Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday removed every member of a scientific committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how to use vaccines and pledged to replace them with his own picks.

The 17-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices had been in a state of flux since Kennedy took over. Its first meeting this year had been delayed when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services abruptly postponed its February meeting.

    • @Wahots@pawb.social
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      9 days ago

      The truly sad thing is that Pestilence and his goons halted food and medicines that prevented or suppressed serious diseases in poor countries. This will irreversibly spread HIV, TB, and other terrible diseases like malaria.

      Even more worrying, people that used to be fed grains and other food staples from American farmers are no longer getting food shipments. This means American farmers can’t sell their crops to the government anymore, and the people who received food are now starving. This encourages instability, war, famine, and worst of all, bushmeat hunting, which can harbor all sorts of endemic diseases. Some have rarely come into contact with people, so they’ve never made the jump to humans as a host. But the more people hunt wild game, the more and more chances it has to get things just right in order to jump to humans and spread. This is most likely the root cause of HIV and COVID, and there’s speculation that Ebola started infecting humans the same way.

      This is already a huge problem, and it’s only to get worse as climate change makes conditions even more favorable to bacteria, viruses, and most worryingly, fungi, which we don’t have many medicines for.