Some Restaurants Are Ditching Seed Oils. It Could Cost Them.
Stuart Brioza, a chef and an owner of the acclaimed San Francisco restaurants State Bird Provisions, the Progress and the Anchovy Bar, never imagined that switching kitchen oils could be so political.
Two years ago, he stopped using grapeseed oil in favor of sugar-cane oil, which he thought was less processed and more flavorful, adding a buttery note to vinaigrettes and aiolis.
Mr. Brioza only recently realized that the decision to stop using seed oil aligned him with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, who is known for espousing conspiracy theories about vaccines, fluoride and other public health issues.
Mr. Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again movement have rallied against seed oils, including canola, soybean and corn oils, declaring — without meaningful scientific evidence — that they are harmful for health.
'I have no association with that movement,' said Mr. Brioza, whose restaurant hosted a fund-raiser for Kamala Harris last year, 'or anything that has a funny acronym and rhymes with MAGA.'
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Los Angeles Times
10 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
With slate of anti-vaccine moves, RFK Jr. steps up his assault on public health
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, loves to pose as an avatar of 'evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense.' So it's proper to ask why his defense of his recent initiatives related to vaccine policy is packed to the gunwales with cherry-picked data, flagrant misrepresentations of scientific findings and absurd, even slanderous, claims about science and scientists. I last wrote about RFK Jr.'s reign at the agency on June 2, apropos of his release of a 73-page 'assessment' of the health of America's children titled 'The MAHA Report' (for 'Make America Healthy Again'). I observed that the report was filled with 'obvious errors, misrepresentations and outright fabrications of source materials, some of them plainly the product of the authors' reliance on AI bots.' Would that the report marked the nadir of Kennedy's work as secretary of Health and Human Services. Alas, not so. Since then, he has doubled down on his attacks on public health in America, especially when it comes to vaccine policy. On June 9 he summarily fired the 17 public members of the authoritative Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or ACIP. Kennedy also sent members of Congress a fact sheet justifying his May 27 lifting of CDC recommendations that pregnant women and healthy children receive COVID vaccinations. The fact sheet was disclosed last week by KFF Health News, which identified numerous distortions and misrepresentations of scientific research in the document. The most important of Kennedy's initiatives was his evisceration of ACIP. The committee's recommendations on vaccines, once accepted by the CDC, dictate which vaccines private insurers will pay for as well as those the U.S. government will provide free of charge to low-income children. The abrupt firings, wrote Edwin Asturias of the University of Colorado, one of the fired ACIP members, 'have stripped the program of the institutional knowledge and continuity that have been essential to its success over decades.' He said Kennedy's actions 'have left the US vaccine program critically weakened.' The unpaid members of the committee are typically physicians, epidemiologists and vaccine scientists. As Science documented in March, the members are required to divest all vaccine manufacturer stock before they join, as are their family members; quit any service on vaccine company scientific advisory boards; and quit any consulting for vaccine companies. Kennedy placed his contempt for science and scientists front-and-center in announcing the changes to ACIP and in his subsequent comments. On June 10, he wrote on X: 'Yesterday I retired 17 members' of ACIP,' accusing ACIP members of 'malevolent malpractice' in their recommendations on childhood vaccinations. In an appearance on Fox News two days later, Kennedy singled out one of the nation's leading vaccine experts, Paul Offit of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, for having voted on ACIP to approve a rotovirus vaccine for children and subsequently selling the patent on a vaccine 'he owned and developed' for $186 million. His accusation prompted Offit to post a rebuttal, in which he noted that he had left ACIP in 2003, and the rotovirus vaccine he developed didn't come up for a vote until 2006. He also noted that he wasn't the owner of the vaccine, despite Kennedy's assertion — he developed it as an employee of the Children's Hospital, and therefore the hospital owned the patent and the vaccine. On Fox, Kennedy also asserted that a government investigation had reported that '97% of the people on the committee had conflicts of interest.' The report he referred to, however, said nothing of the kind. Produced by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, the report examined ethics rules at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It didn't find that 97% of ACIP members had conflicts of interest, but that 97% of the financial disclosures filed by independent advisers to the CDC on 17 committees — a far larger universe than ACIP alone — lacked certain documents. In effect, it focused on paperwork errors. Most of the omissions, the report stated, involved advisers who were employed by institutions were 'potential CDC grant recipients.' It did not say that those advisers had conflicts, only that they hadn't disclosed that they worked for entities that might be in line for CDC grants in the future. In his announcement, Kennedy misrepresented the research that had been done on vaccines commonly recommended for children. On Fox, he claimed that among childhood vaccines, only the COVID vaccines had been tested against placebos and found to be safe and effective. In fact, according to Stanford infectious disease expert Jake Scott, every vaccine has been tested against some form of placebo; some in use today had been tested against earlier versions of the shot, which themselves had been tested against placebo. As I explained earlier, testing every new formulation against saline solutions, which Kennedy advocates, would be unethical because it would require depriving trial subjects of known treatments for a disease. By no means can Kennedy's ACIP appointments be interpreted as an upgrade to the committee's expertise. Among the 17 members Kennedy 'retired' were professors of medicine at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Vanderbilt, Stanford, Cornell and the Universities of North Carolina and Iowa; and 10 experts in epidemiology, infectious diseases, public health, pediatrics and gerontology. Among their replacements are several with established anti-vaccine records. The worst aspect of Kennedy's ACIP roster is its almost total absence of expertise in the field the committee is charged with overseeing. 'Generally speaking,' observed immunologist and epidemiologist Michael Mina on X, what's missing are 'experts in diseases vaccines prevent, experts in vaccines, infectious disease epidemiology [and] clinical trials.' Mina concluded, 'If this was the private sector, no way would this group pass muster.' As for putative conflicts of interest, Science found that of ACIP members who were appointed by President Biden in 2024, only eight had received any payments from vaccine makers in 2017-2023. The payments averaged about $4,100 a year, mostly as honoraria for talks and reimbursements for travel. Larger amounts comprised grants to institutions where some members were employed, but not to the members themselves. Curiously, given Kennedy's expressed horror at supposed conflicts of interest on ACIP, he seems to have overlooked an apparent conflict of Martin Kulldorff, one of his appointees. Kulldorff is a former Harvard professor who was a drafter of the notorious Great Barrington Declaration, which asserted that if anti-pandemic policies were directed chiefly at vulnerable populations such as seniors and COVID was allowed to run rampant among children, youths and adults without troublesome medical conditions, the U.S. would achieve 'herd immunity' against the virus in a matter of months. Never mind that a similar strategy produced a horrific toll in Sweden, where it was eventually reversed. Kulldorff has been an expert witness for plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the drug company Merck over supposed adverse side effects of Gardasil, collecting tens of thousands of dollars at a rate of $400 an hour. I asked Kulldorff and Kennedy's agency whether that record should disqualify Kulldorff from serving on ACIP or if he should at least recuse himself from votes on Merck products, but received no reply. I also asked Kennedy's agency to respond to criticisms that his assertions were rife with junk science, but also received no reply. That brings us to the supine response of Congress to Kennedy's actions. And by supine, I'm referring specifically to Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician. All eyes were on Cassidy as Kennedy sought Senate confirmation, because he had raised questions about the candidate's fitness for the office and he was seen as a bellwether on the nomination. Cassidy fell into line with a speech on the Senate floor Feb. 4, in which he stated that Kennedy had promised him that he would maintain ACIP 'without change.' Quite obviously, Kennedy played Cassidy for a fool. When I sought Cassidy's reaction to Kennedy's breach of his promise, a Cassidy spokesman replied that Kennedy's commitment 'was about the ACIP process, not staffing.' I asked when and where Cassidy first backed off by referring to 'process' — whatever that is — but received no reply. After the ACIP bloodletting, Cassidy posted on X: 'Of course, now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion. I've just spoken with Secretary Kennedy, and I'll continue to talk with him to ensure this is not the case.' Then there's the fact sheet about his ending the CDC recommendation of COVID vaccination for pregnant women and healthy children that Kennedy distributed to members of Congress. The document describes one study as having found that cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, heart inflammations, 'were found exclusively in those that received the COVID-19 vaccine,' especially young males. The study made no such finding, according to one of its co-authors. Indeed, several studies have found that the risk of those conditions was greater among patients who contracted COVID itself than those who received the shot. In any event, the condition is rare among vaccinated people. The document also misrepresents the conclusions of papers it cited to question COVID vaccinations for pregnant women. None of the cited papers supports that recommendation. Instead, they support COVID vaccinations for pregnant women. Kennedy's action not only could increase vaccine hesitancy among people who would benefit from the vaccines. It could also make the shots less accessible, because insurers may deny coverage for vaccines that are taken off the CDC recommended list. Kennedy asserted that his actions against vaccines are aimed at enhancing the transparency and credibility of government recommendations on immunization. Every step he has taken, however, has undermined his credibility and that of the agencies charged with protecting public health in America. His campaign will be costly indeed, not only in money, but in lives.
USA Today
a day ago
- USA Today
RFK Jr. and MAHA agenda divide country but vaccines have widespread support: Poll
RFK Jr. and MAHA agenda divide country but vaccines have widespread support: Poll Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy's overall approval rating sits at 51 percent, though the party breakdown shows a big divide between Democrats and the GOP. Show Caption Hide Caption RFK Jr. appoints 8 new members to vaccine committee Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced eight new members to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's independent vaccine advisory committee. unbranded - Newsworthy Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again agenda unites people from both parties - but not always in favor of his positions, a recent poll shows. Most Americans blame the food industry for the nation's chronic health problems, echoing arguments Kennedy has long made against 'Big Food,' according to the results of the NBC News Decision Desk Poll released June 16. At the same time, close to 80% of U.S. adults support the use of vaccines for prevention of diseases - a stark contrast from the controversial views on vaccines held by the Cabinet secretary appointed by President Donald Trump. Public opinion of Kennedy Jr. is also divided: 51% of the respondents said it was favorable and 48% picked unfavorable for the former 2024 presidential candidate who ran as a Democrat and then as an independent before dropping out to endorse Trump. More: RFK Jr. suspends campaign; endorses former President Trump A majority of Democrats (82%) say their opinion of Kennedy is either strongly "unfavorable" or 'somewhat unfavorable,' while 84% Republicans view Kennedy as either 'strongly favorable' or 'somewhat favorable.' Among independents, 52% have a favorable view of Kennedy, the son of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy. The poll was conducted online from May 30-June 10 among a national sample of 19,410 adults age 18 and up. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.1 percentage points. Among the poll participants, 37% described themselves as Democrats, 37% as Republicans and 26% as 'Independent or something else.' Asked about the use of vaccines to prevent diseases, 69% of Republicans, 93% of Democrats and 76% of independents responded to the NBC poll that they support immunizations to protect public health. Kennedy has repeatedly called into question the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Earlier this month, he fired the entire committee that advises the federal government on vaccine safety, implying that it was not conducting "adequate safety trials" before recommending new vaccines to children. Kennedy later appointed to the panel a physician criticized for spreading COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories. Vaccine experts widely dispute Kennedy's characterizations. More: RFK Jr.'s MAHA movement is coming to a state near you NBC's pollsters also asked who deserved the most blame for America's chronic health problems, including obesity and heart disease. A majority at 35% blamed the food industry, followed closely by the 'choices of individuals' at 32%. Kennedy has been a big critic of Big Food and Big Pharma, blaming them for Americans' high rates of chronic ailments like Type 2 Diabetes and accusing the industries of profiting by keeping Americans sick. In April, he announced that eight artificial dyes will be eliminated from medications and the nation's food supply by the end of 2026, including those found in candy, ice cream, soft drinks and jams. Only 6% of respondents blamed environmental toxins - which Kennedy has blamed a host of ailments on - as a reason for chronic diseases. The MAHA Commission report released by Kennedy last month identifies various toxins and environmental factors as potential contributors to chronic disease in American children. He has also announced a series of studies aimed at studying possible environment causes behind autism, which scientists continue to push back on. Last month, the right-leaning think tank Foundation for Government Accountability released a poll showing a similar pattern to NBC's results. It found more than 80% of Democrats and Republicans said they were in support of a U.S. prohibition on certain dyes and chemicals from foods in the same way they were banned in some European countries. Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House Correspondent for USA TODAY. You can follow her on X @SwapnaVenugopal
The Hill
a day ago
- The Hill
Slight majority views RFK Jr. favorably: Poll
A slight majority of Americans questioned — 51 percent — view Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. favorably, according to an NBC News poll released on Monday. Slightly fewer than half of respondents — 48 percent — view him unfavorably, including a majority of Democrats surveyed. When questioned about Kennedy's 'Make America Healthy Again' policies, 35 percent said that said the food industry was the most to blame for America's chronic health problems and 32 percent said the choices of individuals were the biggest contributing factor. Twelve percent picked socioeconomic status, 10 percent pointed to health insurance companies and 6 percent listed environmental toxins as top reasons for chronic health issues. Kennedy has pledged to focus on ultra-processed foods, especially for children. His remarks on vaccines are also closely watched. In late May, the CDC said that it would no longer recommend regular COVID-19 shots for healthy children and pregnant women. Last week, he removed every member of the independent panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines, citing a need to 're-establish public confidence in vaccine science.' He the named new picks to the body that included several critics of vaccines as well as people who had spread misinformation during the pandemic. In the new survey, 80 percent of respondents said they supported the use of vaccines to prevent disease, including majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Another 13 percent 'somewhat' opposed using vaccines to prevent disease, and 7 percent said they 'strongly' opposed it. Younger and older voters were more likely to say they 'strongly' supported vaccines, pollsters found. The online poll of 19,410 respondents, conducted May 30 to June 10, had a margin of error of 2.1 percentage points.
