The Rubber Stamps Are Shown The Door

RFK Jr. made his first sweeping moves at HHS last week and seemed to indicate a new day has dawned in the rubber stamp department.

If anything can be said about modern American politics, it is that the system we live in is far more illusionary than it is real. We speak of democracy and rights, we proudly proclaim our freedoms and free markets, but what is happening under the hood is nothing like the rhetoric we shout from the streets. The United States remains a storybook facade, a place where our beliefs about what we are supersede reality on a daily basis. One of the great hopes in the new administration has been to reclaim some of the ground that has been lost between reality and idealism. The party got off to a great start, with DOGE celebrations, pardons, and muscling Congress into cabinet appointments that were popular with the citizens, but not the donating class. It felt like the rabble had finally overcome the Blob. But then the doldrums of government set in, and the tactics that had led us into this wilderness of ill-democracy of slow rolling and red-tape taping began to burden the Trump team of Avengers. Kash Patel fumbled around on Joe Rogan about the Epstein files. Dan Bongino looked to be being held hostage on his Fox News interviews. Pam Bondi seemed to fade into the shadows, and grand promises of retribution for past ills were buried under the technicalities of an entrenched system that knows how to defeat any momentum that comes from the rabble.

And then there was Elon’s visible and vitriolic meltdown on X. Every bridge that he’d ever crossed seemed burned down by irrational, Molotov cocktail postings that seemed to leave no room for even a prodigal son’s return. Congress had done its usual solecism of duty and found a way to cram every new kind of spending available into a Big, Beautiful, Bust of a Bill. By the first week in June, the enthusiasm and excitement of the inaugural version of Trump was looking more like the George W. Bush brownie face than it was the presidential portrait that hangs in the White House.

Meanwhile, over at the MAHA camp, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was being hauranged by anyone who had ever seen a seed oil, and was being accused of selling out to Pharma, the Mossad, or Susie Wiles. MAHA was being accused of being a joke and a slogan that had no teeth. Yet, Mr. Kennedy continued to work diligently to build a team of people strong enough to withstand the criticism and who could help him build a case for big moves with long-lasting change. The arrows flew, but as he had demonstrated in his long career, none of that criticism seemed to faze his path.

On Monday, June 9th, the biggest move by Mr. Kennedy to date came crashing across the news feeds with a force that even his most ardent food-conspiracy-foes couldn’t help but applaud. Mr. Kennedy retired seventeen members of the ACIP panel that supposedly oversees vaccine safety. ACIP is the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. It is described on the CDC website as:

“The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is a committee within the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that provides guidance on the use of vaccines to control vaccine-preventable diseases in the civilian population. It develops recommendations for vaccine administration, including schedules and dosages, which are published as official CDC guidelines.”

Sounds like what good government should be, right? A panel that helps oversee the mercantile interests of corporations and helps make sure that the “medicines” they are propagating amongst the populations are doing the good that the heavy-set-dancing-ladies of the advertisements purport the drugs to be doing. It turns out that the entire panel, however, is much like the rest of our government: great on rhetoric and terrible in practice. A clip from one of their meetings about the Hepatitis vaccine in 2018 was circulating on social media earlier this week, and the entire panel demonstrates itself to be as good at preventing crony capitalism as COVID masks were at preventing a virus. As you can see in the clip, all questions are unanswered, and despite the fancy military suits of the participants, their credibility is about as legitimate as the medals on their chests for all the unwon wars of the late twentieth century.

Not exactly a robust scientific debate. So as Mr. Kennedy continued to face resistance and insubordination from his governmental, bureaucratic residual underlings, he decided that the time had come to make a bold move. Monday, he announced across his social media platforms:

“On Monday, I took a major step towards restoring public trust in vaccines by reconstituting the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP). I retired the 17 current members of the committee. I’m now repopulating ACIP with the eight new members who will attend ACIP’s scheduled June 25 meeting. The slate includes highly credentialed scientists, leading public-health experts, and some of America’s most accomplished physicians. All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense. They have each committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations. The committee will review safety and efficacy data for the current schedule as well.”

The usual chicken-little sycophants from the old version of the press marched out to their keyboards and made sure everyone knew this was the end of medicine as we know it.

The CIA-style mouthpiece, F. Chuck Todd, had this to say after the announcement: “He didn’t present a single piece of scientific evidence to make the case against this board. He’s killing this board based on his own conspiratorial beliefs. This intentionally puts Americans in harm’s way. This is one impeachment that could be bipartisan.”

You can almost hear the heavy breathing.

Golly-gee, maybe the media is right this time. Maybe RFK Jr. wants to send us all back to the 16th century, where we can die of plagues and poxes and drink our raw milk while we suffer. Or maybe, just maybe, government isn’t nearly as wholesome as our mythology has led us to believe. Let’s take a quick look at who the raspy rascal just sent off into the K Street wilderness:

(Credit to Jon Fleetwood for finding the archived version of the CDC website from April, where these biographies were housed. The CDC website has since been scrubbed.)

Chair: Dr. Helen Keipp Talbot - Professor of Medicine, Vanderbilt University

Dr. Edwin Asturias - Professor of Pediatrics and Infectious Disease Epidemiology, University of Colorado

Dr. Noel T. Brewer - Gillings Distinguished Professor in Public Health, University of North Carolina

Dr. Oliver Brooks - Chief Medical Officer, Watts HealthCare Corp

Dr. Lin H. Chen - Director, Mount Auburn Travel Medicine Center, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Helen Y. Chu - Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology, University of Washington

Dr. Sybil Cineas - Associate Professor, Brown University

Dr. Denise J. Jamieson - Dean, Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa

Dr. Mini Kamboji - Professor, Weill Cornell Medical College / Sloan Kettering

Dr. George Kuchel - Director, UConn Center on Aging

Dr. Jamie Loehr - Owner, Cayuga Family Medicine

Karen Lyons MS, RN - Chief, Immunization Section, Illinois Dept. of Public Health

Dr. Yvonne Moldanato - Stanford University School of Medicine

Charlotte A. Moser - Co-Director, Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Dr. Robert Schechter - Chief, Immunization Branch, California Department of Public Health

Dr. Albert Shaw - Professor of Medicine, Yale School of Medicine

Dr. Jane Zucker - Adjunct Professor, SUNY Downstate School of Public Health

A lot of experts in that list. Perhaps the media was right about the crazy moves of RFK Jr. Maybe our children are just moments away from a medical apocalypse. I ran over to the interwebs to see if I could find out what it was that RFK saw as the egregious conflicts of interest that ultimately led to their dismissals. So I started at the top of the list and worked my way through them. There is a lot of conjecture about all of these people raging across social media, which I am certain anyone reading is wildly surprised by, so I am presenting these findings only when there are verifiable, reputable sources. DoubleFlyingEagle76’s X feed didn’t make the cut.

I have included my sourcing for reference:

Helen K. Talbot: From the Open Payments website: (search set to All)

Here is who did the paying:

So, not a ton of money in Pharma terms, but still a bit of conflict that might be there for someone sitting in the seat that is supposed to be a check upon the manufacturers.

Let’s move on to Dr. Asturias: According to a 2025 article from The Colorado Sun, Dr. Asturias received nearly $4 million in research support from pharmaceutical companies, including over $3 million from Pfizer, for studies on diseases like RSV and pneumonia in Guatemala and the U.S. These studies often focused on assessing vaccine or test efficacy, such as a Pfizer pneumococcal urine antigen test. Additionally, he received smaller amounts, ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars annually, for consulting and speaking fees from companies like Merck and Sanofi during the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Here is his Open Payments Data (settings set to All)

It is hard to say how much of this went to the University of Colorado and how much Dr. Asturais ended up with out of all of this, but the numbers are fairly significant. The good news is that the University of Colorado Boulder is not at all ideological in its teachings and philosophy…Wait, I have that wrong.

Dr. Noel T. Brewer is a “distinguished” professor of health behavior at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. He has documented connections to pharmaceutical companies through research grants and advisory roles. Specifically, he has received grants from and served on paid advisory boards for Pfizer, Merck, and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), as noted in the HPV IQ project website, which mentions an unrestricted educational grant from Pfizer.

Surely there has to be someone who doesn’t have ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

Dr. Oliver Brooks seems not to have been as fruitful in his participation in the graft, with only a $45,000 payout.

Dr. Lin H. Chen, an infectious disease specialist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, has documented financial connections to pharmaceutical companies, primarily through research funding and advisory roles. According to Open Payments, she received approximately $55,000 in personal payments and $250,000 in research funding, with specific ties to Sanofi Pasteur, where she served as a site principal investigator for an investigational new drug program and a study on a Sanofi yellow fever vaccine. These activities are related to her expertise in travel medicine, as she directs the Travel Medicine Center at Mount Auburn Hospital.

Dr. Helen Y. Chu is an infectious disease specialist and associate professor at the University of Washington. While the payments are not as significant on Open Payments, she has been reported to have financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, primarily through research funding and personal payments. Her Open Payments page shows that she received $11,000 in personal payments, mostly from Merck, and suggests her extensive work on clinical trials for COVID-19, influenza, and RSV vaccines likely involved funding from companies like Moderna, Pfizer, or GSK.

Dr. George A. Kuchel, a professor of geriatric medicine and Director of the University of Connecticut Center on Aging, also has documented financial ties to pharmaceutical companies through research funding and personal payments. In an Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) report from 2024, Dr. Kuchel received over $13,000 in general payments from Janssen and approximately $5,000 in associated research funding from Novartis in 2019.

Dr. Yvonne “Bonnie” Maldonado, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, has documented financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, too. These came primarily through research funding and consulting roles. According to a Washington Examiner report, she received $33,500 from Pfizer and Merck between 2017 and 2023 for consulting work. Her Open Payments page shows she received over $4.5 million in research funding from Pfizer. She also served as a site principal investigator for Pfizer’s COVID-19 and RSV vaccine trials and an AstraZeneca vaccine trial, and previously was a member of Pfizer’s Data and Safety Monitoring Board, but there is nothing to see here because, if you remember from the media bombardment and a dancing Stephen Colber, those shots were all super safe and effective.

Charlotte A. Moser, MS, Assistant Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), has no clearly documented financial ties to pharmaceutical companies based on available sources. Finally, someone without a conflict! Maybe RFK should have done a little homework on her. There are no records of any direct payments on the Open Payments page, but down in the details, it mentions her co-authorship of an article with a pretty famous vaccine advocate, Dr. Paul Offit. His connections to Pharma are a little more extensive.

Of the 17 people that Mr. Kennedy fired, eight had no verifiable ties to Big Pharma money, making the majority of the board with direct conflicts of interest with the industry. While I may be sympathetic to the people who were tossed out because of guilt by association, I think it is important to note that one of the main points that Mr. Kennedy held throughout his campaign was the huge swaths of distrust that these divisions of government have created. The industry has captured so many people who serve in these positions because they understand the game better than the average citizen.

This entire collusion style merry-go-round starts because the industries that dominate any space in America know that they must squash their competition by being able to withstand the regulations that the politicians create. The cycle is consistent. Most big corporations are in favor of heavy regulation because they know their competitors cannot compete with the money they, as big players, can dole out in either grants or perks to the people sitting on these boards. The people in the pharmaceutical industry have realized that the most profitable person is a marginally sick one to whom they can sell multiple drugs. They use statistics of any injuries to minimize the harm that their products cause. They hide behind single-digit numbers of people who are harmed and point to the statistics that say that the “vast majority” are fine to beta test their products in the marketplace. It makes gaslighting the injured incredibly effective and easy. Meanwhile, if someone does make it to court or back to the politicians to make a change to the enterprise, it becomes easy to pay off with settlement monies that are an infinitesimal proportion of the money they stand to make over the long course of the drug. Class action lawsuits are diluted, and in the end, anyone who claims they have been harmed is defeated in spirit before they ever get going.

What Mr. Kennedy is doing with this panel is a major move toward building trust. The people he named to replace those whom he fired are all people who seem to have limited conflicts related to Big Pharma. From a post yesterday on X, Mr. Kennedy named the fired ACIP members replacements:

“Joseph R. Hibbeln, MD, is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist with a career in clinical research, public health policy, and federal service. As former Acting Chief of the Section on Nutritional Neurosciences at the National Institutes of Health, he led research on immune regulation, neurodevelopment, and mental health.

Martin Kulldorff, MD, PhD, is a biostatistician and epidemiologist formerly at Harvard Medical School and a leading expert in vaccine safety and infectious disease surveillance. He has served on the Food and Drug Administration’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Subgroup of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, where he contributed to national vaccine safety monitoring systems.

Retsef Levi, PhD, is the Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a leading expert in healthcare analytics, risk management, and vaccine safety. He has served as Faculty Director of MIT Sloan’s Food Supply Chain Analytics and Sensing Initiative and co-led the Leaders for Global Operations Program. Dr. Levi has collaborated with public health agencies to evaluate vaccine safety, including co-authoring studies on mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and their association with cardiovascular risks.

Robert W. Malone, MD, is a physician-scientist and biochemist known for his early contributions to mRNA vaccine technology. He conducted foundational research in the late 1980s on lipid-mediated mRNA delivery, which laid the groundwork for later developments in mRNA-based therapeutics. Dr. Malone has held academic positions at institutions including the University of California, Davis, and the University of Maryland, and has served in advisory roles for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense.

Cody Meissner, MD, is a Professor of Pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and a nationally recognized expert in pediatric infectious diseases and vaccine policy. He has served as Section Chief of Pediatric Infectious Disease at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and has held advisory roles with both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

James Pagano, MD, is a board-certified Emergency Medicine physician with over 40 years of clinical experience following his residency at UCLA. He has worked in diverse emergency settings, from Level 1 trauma centers to small community hospitals, caring for patients across all age groups, including infants, pregnant women, and the elderly. Dr. Pagono served on multiple hospital committees, including utilization review, critical care, and medical executive boards. He is a strong advocate for evidence-based medicine.

Vicky Pebsworth, OP, PhD, RN, earned a doctorate in public health and nursing from the University of Michigan. She has worked in the healthcare field for more than 45 years, serving in various capacities, including critical care nurse, healthcare administrator, health policy analyst, and research scientist with a focus on public health policy, bioethics, and vaccine safety. She is the Pacific Region Director of the National Association of Catholic Nurses.

Michael A. Ross, MD, is a Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University, with a career spanning clinical medicine, research, and public health policy. He has served on the CDC’s Advisory Committee for the Prevention of Breast and Cervical Cancer, where he contributed to national strategies for cancer prevention and early detection, including those involving HPV immunization. With research experience in hormone therapies, antibiotic trials, and immune-related conditions such as breast cancer prevention.”

In that same post, Mr. Kennedy implied the underlying differences beyond the conflicts of interest by describing how each of the appointees approaches their profession:

“All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense. They have each committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations.”

I ran each of these people through the Open Payments website. Not one of their names can be connected there to payments to them or research grants that they may have been awarded. Many who weren’t as deeply invested in the Kennedy campaign as I was, may be unfamiliar with this aspect of what Mr. Kennedy claimed he would do with agency capture if he were elected president. He stated over and over again in his campaign stops and speeches that he believed that people who serve on boards should have no ties to the mercantile interests that they are supposed to oversee. While his presidential bid came up short, his philosophy has seemingly not changed as he settles into his position as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. With this selection of people, he seems to have aligned his actions with his underlying principles. There has been some rumblings about Dr. Robert Malone regarding a potential conflict of interest. The New York Times has contacted the Kennedy office to discuss his need to be dismissed. I find the idea that a news paper has the audacity to call for the resignation of someone sitting on a panel, that up until Monday, could have cared less that it existed. Here is Secretary Kennedy’s response. It clarifies further that he is coming after the vaccine mandates and the collusion driven profits that they provide for manufacturers.

The New York Times reporter objected to the fact that, in 2017, Malone drafted an expert report for a federal case on behalf of a whistleblower, Merck’s laboratory director Stephen Krahling, who accused the company of forcing him to falsify lab reports to inflate the efficacy of the mumps component of its MMR jab. The Times claims that its “experts believe” that Malone’s involvement in these legal proceedings should make him ineligible to vote on future ACIP recommendations.

In fact, HHS will, for the first time in history, institute bias policies recommending that ACIP panelists recuse themselves from decisions in which their current or former clients have a financial interest. Vaccine mandates give these panelists the awesome power to guarantee billion-dollar annual profits to their Pharma benefactors from trapped markets of 74 million American children now compelled to purchase a zero-liability product with no legitimate safety testing. Despite years of complaints about conflicts and corruption at ACIP—from congress, the HHS inspector General, and others—the mainstream media has largely remained silent. - Secretary Kennedy on his X post from June 13.

I have maintained in my writings two fundamental concepts: if you are going to have a government, it needs to be good or it is not worth having at all; and secondly, the more influence that the government can exert over people through its collusion with business, the more aggrieved the citizens become. What we have been subjected to over the course of the last many years has been an erosion of trust and dedication to the role of government. Instead of people coming to Washington to serve the citizen, they went there to get wealthy and gain power. In the course of that abandonment of ideals, the ones who suffered are the people of the nation, who placed their trust in the institutions and government. Their confidence in those they elected and the bureaucracies their representatives oversaw was betrayed in totality.

This firing and replacing move by RFK is a profound first step in the right direction. It is reorienting how the government has worked for the last 60 years. The military-industrial complex is real, and so is the medical-industrial complex. Most are familiar with Eisenhower’s warnings about the military, but few remember a deeply profound line from later in the speech as he spoke about the corruption that was evident within our universities and research companies.

“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Mr. Kennedy quoted that speech often during the campaign. He referred to it as one of the most important moments of twentieth-century American history. Eisenhower handed off the reins of a government that was already seemingly out of control in 1961 to RFK’s uncle. Eisenhower was telling the people, and more directly his replacement, to be vigilant. I am certain that he told John Kennedy in those private moments in the Oval Office during the transition that there were forced to be aware of that had overwhelmed the democratic forms of the United States. Just a few short years later, as President Kennedy and his brother moved to make changes, the government that they were supposedly in charge of, turned on them and murdered them both in broad daylight. Jack was dead in a limousine in Dallas, and any changes that the Kennedys wanted to make to this behemoth government would seemingly all end on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in June of 1968.

Fifty-seven years later, the Kennedy name is back in Washington, and he is leaning into the same instincts of his father and his uncle to undo a government-corporate complex that has done untold damage to the citizenry. We shall see if this can be sustained, but so far, Mr. Kennedy is chipping away, bit by bit, at the things that so many of us want changed.