A physician with four decades in critical care medicine is sounding an alarm about what he describes as a coordinated dismantling of protections for American children across multiple federal programs and health policies.
The changes span from birth onward. Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has narrowed the routine childhood immunization schedule from 17 diseases to 11, eliminating the hepatitis B birth dose. In infants, hepatitis B infection becomes chronic in approximately nine of 10 cases, compared to one in 20 for adults. That chronic infection produces cirrhosis and liver cancer decades later, which is why vaccination on the first day of life has been standard practice.
Refusals of vitamin K shots, which prevent newborn brain bleeding, nearly doubled between 2017 and 2024 in an analysis covering more than 5 million births.
The administration's budget proposes cutting WIC's fruit and vegetable benefits for young children by as much as 75 percent, from $26 monthly to $10. Head Start, serving more than half a million of the poorest preschoolers, faced elimination before being frozen instead, with federal staff cut by roughly a fifth.
School-age children are affected through Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program. Enrollment has dropped by at least 1.5 million children since the president took office, according to federal data, with Georgetown University counting 2 million fewer insured children overall.
Food assistance has contracted sharply. The largest reduction to food stamps in the program's 60-year history began removing 4 million people from the rolls, many of them parents. A billion-dollar agriculture department program purchasing locally grown produce for school cafeterias was cancelled, with the department stating it no longer serves agency goals.
Children with disabilities face institutional restructuring. The administration announced it would move oversight of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which guarantees 7.5 million students an education, from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services. The Office for Civil Rights, which investigates discrimination against disabled students, would shift to the Department of Justice. The administration has not explained how this reorganization benefits disabled children.
Simultaneously, the administration is eliminating measurement mechanisms that would track the impact. States no longer must report whether children on Medicaid have been immunized. Vitamin K refusal data was never counted federally. No official statement discloses how many children are expected to lose coverage.
Kennedy has asked a federal appeals court to fast-track review of a March ruling freezing his vaccine changes. A judge previously found 13 of his 15 new advisers unqualified for the panel and the changes themselves arbitrary and capricious. He seeks the reconstituted committee to act before autumn respiratory season.
Author James Rodriguez: "Cutting immunizations while silencing the data systems that measure harm is the textbook approach of a government determined not to see what it's done."
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