leading causes of death in the U.S.

—Office of Science – approves outbreak reports and scientific publications, including the essential Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

—National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey – coordinates complex fieldwork, laboratory testing, and data integration, and helped identify Americans’ dangerous overconsumption of ultra-processed foods, an issue Secretary Kennedy has repeatedly cited as a major health threat.

The staff reductions announced last weekend hit critical infrastructure, including:

—National Center for Health Statistics – how we track births, deaths, chronic disease, and emerging threats

The administration talks about making America healthier, about transparency and quality science. But the plain truth is they’re doing the opposite, systematically destroying the systems that keep us safe from health threats, making life-and-death decisions with no discussion & undermining science.