May 22, 2026
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The outbreak, with more than 8,000 confirmed cases and another 60,000 suspected infections, has prompted an emergency vaccination drive.
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May 22, 2026
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Hunger and conflict are on the minds of the residents of Akobo, where an outbreak could have devastating consequences.
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- May 22, 2026
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WILLIAMSTON, N.C. — Two years after her brother’s death, Debra Pierce still wonders whether the 50-year-old would have survived his heart attack if her local hospital hadn’t closed.
“The sad thing is we’ll never know if he could have been saved that night or not, because we don’t have a higher level of care in this county,” Pierce said as she stood outside the mobile home where she last hugged her brother.
Emergency crews from a neighboring town worked on Stanley Sears for a half hour but couldn’t revive him for the long drive to the closest hospital, records show.
In the tall grass — which would be mowed if Sears were still alive — Pierce swiped through the photos on her phone. She stopped at a picture that showed Sears smiling. Pierce chuckled and then sighed: “Bless him.”
The local hospital had closed a year before Sears’ death, leaving behind a gutted healthcare system. Martin County does not have paramedics on its ambulances, and it can be 20 miles or more to the closest — and often overcrowded — emergency rooms.
The healthcare gaps in Martin County illustrate the finite reach of a $50 billion rural health fund that Republicans crafted to strengthen support for President Donald Trump’s signature tax and spending measure, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, last year. Though the cash has not been doled out, Republican candidates in competitive midterm elections — including the closely watched battle for the congressional district that encompasses Martin County — are casting the fund as a lifeline that will shore up critical rural health services across America.
The money has been highly anticipated in North Carolina, where most residents live in rural counties. Pierce, a Republican who blames county officials for the hospital closure, said she has faith Trump will help them. “Old man’s doing his job up in there,” she said.
On paper, Martin County — home to about 22,000 people — looks like a top contender to receive at least some of the $213 million that’s been earmarked for North Carolina.
Yet County Manager Drew Batts said it won’t be the answer for his residents.
“The $50 billion is not something that is specifically going to help our situation,” Batts said as he walked into the shuttered hospital in April. “It’s not going to help us get this place reopened.”
Martin County won’t get direct relief from Trump’s rural health fund — because its hospital isn’t open. North Carolina is distributing the money among existing health and social service organizations. Plus, federal regulators set limits on how much can be spent on construction and building renovations.
‘We Can Only Pray’
Martin General Hospital closed abruptly in 2023, surprising employees and shocking patients, who had to be wheeled out on stretchers and transported elsewhere to finish treatment. The closure even stunned local elected leaders, who say the company operating the county-owned hospital, Quorum Health, did not notify them it intended to shut down operations and file for bankruptcy. Quorum spokesperson Lisa Anderson said the company had told county commissioners of the hospital’s ongoing financial challenges.
Politicians have spent the years since trying to reopen the hospital, with county taxpayers pouring an estimated $2.9 million into maintenance, utilities, and other costs in the hopes of resuming operations, Batts said.
The county is now considering spending at least $1.5 million, he said, to create two higher-level paramedic units with quick-response vehicles, specially equipped with electrocardiogram equipment or other “advanced lifesaving support.”
Pierce said she is praying the county can add paramedics and reopen the hospital.
“There’s some answered prayers happening every day,” she said. “So, we can only pray and hope, you know?”
‘They Just Want To Not Die’
With its nine hospitals, the region’s largest health system is ECU Health, connected to East Carolina University. The system has become a de facto safety net for 29 counties. Batts and Brian Floyd, the Greenville-based system’s chief operating officer, have lobbied state and federal lawmakers, walking them through the shuttered hospital and asking for help.
“It’s a real healthcare crisis that has already proven itself to have lost lives that perhaps didn’t have to be lost,” Floyd said. “They just want to not die because there’s nowhere to go when you have an emergency.”
Eleisa Ann Evans drove 2½ hours from a small town near the Outer Banks on a recent evening so her aunt could get care at an ECU Health ER in Greenville. Once there, Evans said, staff told her to leave her 79-year-old aunt in the waiting room and wait outside because of capacity issues.
Evans said she was outraged at the way the staff treated her. She said she had been standing behind her aunt’s wheelchair while inside and “wasn’t using nobody’s chair.”
With Martin General gone, all the surrounding counties are “also in jeopardy,” Floyd said. “No one knows what to do” with that large of a healthcare “desert,” he said.
What healthcare is left in the county includes one urgent care center, run by a private company, and a nonprofit health clinic, operated by Agape Health Services, which accepts patients from five counties and plans to build another primary care clinic to meet demand.
ECU Health signed a letter of intent last year to reopen Martin General as a rural emergency hospital that would provide outpatient care as well as an ER. Under the terms of the deal, Martin County would pay to refurbish the hospital, and the North Carolina General Assembly would have to give ECU Health $210 million, of which $150 million would pay for the construction of a new inpatient tower at ECU’s Beaufort Hospital.
The health system, through its affiliate Access East, won a portion of North Carolina’s $213 million first-year payout from the rural fund. But the federal money can’t be used to reopen Martin General, Floyd said.
The five-year Rural Health Transformation Program is slated to be delivered in $10 billion annual increments to states, which applied and competed for the money.
North Carolina’s plan creates a hub-and-spoke model that allots money to six large regional leads, including nonprofits such as Access East. Those hubs will distribute money to local entities and coordinate broad initiatives such as improving primary care and fortifying the healthcare workforce, as well as developing “digital solutions,” according to the state’s hub application.
An Election Issue
The lack of emergency care in the region has emerged as a top talking point in a close U.S. House race between Rep. Don Davis, a Democrat who represented the district when Martin General closed and is seeking his third term, and Republican Laurie Buckhout.
The rural health fund was added at the last minute in 2025 to win votes for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is expected to reduce federal Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion over a decade — cuts that are projected to hit rural hospitals and clinics especially hard. Rural health executives say the fund won’t come close to offsetting those losses.
Matt Mercer, a spokesperson for the North Carolina Republican Party, called the rural fund a “once in-a-generation opportunity” for the state.
But U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, who was one of three Republican senators to vote against the bill — and who announced shortly before the final vote that he planned to retire from Congress — warned of devastating consequences ahead for healthcare in his state.
Buckhout, who declined an interview, plans to attack Davis — a vulnerable incumbent whose district was recently redrawn to favor GOP candidates — for voting against the bill.
“Martin County lost its hospital on his watch, and he still opposed the funding meant to help communities like it,” Buckhout campaign spokesperson Stephen Gallagher said in a statement to KFF Health News. The campaign did not respond to additional queries about her plans for healthcare access, if elected.
Davis, who signed a letter from lawmakers in support of North Carolina’s rural health fund application, said the money “is essentially putting a band-aid on a much, much broader situation that needs dire help.” He has introduced legislation that would increase Medicaid reimbursements for rural hospitals, though it has not moved forward.
During recent testimony on Capitol Hill in Washington, ECU Health CEO Michael Waldrum said his system expects to lose a billion dollars over the next 10 years from the looming Medicaid cuts.
Overnight Waits for Emergency Care
The region’s emergency rooms offer a stark glimpse of a healthcare system in crisis.
Martin General’s ER treated about 11,000 patients annually before it closed, according to state data. A sign still hangs in the staff break room showing that 23 patients were seen in the ER the day it closed.
ECU Health, which owns all but one of the rural hospitals around Martin General, reported a 132% increase in its daily ER visits since the hospital’s closure. The company’s nearly 1,000-bed hospital in Greenville, about 40 minutes from Williamston, is the state’s only Level 1 trauma center east of Raleigh.
The Greenville hospital’s median patient ER wait and treatment time was nearly 4½ hours, according to the most recent federal data. That’s longer than 96% of thousands of hospitals reporting nationwide. The wait times “don’t reflect poor care,” ECU Health spokesperson Brian Wudkwych said in an emailed statement. He said the system’s ERs treat nearly 300,000 patients annually.
While the system has seen an increase in Martin County patients, the wait times primarily stem from shortages of inpatient and behavioral health beds, Wudkwych said.
Floyd, the ECU Health chief operating officer, said many rural patients who arrive at the system’s ERs have multiple chronic conditions that require longer visits. Often doctors start treating one problem and then find the patient’s “blood sugar is out of control, your hypertension is far out of control,” he said.
ECU staff encourage people who are not too sick to skip Greenville and, instead, seek care at one of the system’s community hospitals, which aren’t as busy, Floyd said.
A security officer guarded the Greenville emergency department’s doors on two nights in April. The “capacity notice” sign near the entrance meant family members of patients had to wait in cars or on benches outside.
“We’ve only been here six hours,” Tonya Miles said after bringing her mother for a potential blood clot in her leg. The family had left the day before after waiting for two hours, because her mom “wasn’t prepared” for such a delay in treatment, Miles said.
On another evening, Olivia Lewis said she had brought her mother two nights previously and left without care after their wait stretched from 10:30 p.m. to 7 a.m.
“She tore off her hospital bracelet and said: ‘I’m out. I’m done,’” she said. Now, they were back.
On a recent Friday in Martin County, Vannessa Little was sitting at a McDonald’s with her kids just down the street from the closed hospital. Little pointed to one of her girls and wondered how her care would have been different if the hospital had been open.
Her daughter, then 6, suffered severe burns over 30% of her body in 2024, and the journey to treatment was “just crazy,” Little said. An ambulance arrived at her Williamston home from neighboring Bertie County to transport them to ECU’s Greenville ER.
“That was a long time,” Little said of the 30-mile drive. The girl was ultimately airlifted more than 100 miles to Chapel Hill. Little said she hadn’t heard of Trump’s rural health investment. “The only changes that people are making is they’re taking away everything.”
She voted against Trump in 2024 and said she didn’t think she would vote this year.
“It’s a waste of my time.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.This <a target="_blank" href="https://kffhealthnews.org/rural-health/rural-health-fund-hospital-closures-north-carolina-martin-general/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://kffhealthnews.org">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://kffhealthnews.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">
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- May 21, 2026
- Rose
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People who got the injection, retatrutide, lost 28 percent of their body weight on average after 80 weeks, Eli Lilly said.
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- May 21, 2026
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In response to abrupt and politicized changes to federal vaccine policy, concerned Coloradans have taken several steps to shore up support for vaccine science.
A bill passed by the state legislature in March then signed into law by Democratic Gov. Jared Polis allows Colorado to further uncouple itself from federal guidance.
The law allows health officials to follow the recommendations of national medical groups when making decisions such as purchasing bulk vaccines for the Medicaid program.
“We are insulating our state from the dysfunction coming out of Washington,” said Democratic state Sen. Kyle Mullica, a co-sponsor of the bill and a registered nurse. “We’re going to rely on science.”
“From fighting during the pandemic for Coloradans to get vaccines as quickly as possible to combating the Trump Administration’s barriers to getting vaccinated, we have expanded access to vaccines for Coloradans who want them,” Polis said in a statement when he signed the law.
Colorado is one of at least 29 states that, along with Washington, D.C., have taken steps to bypass the new federal recommendations amid worries that the changes could chip away at public trust in vaccines and erode broad vaccine coverage.
Previously, Colorado, like most states, had followed federal guidance set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In January, CDC advisory panelists, selected by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., removed six pediatric immunizations from the agency’s universal recommendation list.
Last year, doctors, scientists, local leaders, and other supporters came together to form an outreach and advocacy coalition called Colorado Chooses Vaccines.
The group aims to offer a clear, unified voice on the proven benefits of vaccines and reassure residents confused by the many federal changes.
Carol Boigon, a former Denver City Council member, joined the group because she wants more people to hear her own chilling story about vaccine-preventable illness.
“Every summer everybody got sick,” Boigon said, recounting her childhood in 1950s Detroit.
The illness was polio, a highly contagious viral disease that attacks the nervous system, sometimes causing partial or full paralysis.
During the summer of 1953, “the whole block was sick and some of us got crippled, and that was just the way it was,” she said.
New Group Steps Up
Boigon’s personal history will be part of the coalition’s work to educate new generations about the dangers of infectious diseases that were once common in the U.S. but are now relatively rare.
The group, which formed last September, will also compile vaccine information from medical groups and the state health department and advocate for policy proposals with the state government.
“It was in direct response to the federal threats,” said another coalition member, former state lawmaker Susan Lontine. She leads the nonprofit Immunize Colorado.
Another member, public relations specialist Elizabet Garcia, wants more outreach to Hispanics, whose vaccination rates lag behind other groups’.
“A lot of time it’s this fear that they’re going to have to pay out-of-pocket, that their insurance doesn’t cover it, that they might not even have insurance in general,” Garcia said.
Boigon was 5 when she got sick and was hospitalized for six weeks with a fever. The virus attacked her spine.
“None of my limbs worked immediately afterwards,” Boigon said.
Although she regained function in her other limbs, her right arm never fully recovered. She had to adapt, relearning everyday tasks such as reaching out to shake hands with people with her left hand.
In 1955, not long after she got sick, the new polio vaccine became more widely available to the public. As vaccinations took off, U.S. cases of polio, once one of the nation’s most feared diseases, dropped by an estimated 85%-90%.
Increasing Public Trust
State leaders have taken other steps to promote public health. After the Trump administration pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, several states, including Colorado, decided to join the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network on their own.
Colorado also joined a multistate lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s changes to the childhood vaccine schedule.
And the new state law has provisions besides allowing the state to diverge from federal recommendations. It codifies pharmacists’ ability to prescribe and give vaccines themselves. It also increases legal protections for healthcare workers who give vaccines.
“This law will provide more clarity to guide all Coloradans, including providers who administer vaccines,” Lontine said.
But the legislation has opponents who say it would interfere with parental choice and claim vaccines might be unsafe or ineffective.
“I just want to make sure we’re not just getting into a big political dispute between the federal recommendations — the CDC and so forth — and different political views in Colorado here,” said Republican state Sen. John Carson, who voted against the vaccine bill.
NPR contacted the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services about Colorado’s new law. Spokesperson Emily Hilliard answered in an email: “The updated CDC childhood schedule continues to protect children against serious diseases.”
Preventable Illnesses Surge
The flurry of statewide activity comes as Colorado and the nation have seen surges in illnesses such as flu and measles.
As of mid-May, Colorado had recorded 22 measles cases this year. In 2025, it registered 36 cases, according to the state health department, far surpassing totals from previous years.
Across Colorado, kindergarten vaccination rates for measles were 88% last school year — with only a few counties achieving rates of 95%, the level needed for herd immunity, according to data published by The Washington Post in December.
This has also been Colorado’s worst flu season in recent years.
Vaccination rates for both flu and covid-19 have dropped slightly in Colorado, according to the state health department.
Eight children in Colorado have died this season from flu; one from covid; and one from RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus. Vaccines for all three are available for children and recommended by the state’s health department.
Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, has defended his decisions to overhaul the recommended schedule for childhood vaccinations.
In March, a federal judge put on hold many of the changes.
“We’re not taking vaccines away from anybody. If you want to get the vaccine, you could get it. It’s going to be fully covered by insurance just like it was before,” Kennedy told CBS News in January.
When a reporter suggested the new changes could result in fewer people getting a flu vaccine, Kennedy said: “Well, that may be, and maybe that’s a better thing.”
Boigon is sometimes incredulous at everything that has happened.
“It’s like we’re going backwards,” she said. “It’s like we have decided we don’t want a modern life; we want to be back in the 1950s, where children are sick and dying.”
This article is from a partnership with Colorado Public Radio and NPR.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.This <a target="_blank" href="https://kffhealthnews.org/public-health/colorado-vaccine-law-coalition-cdc-acip-infectious-disease-prevention-polio/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://kffhealthnews.org">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://kffhealthnews.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">
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- May 20, 2026
- Rose
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Aid cuts by the Trump administration have shut down crucial disease surveillance networks and medical supply chains in East Africa.
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- May 20, 2026
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To some Africans, the claim that the continent’s largest health agency had already bungled its response scratched a familiar wound.
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- May 20, 2026
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Julie Rovner, KFF Health News’ chief Washington correspondent and host of the What the Health? podcast, recently spoke with Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) about the ongoing fight between President Donald Trump and Congress over control of federal spending.
Baldwin, who is a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said lawmakers have been forced to take unprecedented action to ensure the Trump administration properly spends taxpayer dollars.
“In this most recently passed bill that Donald Trump signed into law, we had to put guardrails that we’ve never had to put into our appropriations laws before to enforce our spending bills,” Baldwin said. “And those laws have made it clear that we expect that they must spend what we have appropriated, and not just all of it at the end of the fiscal year, but in a timely manner throughout the year.”
The conversation also addressed the success — and Trump-imposed limitations — of the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. The resource, which was created through a bipartisan effort, has led to a notable reduction in youth suicide, according to research published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“It’s heartwarming to know that this work matters,” Baldwin said.
This interview aired May 14 on Episode No. 446 of What the Health? From KFF Health News: “In Search of a New FDA Commissioner.”
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- May 19, 2026
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The prehistoric hominins “apparently were very adept at what we would consider invasive medicine,” said the anthropologist John Olsen.
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- May 19, 2026
- Rose
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The state is leading the country’s reckoning with PFAS. The outcome of its suit against the federal government will affect how courts treat more than 15,000 other claims nationwide.
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- May 19, 2026
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Enrollment in the Affordable Care Act continues to erode as some customers struggle to make premium payments, with the declining numbers churning market uncertainty for insurers. In response, insurers are likely to raise rates again next year, following this year’s larger-than-typical hikes.
Sign-ups were already down in January by about 1.2 million from last year’s record enrollment. For this year, enrollees then faced premiums that increased, on average, by 26%. On top of that, subsidies that help people purchase coverage shrank or vanished.
Now experts are watching how many of the approximately 23 million people who enrolled will fail to pay their share of premiums.
While available data on premium payments is mainly from January, a few states that run their own ACA markets have released information for later months. The sharpest drop in people paying premiums, based on limited data, is in Georgia, which saw a 28% drop in April compared with the same period a year ago, according to an analysis by Charles Gaba, a healthcare policy analyst and blogger who specializes in the ACA.
The news website NOTUS reported May 12 that it had internal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data showing that roughly 21% of people using the federal ACA marketplace — 30 states — failed to pay their share of January premiums, which, if correct, is far higher than at the same time last year.
CMS did not answer questions from KFF Health News about the enrollment data.
In looking at the early numbers analysts released, “we can’t yet quantify how much worse it will be than in previous years, but it will absolutely be worse because of the sticker shock,” said Ellen Montz, a managing director with consulting firm Manatt Health, who helped oversee the ACA during her tenure with the Biden administration.
The initial results come amid rising public concern about affordability, with polls showing that healthcare costs are often top of mind for voters.
A KFF analysis released May 19, for instance, found that the average ACA plan deductible saw the steepest increase in history — growing by 37%, or over $1,000, from $2,759 in 2025 to $3,786 in 2026 as enhanced premium tax credits expired.
Those rising costs pose a political challenge for President Donald Trump and the broader GOP, which has opposed enhanced subsidies to help people purchase Obamacare coverage. Republican lawmakers also passed a spending package last year — enacted as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — that included provisions expected to reduce ACA enrollment and was cited among factors fueling higher premiums this year.
The enrollment reductions “are real people with real consequences,” Montz said. “The Affordable Care Act is a political lightning rod, but it’s a critical component of the coverage landscape.”
Following the Numbers
Right now, the drop-off rate aligns with what some policy experts predicted, partly because Congress did not extend generous benefits that expired at the end of last year. Those enhanced subsidies had been in place since 2021.
“Overall, the individual market does appear to be trending toward a significant contraction in 2026, and may well resemble” drops projected by the Congressional Budget Office, said a report from the Wakely Consulting Group, an analysis arm of the HMA Co.
Based on its analysis, drawn from data provided by 75 insurers, Wakely estimates that average ACA enrollment will end up being 17% to 26% lower this year than last.
So far, the Wakely report says, an average 86% of enrollees made their first payment in January.
Failure to pay premiums varied by state. Those with the lowest drop-off rates had enacted additional help — such as backfilling part or all of the reduced subsidy amounts with state money — or experienced lower premium increases. States that run their own exchanges had higher payment rates (92%) than those served by the federal marketplace (82% to 84%).
Gaba’s initial analysis of data includes more recent numbers from nine of the 20 states that run their own Obamacare marketplaces.
“Georgia could be fairly representative” of other states that did not enact additional protections, Gaba said. For example, payment failure rates, year over year, were 11.6% as of April in New Jersey, and, as of February, 15.7% in Washington state and 8.5% in California.
Only one state in his sample — New Mexico — saw an increase in the percentage of people making premium payments, according to the latest available monthly data. Unlike most, it had set aside state money to fully make up for the lower federal subsidy amounts.
Enrollment figures for the ACA are never static. Traditionally, more people sign up — either through auto reenrollment or by taking initiative to shop — than actually pay premiums, so the numbers tend to be higher at the start of the year.
People drop out over the course of a year for many reasons, such as finding other coverage through a job or by marrying someone with insurance.
Cost, of course, is a factor. This year, because premiums went up and subsidies went down, many people faced costs at least double what they previously paid toward their coverage.
And the Trump administration ended a special enrollment program that let low-income people enroll year-round.
Some ACA critics say enrollment drops should not be seen solely in the context of rising costs. Paragon Health Institute, a free-market think tank that has become influential among conservatives on Capitol Hill, has long argued that record enrollment numbers in recent years were fueled by fraudulent sign-ups, perhaps in the millions.
Insurers, hospitals, and policy experts took issue with the methodology Paragon used to estimate improper enrollments, saying they likely were vastly overestimated.
In a recent Paragon newsletter, the organization’s president, Brian Blase, doubled down on the fraud findings. Using data that detailed how many people failed to make premium payments each year, on average, from 2014 to 2019 — the year before covid emerged and two years before enhanced subsidies kicked in — he offered this prediction for 2026: About 19 million people would be enrolled by year’s end. Even at that, the note says, the “market would be 90% higher than the pre-COVID average.”
For other experts, however, the biggest explanation for falling enrollment is cost.
Some people had never experienced the ACA before the enhanced tax credits kicked in, so they faced extra sticker shock.
“In economic theory, no matter whether one is left, right, or center, it’s a simple fact that when you raise prices of something, fewer people will buy it,” said Sabrina Corlette, co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.
The Long View
The expectation of a lower enrollment trend holding up is one of the key factors likely to translate into higher cost estimates as insurers draw up 2027 rates.
For one thing, though it is still unclear how many people will stay enrolled, it is also unknown whether those enrollees will submit more medical claims than insurers projected. It’s generally thought that younger or healthier people are more likely to drop coverage when faced with growing premiums.
Secondly, there has been a sharp shift by consumers to purchase bronze-level plans, which have smaller monthly premiums but higher deductibles — the amount people must pay out-of-pocket for most treatment, except preventive care, before insurers pitch in. The KFF analysis found that sign-ups for bronze plans jumped from 30% to 40% of total plan selections — growing from 7.3 million in 2025 to 9.2 million people this year. Will they pay? Or will hospitals and doctors be on the hook for uncollected copays or deductibles, and then raise prices to compensate?
Insurers base their premiums, in part, on such analyses.
Another troubling factor for actuaries is the late posting of a key regulation that sets the next year’s rules for ACA health plans. The initial 2027 proposal from the Trump administration came out in mid-February and included aggressive new ideas — such as sharply increasing deductibles for certain types of ACA plans or allowing insurers to offer plans with no set networks of medical providers. It was not finalized until May 15, well into the time when insurers are calculating premiums for the following year. Many of the proposed changes, with some modifications, were approved, such as allowing for higher annual deductibles in some types of coverage.
“This is definitely a challenging year to be an actuary,” said Louise Norris, a health policy analyst for healthinsurance.org, a consumer information and referral website affiliated with Trove Group, an insurance agency.
“We know for sure that the individual market has gotten smaller and almost certainly sicker, as the people dropping coverage are more likely to be healthy.”
While they “aren’t waving huge red flags” yet, insurers are closely watching trends, said Michelle Anderson, a director at Wakely and co-author of the recent report.
Anderson does not expect an average 26% premium increase like the one seen this year.
Still, Anderson expects the ongoing uncertainty and predicted decline in enrollment, which will vary by state and insurer, to play a role in setting next year’s premium rates.
“It would not surprise me if there were some double-digit increases,” Anderson said.
KFF Health News reporter Rachel Spears contributed to this article.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.This <a target="_blank" href="https://kffhealthnews.org/insurance/eroding-aca-enrollment-higher-insurance-rates/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://kffhealthnews.org">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://kffhealthnews.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">
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- May 18, 2026
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Doctors and patients complain that the controversial practice of prior authorization for treatment and procedures is still widespread.
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- May 18, 2026
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President Donald Trump earlier this year bought as much as $680,000 in stock of Eli Lilly, the maker of blockbuster obesity drugs, as the agencies he oversees undertook an agenda that largely benefited the company.
On May 14, the federal government released ethics disclosures revealing a list of stock and bond trades made on Trump’s behalf from January to March of this year. They included extensive trades across the economy, including investments in tech giants such as Microsoft and Nvidia, aerospace firms such as Boeing, and household-name companies such as Target and Chipotle.
In healthcare, however, the trades for Lilly — a company valued by the stock market at just under $1 trillion — stand out. That’s because the timing of Trump’s purchases coincides with several favorable government decisions benefiting the drugmaker’s GLP-1 business, including progress toward a long-held goal: qualifying the drugs for reimbursement from Medicare, the government health insurance program primarily serving seniors, when they are prescribed for weight loss.
The disclosure forms — which bear Trump’s distinct signature — give ranges rather than exact dollar amounts for the trades. They show seven purchases of Lilly stock made on the president’s behalf through the end of March, the first of which occurred on Jan. 6.
During that period, and just afterward, several Trump administration initiatives ultimately benefited Lilly. Perhaps the biggest was an initiative from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which was proposing a pilot program — a temporary “bridge,” potentially followed by permanent reimbursement — through which Medicare patients would pay $50 a month for GLP-1 drugs.
The deadline for drug manufacturers to submit applications indicating their interest in participating was Jan. 8. Lilly has since been named as a participating manufacturer in the program, calling it a “significant milestone.”
Another purchase on Feb. 10, of West Pharmaceutical Services stock valued between $250,000 and $500,000, was similarly a bet on the GLP-1 market. The company, which manufactures injectable devices for drugs, credited growth in its GLP-1 business with driving increased revenue in its most recent quarter.
Lilly declined to comment. West Pharmaceutical Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A spokesperson at the Department of Health and Human Services declined to comment, referring KFF Health News to the White House. A White House spokesperson referred questions to the Trump Organization — the holding company for most of the president’s businesses — which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In response to other outlets’ questions about Trump’s stock trades, the Trump Organization has said the investments are controlled by independent brokers.
It is unclear from the disclosures whether Trump directed any of the trades himself. Four of the Lilly stock purchases are marked “unsolicited,” though the Office for Government Ethics did not immediately respond to a request for clarification on the use of that term.
Trump’s assets are in a trust held by his children, and Trump Organization spokespeople have said in the past that neither the president nor his children play a role in “selecting, directing, or approving” specific investments.
Eric Trump, the president’s son and a Trump Organization executive, said May 15 on X: “To suggest that individual stocks are being bought or sold, at the discretion of any member of the Trump family, would be a lie and blatantly false.”
He claimed the purchases of index funds account for the investments. The disclosures record purchases of funds and individual stocks.
Lilly had a strong 2025, finishing with $65 billion in revenue, up $20 billion from the year before. GLP-1 drugs accounted for a substantial portion of that total.
At the beginning of 2026, the drugmaker said it expected another surge in revenue this year, above $80 billion. It was a “stunning” projection, analysts at the bank Citi said.
Analysts for the financial services firm TD Cowen said the Medicare and Medicaid market would be critical to making it happen. “Guidance anticipates favorable impact from Medicare coverage of obesity medications by 7/1/26,” the analysts noted.
Historically, Medicare hasn’t covered obesity drugs. In a May 2025 open letter, noting unfavorable reimbursement decisions across government and private-run insurance, Lilly said: “This isn’t about just one medicine, formulary, or insurance plan. It’s about a system that limits patients’ and health care providers’ ability to choose an obesity management treatment plan that is best for them.”
Key to that market was the pilot program rolled out by CMS, called BALANCE, aimed at helping Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries improve their health. Last fall, 12% of U.S. adults reported currently using GLP-1s, according to a KFF poll, and 56% of those who had used GLP-1s found the medications — prescribed to treat diabetes and aid weight loss — hard to afford.
The appearance of a potential conflict of interest is enough to trouble ethics experts.
“A president who buys or sells the stock of a company whose value is affected by his administration’s actions undermines the public’s trust in two ways,” said Kathleen Clark, a legal ethicist at Washington University in St. Louis.
First, she said, the public should believe government actions are motivated by common good, not personal enrichment. And second, the public should believe that those within government aren’t benefiting from inside information.
A ban on stock trading by the president would require an act of Congress, though some lawmakers have resisted such legislation. Members of Congress are also permitted to buy and sell stocks.
Trump’s White House and HHS boosted GLP-1s throughout the first few months of the year. In February, the government unveiled TrumpRx, a web portal directing patients to lower-price versions of some drugs, with some terms and conditions.
The website offers Zepbound for as low as $299 a month and points patients to LillyDirect, the drug company’s telemedicine service prescribing the drug. Company executives haven’t commented on TrumpRx specifically, but they have touted the telemedicine service. Lilly’s 2025 annual filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission said LillyDirect was a “growing portion of our business.”
Also, in February the FDA intensified a broad crackdown on “compounded” GLP-1s — drugs manufactured by pharmacies that are cheaper and, critics charge, often unsafe alternatives to Lilly’s branded products.
The agency made another favorable decision for Lilly in April, approving its Foundayo weight loss pill under its Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher program. The program was launched by FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, who had promised to approve high-priority drugs in record time. Foundayo was approved in 50 days after filing.
“This approval demonstrates what the FDA can achieve when we eliminate delays and prioritize fast and thorough work from the agency and industry partners,” Makary, who stepped down last week, said in an April news release.
Not all agency decisions were favorable. The FDA asked Lilly to provide additional safety data regarding liver toxicity in Foundayo, though analysts don’t appear particularly troubled. The company has told news outlets that no negative safety signals have been observed.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.This <a target="_blank" href="https://kffhealthnews.org/health-industry/trump-stock-trades-eli-lilly-glp-1-weight-loss-drugs-invest-ethics-disclosures/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://kffhealthnews.org">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://kffhealthnews.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">
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- May 17, 2026
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The hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius set off alarms for a world still traumatized by Covid. For those on board, the danger was much closer.
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- May 17, 2026
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Straus Family Creamery asked customers to throw out some tubs sold in May across 17 states. No injuries have been reported, the company said.
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- May 16, 2026
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KFF Health News chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner discussed federal policy on vaccine research, vaping, and drug access on Science Friday on May 8. Rovner also discussed the Supreme Court decision on the abortion pill mifepristone on NPR’s Morning Edition on May 5.
Céline Gounder, KFF Health News’ editor-at-large for public health, discussed the rising cost of drug prices, despite hopes about TrumpRx, on CBS News’ The Daily Report on May 7.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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- May 15, 2026
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What you should know about the federal government’s pilot program offering GLP-1s solely for weight loss.
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- May 15, 2026
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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is caught between his Make America Healthy Again supporters who want him to do more to advance their priorities, including curtailing vaccines, and a White House trying to combat President Donald Trump’s unpopularity.
Protesters’ chants could be heard from inside the Cleveland City Club, where Kennedy was speaking to a bipartisan group of citizens as part of his recent tour of northern Ohio. His calls for parents to have more “choice” on vaccinating their children was met with applause from half of the room. The other half released exasperated sighs and gasps.
His travel schedule is about to get busier: Kennedy is expected to stump for GOP lawmakers, traveling to states with competitive races in the upcoming midterm elections.
The goal of Kennedy’s campaign appearances is to shore up support for Republican candidates. But his targeted presence underscores the increasingly intense push and pull Kennedy faces as he works to maintain enduring political viability with GOP voters — especially MAHA supporters.
His challenge is complicated by a widening schism between the White House and Kennedy’s anti-vaccine crusade. Some MAHA adherents feel betrayed by the Trump administration, which they say is thwarting the movement’s agenda by not doing more to limit pesticides, halt access to covid shots, or investigate conspiracy theories about airplane contrails poisoning the skies.
Meanwhile, some in the MAHA camp hope Kennedy will announce his own run for the White House in 2028.
But Kennedy says he has no such aspirations. Asked by KFF Health News on May 7 whether he sees a path to run for the presidency again as a Republican, he replied firmly: “No, I’m not going to run.”
Changing his position about running would put Kennedy on a collision course with President Donald Trump, who’s reportedly weighing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance as possible successors. (Trump, too, has mused about running again in 2028, though the 22nd Amendment would prohibit it.) A Kennedy candidacy could also sap much of the Trump administration’s work on other MAHA causes, because the secretary would likely leave his role at the Department of Health and Human Services.
“If he isn’t secretary, then MAHA’s influence will severely diminish,” said David Mansdoerfer, who served as deputy assistant secretary for health at HHS in the first Trump administration.
“Running would be perfectly logical for Bobby,” said Christopher Bosso, a public policy and political science professor at Northeastern University. “Kennedy is being a good soldier, but to what extent? That is going to be a question.”
‘A Grave Misstep’
Recent Trump administration actions have riled up MAHA supporters. The president in April nominated Erica Schwartz, a doctor and vaccine supporter, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kennedy fired Susan Monarez, the agency’s previous director; she testified she was ousted for not preapproving vaccine recommendations.
Schwartz’s nomination and White House efforts to shift Kennedy’s focus away from vaccines stand in stark contrast with 2024, when Trump pledged to let Kennedy “go wild” on health.
In an interview, Kennedy said “I think I have” gone wild on health. He shot down claims that the White House has limited his work.
“President Trump has let me do more than any HHS secretary in history,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy has said he supports Schwartz, though he told lawmakers last month that he did not discuss her nomination with Trump. MAHA adherents have criticized her backing of covid vaccines, holding it up as evidence that the White House is restricting the health secretary.
“Trump’s pick to head the CDC, Erica Schwartz, would likely be a disaster,” Aaron Siri, a lawyer and Kennedy ally, said on X, citing her work supporting the covid vaccine rollout.
Trump also withdrew the nomination of wellness influencer Casey Means, another Kennedy ally, for U.S. surgeon general. In May, the president nominated Nicole Saphier, a radiologist and former Fox News contributor. MAHA adherents have panned the selection, which reflects a more mainstream and traditional medical approach to the position. Means had faced pushback from some Republican senators for questioning contraception methods and refusing to reject the debunked link between vaccines and autism.
“DOGE the Surgeon General!!! We want medical freedom!!!! If not Casey – we take no one!” Vani Hari, a MAHA influencer, said May 1 on X.
Taken together, these actions threaten to weaken MAHA support for GOP candidates. But many Republicans in competitive races are already distancing themselves from the grassroots, vaccine-skeptical “medical freedom” movement led by Kennedy.
Many MAHA supporters also feel let down by Trump administration directives that rolled back environmental regulations and promoted pesticides. Some now see a Kennedy presidency as critical to attaining their policy goals.
Stephanie Weidle “100%” wants to see Kennedy run again. The 34-year-old Washington, D.C., resident was outside the Supreme Court last month during a rally to oppose protections for the weed-killing chemical glyphosate.
A reliable Republican voter, Weidle described the administration’s actions as disappointing. She wants to see Kennedy go further on examining the childhood vaccine schedule and limiting chemical use on crops.
“His hands have been tied,” Weidle said of Kennedy. She believes the White House has ordered him to back down from those controversial issues. “Republicans have made a grave misstep in not leading with MAHA.”
Vaccines Are a Flash Point
In the midst of these dynamics, Kennedy is attempting to thread the needle between the White House, which wants him to back away from attacking vaccines, and MAHA supporters who want him to do more. He has sought to appease both sides, praising Saphier as the surgeon general pick and describing her on X as a “long-time warrior for the MAHA movement.”
He’s also tempered his public focus on vaccines. His podcast, which he said would “confront the lies” that lead to illness, has veered away from the topic and centered instead on food and nutrition.
During his recent congressional hearings, he also focused on initiatives that poll well with voters. Appearing before the House Ways and Means Committee, Kennedy offered an opening statement focused on healthcare affordability and drug prices, issues he had shied away from during his first few months on the job.
While he mentioned his redesign of nutritional guidelines and pressing industry to cease its use of certain food dyes, he avoided more controversial topics that underscored his first few months in office, including his attempt to upend the childhood vaccine schedule and efforts to explore causes of autism.
Despite his pivot to more popular subjects, Kennedy’s draw weakens beyond MAHA circles. A March straw poll of more than 1,600 attendees at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference found nearly zero support for him as a presidential candidate when participants were asked who they would vote for if the election were held today.
“He has a constituency that is very much attached to MAHA that may not vote in the Republican primaries or in a general election,” said Robert Blendon, professor emeritus of health policy and political analysis at Harvard University.
Kennedy ran for president in the 2024 race as a Democrat, then as an independent, before halting his campaign in August 2024 and throwing his support behind Trump.
Some of the president’s advisers credit Kennedy’s MAHA voters with tipping the scales just enough to help Trump secure his 2024 election win. About a third of U.S. adults now identify as MAHA supporters, according to a March poll by Politico, and support is highest among Republicans who also back Trump’s Make America Great Again political movement.
Vaccine policy is galvanizing voters on both sides. Eighty-one percent of voters said vaccine policy, including decisions about what vaccines are recommended for children, will have an impact on their decision to vote in the 2026 midterm elections, according to a KFF poll conducted in April. Voters said they trust Democrats more than Republicans on vaccine policy and other health issues, according to the poll.
But healthcare — especially its costs — looms larger as an issue. Sixty-four percent of voters said that they are very or somewhat worried about healthcare, including the cost of health insurance and out-of-pocket costs for things like office visits and prescription drugs, and 88% said such costs will have an impact on their vote.
Many of the MAHA faithful question whether their political muscle really matters.
Republicans seem less convinced the constituency will make or break the midterm election results.
Republicans in Congress and the administration “have decided not to run on MAHA for the midterms,” Robert Malone, a scientist and Kennedy ally who stepped away in March from his position on the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said April 16 on X.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.This <a target="_blank" href="https://kffhealthnews.org/elections/rfk-jr-kennedy-2028-run-president-maha-trump-white-house/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://kffhealthnews.org">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://kffhealthnews.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">
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- May 14, 2026
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It’s a nightmare faced by families all around Los Angeles: After wildfire smoke blanketed homes, schools and offices with toxic chemicals, when is it OK to go back?
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- May 14, 2026
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Following a recent outbreak of the deadly hantavirus on the cruise ship MV Hondius, KFF Health News editor-at-large and infectious disease doctor Céline Gounder spoke to numerous media outlets about the risks from the disease. Here are some highlights from Gounder on the evolving story.
WHO: Hantavirus Outbreak Risk to Public Is ‘Absolutely Low’
Gounder joined MS Now on May 8 to explain who is at risk of contracting the disease and what is known about how hantavirus spreads, and to share her thoughts on whether people should be worried about traveling.
Comparing Hantavirus and Covid-19
Gounder joined CBS News’ The Takeout on May 8 to break down how hantavirus differs from covid and what the public should realistically be concerned about.
What People Need To Know About Hantavirus
Gounder joined CBS Saturday Morning on May 9 to share what people need to know about hantavirus, including the steps that the U.S. government is taking to contain the outbreak.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.This <a target="_blank" href="https://kffhealthnews.org/public-health/hantavirus-mv-hondius-news-roundup-celine-gounder-tv-clips/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://kffhealthnews.org">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="https://kffhealthnews.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">
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- May 13, 2026
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In a letter to President Trump, the spokesman, Rich Danker, said allowing the sale of flavored e-cigarettes would enhance their appeal to children.
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- May 13, 2026
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In a dispute over vapes, the president sided with tobacco companies that filled his groups’ coffers over his own F.D.A. commissioner, who resigned in protest.
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- May 13, 2026
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TOLEDO, Ohio — The little boy, dressed in a Toy Story sweatshirt, wrapped himself around the nation’s health secretary.
“What do you guys want to be when you grow up?” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked a carpet full of preschoolers.
“A dinosaur!” the boy replied, squeezing tighter.
Just weeks ago, Kennedy sat before lawmakers on Capitol Hill and faced intense questions about a dangerous uptick in infectious diseases among American children.
Now, with midterm primaries underway, Kennedy was seated in a toddler-sized chair in Ohio, on a mission to change the subject.
Advised to stay away from the anti-vaccine rhetoric that rocketed him to political stardom, Kennedy has been dispatched by the White House to evangelize about the least controversial — and most popular — parts of his agenda. Republicans hope Kennedy’s “Take Back Your Health” tour will help them hang on to voters, many of whom are deeply unhappy with President Donald Trump.
So there Kennedy was in early May, crisscrossing a strip of northern Ohio that includes one of the few congressional districts that Republicans are confident they can flip in November, rotating through a wardrobe of blue suits and blue jeans.
He inspected the kitchen of a Toledo daycare center, where hundreds of the city’s tiniest residents learn and play through the federally funded Head Start program. Under the careful watch of a surgeon, he briefly operated the renowned Cleveland Clinic’s robotic hands on a live patient splayed open for heart surgery. And he munched on pesticide-free squash blossoms from a 400-acre farm.
“I am dismantling a corrupt system and replacing it with something better, replacing it with something that actually addresses the declining healthy American population,” Kennedy said from the dining room table of a farmhouse during an exclusive interview with KFF Health News. He pointed to what he views as his biggest accomplishments over the past year: pressuring some companies to remove dyes from certain foods, updating nutritional guidance, and defining ultraprocessed foods.
“People are paying attention to what they eat, and the industry is listening; the industry is changing.”
But hundreds of miles from Washington’s partisan interrogations, Kennedy couldn’t escape the uncomfortable contradictions and consequences of the Trump administration’s policies.
Taboo Budget Cuts
The classrooms of the Clever Bee Academy displayed freshly printed posters featuring Kennedy’s “Eat Real Food” slogan and the redesigned food pyramid.
Kennedy came with an offering, a $30,000 federal grant to help the center upgrade its kitchen and community garden.
Perched in front of staff and parents, he distanced himself from a White House push last year that could have been devastating to many of Clever Bee’s young students, most of whom live in poverty: the proposal to eliminate the $12 billion Head Start program.
“We were asked to cut our agencies substantially,” Kennedy said. “The two programs that I went to the wall to protect, and find the money somewhere else, was the Indian Health Services, which is always starved for funding, and Head Start.”
The next day, Kennedy stood before goats on a farm in Medina, Ohio, cared for by people sobering up from drug or alcohol misuse at the Hope Recovery Community.
He was there to promise more investments from an administration that has steeply cut staff and budgets over the past year.
Kennedy, who still attends daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to cope with a heroin addiction that gripped him for 14 years, said he hopes to replicate the recovery center’s model nationwide, describing it as an “essential role of government to make sure those services are there.”
Broader access to addiction treatment is part of the Trump administration’s newly released National Drug Control Strategy. But recovery advocates are skeptical more people will get help, with millions expected to lose health insurance under Trump’s watch because of rising Affordable Care Act premiums and the nearly $900 billion in Medicaid cuts under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Kennedy dismissed those challenges, pointing to a $100 million investment in addiction treatment services, including sober housing, announced this year.
“We’re trying to make it more accessible,” Kennedy told KFF Health News.
Trouble in MAHA Paradise
Rows of beds featuring green and purple microgreens awaited Kennedy at The Chef’s Garden, a Huron, Ohio, farm that rejects chemical use in growing its produce.
The health secretary plucked handfuls and tossed them into his mouth, quickly chewing before a new sample was brought before him.
“We are absolutely thrilled that someone at this level of government cares about how food is grown and where it is coming from,” said Bob Jones Jr., a co-owner of The Chef’s Garden.
Seeing more farmers produce chemical-free leafy greens has topped the wish list of those who support Kennedy and the Make America Healthy Again movement, and many who backed Trump in 2024. But in a move that’s threatening to fracture that constituency, Trump has pushed to protect the production of glyphosate, a weed-killing, potentially cancer-causing chemical commonly sprayed on crops and lawns.
Though the group MAHA Ohio extols Kennedy’s agenda and endorses candidates aligned with his movement, director Elizabeth Frost acknowledged tensions between MAHA and conservative policies.
The glyphosate issue is an example “where you have the conservative interests to look out for the interests of the industry, and you have your MAHA interest to be cognizant of the downstream health impacts,” said Frost, who volunteered on Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
Some prominent MAHA influencers have suggested that Trump’s White House staffers are stopping Kennedy from implementing more aggressive policies on certain issues, including further limiting vaccine use, a notion he dismissed.
“To say the White House has tied my hands — the only people who could say that are people who haven’t been paying attention for a year,” Kennedy said. “President Trump has let me do more than any HHS secretary in history.”
He added: “The only thing that people in the MAHA movement complain about is the president’s glyphosate order.”
Staying on Message
Republicans consider Kennedy an asset in the recently redrawn northern Ohio congressional district that Democrat Marcy Kaptur has represented for more than 40 years, and which is viewed as one of the most competitive in the nation.
Fresh off winning the Republican primary for the district last week, Derek Merrin smiled as he shook hands with Kennedy.
“We discussed protecting Lake Erie, strengthening rural hospitals, and our shared vision to improve food quality,” Merrin later posted on Facebook. “Let’s Make America Healthy Again!”
Still, even with Kennedy under advisement to avoid anti-vaccine rhetoric, the issue found him in Ohio. At a forum in Cleveland, family doctor Patricia Kellner said the best way to prevent hepatitis B is by vaccinating newborns — a recommendation that was dropped under Kennedy. She told Kennedy about treating patients with the disease.
“Some of them didn’t know because it can be asymptomatic. Some of them found out when they got liver cancer,” Kellner said. “So why are you opposed to a birth dose of hepatitis B?”
Kennedy responded by suggesting that the hepatitis B vaccine was not safe for babies and was necessary only for certain people.
“Hepatitis B is for high-risk groups like drug addicts or prostitutes, or for promiscuous homosexuals,” he added, eliciting gasps from the crowd.
While the risk of contracting hepatitis B is higher for those who inject drugs or men who have sex with men, the disease can be transmitted in other ways, including through contact with contaminated surfaces or childbirth.
Public health researchers have warned that dropping the universal hepatitis B recommendation will result in hundreds of new infections in children, costing millions of dollars in additional health care costs.
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