It should be no surprise that placing an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy nut in charge of the department of Health and Human Services, the cabinet office that oversees almost all the science and public health agencies in the US, was going to do serious harm. And sure enough, he is wreaking havoc.

One of the more disturbing things he has done is cancel a long-running diabetes study that was looking at the effectiveness of a medication known as metformin. The group that got this medication was compared with another group that got a placebo and a third group that made lifestyle changes to meet health goals, such as to exercise more and lose weight.

The study found that, in people with prediabetes, metformin lowered the risk of diabetes by roughly a third; the life-style intervention cut the risk by more than half. Both components were so successful that the trial was stopped early.

But the The Diabetes Prevention Program Outcomes Study had planned to continue the study to explore other important questions, using the participants that had been enrolled in the earlier phase.

How long do the health benefits last? How do blood-sugar levels affect the body and the brain over time? For more than a quarter of a century, Nathan and his colleagues tracked thousands of patients—which was itself a feat of logistical and scientific endurance.(Many doctors struggle to get their patients to attend annual physicals, let alone engage them for a study of this duration.)

But HHS abruptly ended the study, as a result of the government’s beef wth Columbia University.

The study’s funding comes from the National Institutes of Health, which in 2022 committed some eighty million dollars to cover five years of further research, one of its largest grants. The N.I.H. sends the money to a coördinating center—in this case, Columbia University—which then distributes the funds to dozens of participating trial sites around the country. But, in early March, the Trump Administration froze hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to Columbia, and the diabetes study was abruptly terminated. Columbia informed collaborators at other institutions that trial-related work needed to stop immediately. “We had to call some participants that night and tell them not to come in the next day,”
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The lapse in funding means that the Diabetes Prevention Program Outcomes Study can no longer continue to collect patient data as planned; it can no longer pay staff to do blood work, collect urine samples, scan brains, or conduct neurocognitive tests. Even worse, the study’s existing data are at risk. Scientists need funds to properly store and retrieve samples; they need money to pay for computer servers and to hire statisticians and analysts, who clean and curate the data.
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The longer that the trial is paused, the harder it will be to resume. Trial staff at the various clinical sites, with whom some participants have decades-long relationships, are already being laid off. “People think trials are just about collecting data, but there’s an art to keeping participants invested and engaged,” Crandall said. “That personal connection will fade.”

Long-term clinical studies with huge numbers of participants are very difficult to set up. Even a temporary suspension can be fatal since you lose contact with the enrolled participants.

That is not the only study that has been halted.

It’s estimated that at least a hundred clinical trials are at risk of stopping or have already halted, including some dedicated to preventing sexually transmitted infections, reducing rates of postpartum depression, and keeping organ-transplant recipients safe from infectious threats. More may soon follow. Bryant told me that she’s been working at a contract research organization that helps enroll patients in trials. Even studies sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry are being affected: many rely partially on federal funding, or are run by staff who do, and who have consequently been laid off. An oncologist told me about a patient with Stage IV cancer who, until recently, had three options for experimental trials. She now has none. Meanwhile, people who have never participated in a trial will suffer the costs of unrealized discoveries—potential treatments and insights that never materialize.

Meanwhile measles continues to slowly spread across the country, without any forceful action by the HHS to promote vaccinations.

US pediatricians and infectious disease experts say the fight against rising measles cases nationwide is being hampered by a lack of forceful advocacy for vaccination from government health officials and statements on unproven treatments that are confusing parents.

Doctors assert that vaccination is the most effective way to prevent infection. Measles is caused by a highly contagious virus that’s airborne and spreads easily when an infected person breathes, sneezes or coughs. The disease has been considered eliminated from the US since 2000.

Other states with active outbreaks – defined as three or more cases – include Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.

With one-fifth of states seeing active measles outbreaks, the US is nearing 900 cases, according to figures posted Friday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s confirmed measles cases count is 884, triple the amount seen in all of 2024.

In further attempts to discourage people from getting vaccinated, RFK Jr asserted that the MMR vaccine contains ““aborted fetus debris”.

Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and his department have made a series of misleading statements that alarmed vaccine experts and advocates in recent days – including that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine includes “aborted fetus debris”.

Health department officials released statements saying they could alter vaccine testing and build new “surveillance systems” on Wednesday, both of which have unnerved experts who view new placebo testing as potentially unethical.

“It’s his goal to even further lessen trust in vaccines and make it onerous enough for manufacturers that they will abandon it,” said Dr Paul Offit, an expert on infectious disease and immunology and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, about the statements and Kennedy. “It’s a fragile market.”
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Prior to being confirmed to the role of health secretary, Kennedy was arguably the nation’s most prominent anti-vaccine advocate and led a non-profit known for prolific misinformation. He also earned money by referring clients to law firms suing vaccine makers.

Among the claims Kennedy spread was that medications cause “autoimmune injuries and allergic injuries and neurodevelopmental injuries that have long diagnostic horizons or long incubation periods, so you can do the study and you will not see the injury for five years”, he said in an interview in 2021, according to reporting by the Post.

Kennedy also claimed this week that the MMR vaccine includes “aborted fetus debris”. The rubella vaccine, like many vaccines, is produced using decades-old sterile fetal cell lines derived from two elective terminations in the 1960s.

Vaccines against new pathogens, such as Covid-19, are placebo tested. However, experts consider new placebo-controlled trials for long-time vaccines, for instance measles, to be unethical because it would effectively deny a patient a known intervention while potentially exposing them to a dangerous disease.

“No institutional review board at any academic center would ever accept that – so he’s asking what personal injury lawyer invariably asks for, which is the impossible to be done,” said Offit.

What the Trump gang wants is to decide what results they want first and then find evidence to support them. RFK Jr. has promised that he will devote a “massive testing and research effort” to identify the root cause of autism by September. It may be that what RFK Jr. is really interested in is showing that vaccines cause autism, one of his many crackpot obsessions, and will devote great resources to ‘proving’ that to be the case, depriving funding for more valuable research. Meanwhile, the director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard wants to work with RFK jr. to prove that covid originated in a lab, another obsession of RFK Jr. and the Trump gang

As if all that was not bad enough, the FDA (that is also under the control of HHS) has suspended testing of milk quality.

The Food and Drug Administration is suspending a quality-control program for testing fluid milk and other dairy products due to reduced capacity in its food safety and nutrition division, according to an internal email seen by Reuters.

The suspension is another disruption to the nation’s food-safety programs after the termination and departure of 20,000 employees of the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the FDA, as part of Donald Trump’s effort to shrink the federal workforce.

The FDA this month also suspended existing and developing programs that ensured accurate testing for bird flu in milk and cheese and pathogens like the parasite Cyclospora in other food products.

Effective Monday, the agency suspended its proficiency testing program for grade “A” raw milk and finished products, according to the email sent in the morning from the FDA’s division of dairy safety and addressed to “Network Laboratories”.

Meanwhile, the CDC (also under the HHS) has ordered the National Academy of Science, the country’s most prestigious scientific organization that is sometimes tasked with providing authoritative science-based findings to the government, to cancel a workshop on preventing bird flu infections in humans Engineering.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine workshop was scheduled for June 26 and 27 and expected to discuss best practices for the use of personal protective equipment for people at heightened risk of bird flu, like farmworkers and veterinarians.

Its organizing committee had included workplace health experts, veterinarians and a representative from the poultry and egg industry, according to the event website.
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An advisory on the workshop website says, “On April 23, 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services informed the National Academy of Sciences that it should terminate all work on this activity. This activity has ended, and a final product was not released.”

And of course the Trump gang is targeting any research done on climate science because in their minds global warming is not happening at all or is actually a good thing, or they believe that their god will take of it. They have dismissed from this task all the scientists charged with providing Congress with reports on how global warming is affecting the country.

The Trump administration has dismissed the hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how global warming is affecting the country.

The move puts the future of the report, which is required by Congress and is known as the National Climate Assessment, into serious jeopardy, experts said.

Since 2000, the federal government has published a comprehensive look every few years at how rising temperatures will affect human health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, transportation, energy production and other aspects of the U.S. economy. The last climate assessment came out in 2023 and is used by state and local governments as well as private companies to help prepare for the effects of heat waves, floods, droughts and other climate-related calamities.

On Monday, researchers around the country who had begun work on the sixth national climate assessment, planned for early 2028, received an email informing them that the scope of the report “is currently being re-evaluated” and that all contributors were being dismissed.

So the Trump gang seems to be quite comfortable with the idea of having us all suffer a slow death from unchecked heating of the planet. But not to worry! Before that happens, we will likely die from diabetes, measles, bird flu, milk-borne parasites, and who knows what else, thanks to the elimination of research and public health safeguards.