Upending decades-old guidance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee voted to no longer issue a blanket recommendation that all newborns receive a hepatitis B vaccine at birth. Throughout the meeting, many panelists made misleading claims about the vaccine.
Here, we address claims about the vaccine’s effectiveness and safety, and other countries’ vaccination policies.
The hepatitis B vaccine, which is typically given in a three-dose series, is highly effective in preventing disease and has a strong safety record. As the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia explains, there are no known serious side effects other than anaphylaxis, or a life-threatening allergic reaction, which is very rare and can be treated.
A universal birth dose was first recommended in 1991, after risk-based approaches had not brought cases down. Young children are the most likely to develop a chronic infection that can lead to liver cancer and other problems. In the decades since, rates of hepatitis B in children have fallen by 99%.
In an 8-to-3 vote on Dec. 5, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices decided to end that policy. If accepted by the CDC director, parents of babies born to mothers who test negative for the virus will now be advised to discuss vaccination with a doctor to decide “when or if” to give the vaccine. For those who opt to forgo a birth dose, the panel “suggested” waiting at least two months to vaccinate.
This type of recommendation, which is known as shared clinical decision-making, has typically been reserved for cases in which experts do not think a vaccine is universally necessary for the recommended group, and there is no “default” answer on whether to vaccinate.
The hepatitis B vaccine would remain recommended at birth for babies born to mothers who are infected with the virus and to mothers with unknown status. The changes should not affect health insurance coverage of the shots.
Numerous experts and medical groups have slammed the decision to end the universal birth dose.
“This irresponsible and purposely misleading guidance will lead to more hepatitis B infections in infants and children,” American Academy of Pediatrics President Dr. Susan J. Kressly said in a statement. “I want to reassure parents and clinicians that there is no new or concerning information about the hepatitis B vaccine that is prompting this change, nor has children’s risk of contracting hepatitis B changed. Instead, this is the result of a deliberate strategy to sow fear and distrust among families.”
The panel also voted to advise parents to “consult with health care providers” about whether antibody testing should be done to determine if a child needs an additional HBV vaccine.
However, experts present at the meeting emphasized that it is not known whether a child who achieves a certain level of antibodies after an incomplete vaccination series will in fact have long-term protection from hepatitis B. Dr. Adam Langer, a CDC staff member with a leadership role in the division tasked with preventing hepatitis, called this “a really huge assumption.” He added, “There really is no reason not to give the full series.”
In the past, members of ACIP were scientists and physicians with particular expertise in vaccinology, pediatrics, and other relevant fields. Many of the current panelists, who were hand-selected by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. beginning in June after he dismissed the existing panel, do not have the typical qualifications and also have expressed views opposed to vaccination.
None of the scientific presentations were given by career CDC staff, as is typical. Instead, presentations were given by ACIP member Vicky Pebsworth, a nurse with a doctorate in public health who has ties to anti-vaccine groups; Cynthia Nevison, an environmental scientist who has volunteered for SafeMinds, an anti-vaccine group, and is now a CDC consultant; and Mark Blaxill, a well-known anti-vaccine advocate with no medical training who was recently hired as a senior adviser at the CDC.
Presenters also did not use the committee’s usual frameworks to evaluate evidence.
Dr. Joseph R. Hibbeln, neuroscientist and ACIP member, repeatedly complained about the lack of a rigorous scientific framework and the evidence to support the votes. He voted no on both.
“No rational science or discussion has been presented on these two novel issues,” he said, noting that no information had been given on why the group should advise vaccination after two months rather than any other timeline, and that there was “no data” on whether the antibody testing would actually work to ensure protection if people were not getting the full series of shots.
In a presentation on the safety of the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose, Blaxill claimed that the “safety evidence is limited” and implied the vaccines were not properly tested in placebo-controlled trials.
“There were basically no randomized or placebo controlled trials, meaning an inert placebo applied to infants and in comparison to the vaccine,” he said of the clinical trials previous ACIP members cited when making the 1991 birth dose recommendation.
This family of claims about placebo-controlled trials, advanced in the past by Kennedy, relies on narrowly defining placebos and on the faulty assumption that a randomized trial with a saline placebo is the only way to show the safety of a vaccine. Vaccines often are compared with other types of controls, such as other vaccines.
Looking at the data available today, there have been more than half a dozen randomized, controlled trials on the safety of the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose, a Dec. 2 report from the Vaccine Integrity Project, an initiative of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, found. These include studies that compared the safety of giving vaccines at birth versus on a delayed schedule. In addition, the review detailed other types of safety studies done in the decades the vaccine has been given to infants at birth and also pointed out that the U.S. and other countries have ongoing vaccine safety programs.
“Results of randomized trials, large national safety monitoring programs, and long-term follow-up studies consistently demonstrate that the hepatitis B vaccine is safe regardless of vaccine timing,” the review said. “No safety benefits were identified for a delayed first dose versus vaccination at birth.”
Dr. Evelyn Griffin, an ACIP member who is an ob-gyn from Louisiana, misleadingly suggested during discussions that the hepatitis B vaccine might cause multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease in which the body mistakenly attacks the protective covering around nerve fibers.
“There are signals of autoimmune conditions,” she said of the hepatitis B vaccine. “Multiple sclerosis, for example, is a large signal.”
Later, she claimed that “a large number of studies” show an association between the vaccine and “multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune conditions,” while acknowledging that associations are not necessarily causal. She wondered whether hepatitis B vaccination should “be paused in the meantime, so that we don’t continue autoimmune risks.”
It’s true that in the 1990s, case reports in France sparked concerns about the hepatitis B vaccine and MS. But as an archived CDC webpage explains, the issue has now been studied more rigorously.
“A large body of scientific evidence now shows that hepatitis B vaccination does not cause or worsen MS,” the webpage, which was last reviewed in 2020, says.
A 2007 French study failed to find any link between hepatitis B vaccination and childhood onset MS, while numerous others have looked at adults and also not found associations.
The World Health Organization’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety has concluded that there is “no association” between the hepatitis B vaccine and MS. The group has also reviewed a couple of outlier studies that have claimed to identify possible links, but has found the evidence unconvincing. Several systematic reviews have also concluded there is no link.
In her presentation, Nevison misleadingly suggested that starting hepatitis B vaccination at birth could be putting people at risk later in life because of waning immunity. While antibody levels do drop over time, there is no evidence that people are getting sick as a result of declining immunity.
Antibodies “wane the most rapidly in children who begin their primary series as infants, especially as newborns,” Nevison’s slides read. “While most vaccinees respond well to a booster dose, some of those vaccinated as infants may lack protection when they enter their years of highest risk for acquiring hepatitis B.”
Noting that he disagreed with many statements in the earlier presentations, including Nevison’s, Dr. H. Cody Meissner, a pediatric infectious diseases expert and ACIP member, explained that it is well known that antibodies wane and in some cases disappear after hepatitis B vaccination. But the focus on antibodies is faulty, he said, because other parts of the immune system are very strong and can still provide protection even if antibodies have declined. He said he did not know of a single healthy vaccinated person later developing hepatitis B disease as a result of waning immunity. “I think the evidence is very strong that there is lifelong immunity to hepatitis B after completing the series,” he said. Meissner voted against both proposals.
Langer, the CDC expert, confirmed later in the meeting that the only instances of breakthrough infections had been in people who had, for example, immunocompromising conditions, and that the agency was not aware of any instances of a properly vaccinated, healthy person ever developing hepatitis B.
Dr. Amy Middleman, a pediatric and adolescent medicine physician at University Hospitals Babies & Children’s in Cleveland and a liaison to ACIP for the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, objected to Nevison’s interpretation of one of Middleman’s studies from 2014.
“The entire point of our study is that for most vaccines, the anamnestic response is really their superpower,” she said, referring to the immune system’s ability to respond more quickly and more strongly when encountering a particular antigen again. “So this study shows that memory cells exist such that when they see something that looks like the hepatitis B [virus], they actually attack. The presence of a robust and anamnestic response, regardless of circulating antibody years later, shows true protection, and there was no difference in response based on when the dose was given.”
“In fact, 99% of those with any detectable antibody and 82% of those with zero antibody displayed persistent immunity to a challenge,” Middleman added, referring to a 2015 follow-up study she co-authored.
Meeting attendees repeatedly compared the U.S. hepatitis B vaccine recommendations with those in other countries, calling the U.S. an “outlier” among peer nations.
“The United States’ universal recommendation of the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose is an outlier among developed countries with low hepatitis B prevalence,” an HHS press release announcing the altered recommendations also said.
However, as we’ve written previously, countries that do not have universal policies differ from the U.S. in multiple ways. In countries with these so-called selective strategies, children whose mothers test negative for hepatitis B typically are recommended to receive the vaccine later, often at 2 months of age, although sometimes as late as adolescence.
“The United States is a unique country,” Langer said during the meeting. “I think that most of us would agree that we don’t really have a peer nation in this world.”
The World Health Organization recommends a birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine, and 115 out of 194 member states have adopted this policy. Nations with more selective vaccination strategies are concentrated in Europe.
“While appropriate to consider US vaccine guidance in the context of global recommendations, US vaccination policies were developed and revised to address real-world challenges related to hepatitis B epidemiology, populations at risk, continuity of care, access to care, costs, and other considerations —that are unique to the US and its healthcare system,” the Vaccine Integrity Project report says.
ACIP member Pebsworth presented a slide showing that a variety of countries with relatively low chronic hepatitis B prevalence do not give a universal birth dose. “This graph shows that the U.S. is an outlier,” she said. She is chair of the committee’s new work group on the childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule, which was tasked with assessing the hepatitis B birth dose in advance of the meeting.
However, the U.S. achieved its relatively low rate of hepatitis B after decades of using public health measures to prevent childhood infections, including recommending a universal birth dose.
On her slide, Pebsworth cited data on international vaccine policy that Langer had presented at the prior September ACIP meeting. But at that meeting, Langer also showed data indicating that countries with selective birth dose policies generally have higher rates of successful screening for hepatitis B during pregnancy and also have universal health care — context Pebsworth did not mention.
During the December meeting, Langer expanded on this point, using Denmark as an example. Denmark’s vaccine policies have often been cited to question U.S. recommendations.
But Langer said that not only does Denmark have a lower population than New York City and a high rate of hepatitis B screening in pregnant women, it also provides free prenatal care “for both citizens and refugee or asylum seekers,” unlike the U.S.
In addition, he said that Denmark collects health information on its population on an individual level, tying it to an identification number, and follows babies of mothers who screen positive for hepatitis B to make sure the babies are protected. “In the United States, many of these infants are lost to follow-up as soon as they leave the hospital,” he said.
Langer said that perhaps a better peer nation is Canada. While hepatitis B vaccination recommendations for children there vary by region, he said, studies recently “have shown that universal hepatitis B birth dose is going to be needed to achieve elimination of hep B in Canada.”
Indeed, a May 2025 study by Canadian researchers argued for a universal birth dose, explaining that a current risk-based policy in Ontario has not entirely prevented hepatitis B cases in children. In addition, the researchers wrote that areas that long ago adopted the universal birth dose now have lower hepatitis B rates in adults than those areas with selective policies. Canadian analyses have also found the birth dose to be cost-effective compared with delaying the vaccine until adolescence.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that he received “total exoneration” in an investigative report by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General regarding a Signal group chat about a military attack in Yemen. But the report contradicts that assessment, concluding that Hegseth’s messages “created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.”
The inspector general report, which was issued Dec. 2 and publicly released two days later, also faulted Hegseth for using a personal cell phone to relay sensitive DoD information, and for not retaining the Signal conversations as official records, as required by federal law and Pentagon policy.
The chat between top administration national security officials on Signal, a private encrypted messaging app, came to light because Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently added to the group chat by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, who was later removed from his job. In one of the messages, Hegseth appeared to provide a timeline for impending U.S. military strikes in Yemen on March 15.
According to The Atlantic, two hours before the scheduled start of the bombing in Yemen, Hegseth shared this in the group chat:
Although Hegseth declined to sit for an interview with the inspector general, he provided a written statement on July 25 in which he insisted he provided only an “unclassified summary” of the operation in the Signal chat.
“I am the Original Classification Authority and, in this capacity, I retain the sole discretion to decide whether something should be classified or whether classified materials no longer require protection and can be declassified,” Hegseth wrote to the inspector general. A copy of his statement was attached to the report. “I took non-specific general details which I determined, in my sole discretion, were either not classified, or that I could safely declassify. In making this determination, I chose to keep the details only to the overt actions of DOD assets, which would be readily apparent to any observer in the area and did not include any details about targets or intelligence which may have been derived from other agencies outside of DoD. The purpose of this was to give the principals in the chat thread a heads up on the timeline, as I knew they were going to shortly be notifying partner nations and within hours would also be giving media interviews about what we had done.”
The inspector general report noted that while the information was classified when it was provided to Hegseth, it agreed that as head of the Department of Defense, Hegseth has the “authority to determine the required level of classification for any DoD information he communicates, such as through a document, message, or speech.”
In response to that conclusion, Hegseth’s spokesman, Sean Parnell, released a statement, saying: “This Inspector General review is a TOTAL exoneration of Secretary Hegseth and proves what we knew all along – no classified information was shared. This matter is resolved and the case is closed.”
Hegseth reposted Parnell’s statement on X and echoed his sentiments: “No classified information. Total exoneration. Case closed. Houthis bombed into submission. Thank you for your attention to this IG report.”
In a separate statement, NPR reported, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “This review affirms what the Administration has said from the beginning — no classified information was leaked, and operational security was not compromised.”
The report did conclude that Hegseth had the authority to declassify any information sent via Signal, but the inspector general’s report was not a “total exoneration,” as Hegseth put it.
In his written response to investigators, Hegseth said that “there were no details that would endanger our troops or the mission.” However, the IG concluded, “[I]f this information had fallen into the hands of U.S. adversaries, Houthi forces might have been able to counter U.S. forces or reposition personnel and assets to avoid planned U.S. strikes. Even though these events did not ultimately occur, the Secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.”
“The Secretary’s transmission of nonpublic operational information over Signal to an uncleared journalist and others 2 to 4 hours before planned strikes using his personal cell phone exposed sensitive DoD information,” the report said. “Using a personal cell phone to conduct official business and send nonpublic DoD information through Signal risks potential compromise of sensitive DoD information, which could cause harm to DoD personnel and mission objectives.”
While Hegseth had the authority to declassify the information, the report noted that based on Hegseth’s written statement, he did send “sensitive, nonpublic, operational information over Signal from his personal cell phone.” The inspector general said that action violated Department of Defense policy, “which prohibits using a personal device for official business and using a nonapproved commercially available messaging application to send nonpublic DoD information.”
The inspector general also concluded that Hegseth violated federal recordkeeping laws and Defense Department policy about retaining public records. “Specifically, those regulations require officers and employees of Executive Branch agencies and DoD employees to forward a complete copy of any record created on a nonofficial electronic messaging account to an official account within 20 days of the original creation or transmission of the record,” the report said.
President Donald Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, on Dec. 1, claiming without evidence that his prosecution had been a “setup” by the Biden administration and that Hernández was targeted because he was president of a country where drug cartels operated.
“If somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life,” Trump said in explaining the pardon.
But Hernández had been found guilty by a jury after a three-week trial. He was sentenced by a U.S. District judge last year to 45 years in prison for using his position to help drug traffickers import more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, while accepting bribes to fuel his political career and protecting violent drug cartel leaders from prosecution in return.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Trump’s action as a reversal of “over-prosecution” by the Biden administration. Hernández had been targeted because he was “opposed to the values of the previous administration,” Leavitt told reporters on Dec. 1.
We asked the White House for evidence or further explanation that Hernández’s case had been a “setup” or “over-prosecution” by the Biden administration, but we didn’t receive any response beyond the statements made by the president and Leavitt on Dec. 1.
Hernández was released from a federal prison in West Virginia on Dec. 1.
Here, we will examine the case against Hernández, Trump’s explanation for the pardon, and the response to Trump’s action.
According to the indictment filed on Jan. 27, 2022, in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, from about 2004 to 2022, Hernández “participated in a corrupt and violent drug-trafficking conspiracy to facilitate the importation of tons of cocaine into the United States.” He received “millions of dollars from multiple drug-trafficking organizations in Honduras, Mexico, and elsewhere, including from the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquin Guzman Loera,” the Mexican drug kingpin known as “El Chapo.”
Hernández used the drug money to fund his political campaigns and commit voter fraud, the indictment said. “In exchange, Hernández protected drug traffickers, including his brother and former member of the Honduran National Congress Juan Antonio Hernández Alvarado … from investigation, arrest, and extradition; caused sensitive law enforcement and military information to be provided to drug traffickers to assist their criminal activities; caused members of the Honduran National Police and military to protect drug shipments in Honduras; and allowed brutal violence to be committed without consequence.”
Hernández “contributed with his co-conspirators to Honduras becoming one of the largest transshipment points in the world for United States-bound cocaine,” the indictment also said. Loads of cocaine were trafficked through Honduras from Colombia and Venezuela by boat and air.
(The Trump administration has been building up the U.S. military presence in the Caribbean in recent months and striking alleged drug-running boats off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia, as we’ve previously written.)
Hernández, who had served two terms as president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, was extradited to the U.S. in April 2022 and was convicted in March 2024 after a three-week jury trial on cocaine trafficking and weapons offenses.
The investigation into Honduras as a drug-trafficking route and the eventual prosecution of Hernández dates back to 2015, the New York Times reported. Emil Bove III, who was then a Department of Justice prosecutor, helped lead that investigation. Bove later became a key defense lawyer for Trump and is now an appeals court judge.
During the trial, according to news coverage, Hernández testified that he had championed anti-crime legislation and worked with the U.S. to fight drug cartels. He said the witnesses against him — which included former drug traffickers — were “professional liars.” Hernández also said he was the victim of “a political persecution.”
In addition to former drug traffickers, the witnesses included a Honduran investigator and evidence from notebooks of drug transactions with Hernández’s initials.
In closing arguments, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacob Gutwillig said Hernández had protected some drug traffickers “with the full power of the state” and that he “paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States.”
On June 26, 2024, Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison by District Court Judge P. Kevin Castel, who was nominated by President George W. Bush. Castel called Hernández “a two-faced politician hungry for power” who pretended to be fighting against drug traffickers while working with them.
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a Justice Department press release at the time: “Hernández helped to facilitate the importation of an almost unfathomable 400 tons of cocaine to this country: billions of individual doses sent to the United States with the protection and support of the former president of Honduras.”
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said Hernández “abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world, and the people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences.”
In late October, a month before Trump announced he would pardon the former Honduran president, Hernández sent a letter, obtained by the Times, to Trump seeking a review of his case.
In the letter to Trump, Hernández, who led the conservative National Party, said he “suffered political persecution, targeted by the Biden-Harris administration not for any wrongdoing, but for political reasons.” He also told Trump that “like you, I was recklessly attacked by radical leftist forces who could not tolerate change, who conspired with drug traffickers and resorted to false accusations, lawfare, and selective justice to destroy what we had achieved and clear the path for the Honduran radical left’s return to power.”
Trump ally and adviser Roger Stone, who had supported the release of Hernández, said he gave the letter to Trump, Reuters reported. A White House official told the Times that Trump had not read the letter before announcing he would pardon Hernández.
In a Truth Social post on Nov. 28, in which Trump expressed support in the recent Honduran presidential election for conservative candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a political ally of Hernández, Trump wrote, “I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.”
(The Honduran election results, delayed by technical problems, showed Asfura and Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla in an extremely close race as of Dec. 4.)
Explaining the pardon to reporters on Nov. 30, Trump said, “Well, I was told, I was asked by Honduras, many of the people of Honduras, they said it was a Biden setup. … The people of Honduras really thought [Hernández] was set up and it was a terrible thing.”
“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Trump continued. “And they said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.”
The next day at a White House briefing, Leavitt was asked how Trump’s defense of Hernández differs from the administration’s targeting of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom the administration has called the leader of a drug cartel.
Leavitt responded: “You’re cherry-picking the president’s statement a little bit yesterday, as he also said yesterday the people of Honduras have highlighted to him how the former President Hernández was set up. This was a clear Biden over-prosecution. He was the president of this country. He was in the opposition party. He was opposed to the values of the previous administration and they charged him because he was president of Honduras.”
Leavitt noted that Hernández “shared that his conviction was lawfare by the leftist party who, quote, struck a deal with the Biden-Harris administration.”
“Hernández has highlighted there was virtually no independent evidence presented,” Leavitt said, and “his conviction was based on testimony from many admitted criminals who hoped that cooperating would reduce their own penalties.” Trump “heard the concerns from many people, as he does, and he’s of course within his constitutional authority to sign clemency for whomever he deems worthy of that,” Leavitt said.
Hernández could still face charges in his home country. After Trump’s plan to pardon Hernández was announced, Honduras Attorney General Johel Zelaya reportedly said prosecutors there would be “obligated to take action … so that justice may prevail and impunity may be brought to an end.” Zelaya did not specify what charges Hernández may face, but the Associated Press reported there were various corruption investigations during his two terms in office.
There was bipartisan criticism from U.S. lawmakers in the aftermath of the pardon announcement.
Democratic Rep. Norma J. Torres of California sent a letter to Trump on Nov. 29 urging him not to grant the pardon, writing: “The victims of Hernández’s crimes, including tens of thousands of American families who lost loved ones to cocaine overdoses, deserve justice. … A pardon would tell these victims that their lives don’t matter and that power can buy freedom even after conviction.”
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana asked on X, “Why would we pardon this guy and then go after Maduro for running drugs into the United States? Lock up every drug runner! Don’t understand why he is being pardoned.”
Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts said in a Dec. 1 interview on CNN that the pardon is “completely absurd. It’s totally hypocritical and it just shows that they are completely unserious about actually dealing with narcotraffickers. They’re not addressing the drug problem. And this Honduran president has been proven in a court of law to be responsible for poisoning thousands of Americans and Trump gives him a pardon?”
Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida told CNN that while she supports Trump’s efforts to oust Venezuela’s Maduro, she did not agree with his decision to pardon Hernández. “I would have never done that,” she said. “I would have not taken that action.”
Speaking to reporters on Dec. 2 about the pardon, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said, “I hate it. It’s a horrible message. … It’s confusing to say on the one hand we should potentially even consider invading Venezuela for drug traffick[ing], and on the other hand let somebody go.”
The head of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine division claimed in a leaked email that “at least 10 children” died from COVID-19 vaccination, using that to justify major vaccine regulatory changes. Experts, however, say too little information was provided to verify the claim.
Studies and safety assessments in the U.S. and other countries have repeatedly shown that the COVID-19 vaccines are remarkably safe, including for children, and do not increase mortality risk. While serious side effects can occur, they are rare.
Dr. Vinay Prasad, the official who penned the memo, used the alleged deaths to announce a variety of ways in which the agency would be more stringent in approving future vaccines, which some experts say are unnecessary and impractical and could reduce access to shots.
In a perspective published Dec. 3 in the New England Journal of Medicine, a dozen former FDA commissioners assailed the memo, saying Prasad’s proposals would “impede the ability to update vaccines” and “suppress innovation and competition,” ultimately “disadvantag[ing]” the American people. They added that deaths reported to the CDC and FDA previously “had been carefully reviewed by FDA staff, who drew different conclusions.”
Prasad was installed as the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which oversees vaccines, in May after his predecessor said Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. forced him to resign.
The email was sent to all CBER staff on Nov. 28 and obtained by multiple news outlets the same day.
“I am writing to report that OBPV career staff have found that at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination. These deaths are related to vaccination (likely/probable/possible attribution made by staff),” Prasad opened the lengthy email, referring to CBER’s Office of Biostatistics and Pharmacovigilance. “This safety signal has far reaching implications for Americans, the US pandemic response, and the agency itself.”
Prasad went on to explain that Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician and then-FDA adviser, started investigating reports of death in children from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, over the summer. By late summer, she had determined “there were in fact deaths,” he said. (On Dec. 3, the FDA announced that Høeg had been appointed acting director of the FDA’s drug evaluation center.)
VAERS is an early warning system that accepts unvetted reports of health problems from anyone following vaccination. The reports do not necessarily mean a vaccine caused a problem, as many events are coincidental. Government websites for VAERS repeatedly caution that it is usually not possible to determine from VAERS data alone whether a vaccine caused an event.
Prasad said he then asked OBPV to analyze deaths reported to VAERS and that the resulting “initial analysis of 96 deaths between 2021 and 2024″ found “no fewer than 10 are related” to vaccination. He added that the coding was conservative and the “real number is higher.”
“This is a profound revelation,” he continued. “For the first time, the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children.”
In closing the email, Prasad said he remained “open to vigorous discussions and debate” but that staff who did not agree with his “core principles and operating principles” should resign.
Prasad did not include details on any of the 10 cases, including age, cause of death or which vaccine had been administered. While he referred to myocarditis in the email, he did not specifically say that the deaths were related to the condition.
Myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, is a known side effect of the COVID-19 vaccines. It is, however, rare, and while it can be serious, is typically mild and less severe than the myocarditis that is caused by other viral infections, including the coronavirus.
Experts told us and other news outlets that given the lack of information, it was unclear how reliable the assessments were. Some also objected to other claims in the email.
“The memo [is] factually incorrect, misleading and disingenuous,” Dr. Anna Durbin, a vaccine researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told us. Prasad “has not provided any evidence to support his conclusion that the vaccine caused the deaths yet asserts he knows the vaccine caused them,” she said, adding that the deaths should be independently investigated.
The FDA did not reply to our inquiry asking for more information, but told the biotech news outlet Endpoints News on Dec. 3 that the agency intended to “make a report publicly available by the end of this month.”
Given the lack of detail, experts said it was difficult to evaluate Prasad’s claim of “at least 10” vaccine-related deaths in children.
“It is impossible to tell from the comments of Prasad any details of the cases and whether they have been comprehensively reviewed and other causes of death have been excluded,” Dr. Kathryn Edwards, a now-retired Vanderbilt University vaccinologist and pediatrician who served on both the CDC and FDA’s vaccine advisory panels, told us in an email. “All deaths reported to VAERS are investigated more fully, but some of the reports do not have comprehensive tests for other causes or autopsies to assess multiple organs.” She added that it is “conceivable” that there were some vaccine-related deaths in kids, “but we have not seen the science to confirm this.”
In previous administrations, Durbin said, reports of VAERS investigations would include how the review of deaths was done, who did the review, and how they came to their conclusions. “We do not have any of this for these. Until we do, it is difficult to assess how rigorous the review was,” she said. “Were those staffers qualified to do the review? I don’t know because none of that information was provided.”
By Prasad’s description, however, it appears that the count includes cases that were deemed only possibly related to vaccination.
One “can never prove with 100% certainty that the vaccine did NOT contribute to the death, so one might question what they meant by ‘possible,’” Susan S. Ellenberg, a biostatistician at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine who oversaw VAERS at the FDA between 1993 and 2004, told us in an email. She said it would be interesting to know which types of deaths were considered possible and which were not, as well as how many of the 10 were likely or probable versus possible.
Durbin said it would be “very unusual” to consider cases vaccine-related if there is another possible or probable cause.
Typically, vaccine safety investigations begin but do not end in VAERS. As we’ve explained previously, and a CDC website notes, the system is good at detecting potential safety issues, but such signals are then investigated through other vaccine safety surveillance systems, such as the Vaccine Safety Datalink, which draws information from U.S. health care organizations.
Such investigations have revealed that myocarditis is a side effect of vaccination, but there is no evidence that the vaccines increase the risk of death.
During a safety update presentation before the vaccine advisory panel in June, a CDC staffer reviewed the existing data, noting that the agency is “confident” that “there’s no increased risk of mortality” after COVID-19 vaccination.
Vaccine-related myocarditis is most common — albeit still rare — in teen and young adult males after a second dose. It is very rare in children below the age of 12 and virtually nonexistent in children below the age of 5, according to the presentation. In recent years, too, the risk of developing myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination has fallen.
A CDC follow-up study of around 500 12- to 29-year-olds experiencing myocarditis after vaccination found that 83% were fully or probably fully recovered after three months, with the rate rising to more than 90% after at least one year. There were no known deaths or cardiac transplants.
It is nevertheless possible that vaccination could be fatal in extremely rare circumstances. There have been isolated reports in the scientific literature of lethal instances of myocarditis that occurred after vaccination, including two cases in teen boys in the U.S. The risk, however, is very low. One 2023 Korean study identified 21 deaths from vaccine-related myocarditis among 44 million people who were vaccinated with at least one dose.
While COVID-19 is usually mild in children, it has caused deaths and many cases of severe disease.
“The number of confirmed covid deaths in children is certainly higher than 10,” Jeffrey Morris, director of the division of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania, told us in an email, adding that the risks go beyond death to hospitalizations, ICU stays, and serious inflammatory syndromes and long COVID.
For a while, although death remained rare, COVID-19 was the eighth leading cause of death in people 19 years of age and younger, and the leading cause of infectious disease deaths.
CDC data show that around 2,000 children have died from COVID-19, including 90 confirmed cases between July 2024 and July 2025, which the agency said is likely an undercount.
Using the alleged VAERS deaths as a rationale, Prasad then proposed broad changes to how the FDA approves vaccines, stating the agency would no longer allow antibody data to be used as a proxy for efficacy when evaluating a new vaccine or extending an existing vaccine to a new population. The method is sometimes called immunobridging.
He also said the FDA would “revise” the framework for approving seasonal influenza vaccines — which he said was “an evidence-based catastrophe” — and would reassess how the agency evaluates the safety of vaccines given at the same time.
In their NEJM piece, the former FDA commissioners explained that immunobridging studies have long been accepted by the agency and are important for updating vaccines against pathogens that rapidly evolve.
“The proposed measures will slow the replacement of older products with better ones and will create potentially prohibitive expenses for new market entrants,” they wrote, adding that the changes would also reduce competition and increase prices. “Moreover, insisting on long, expensive outcomes studies for every updated formulation would delay the arrival of better-matched vaccines when new outbreaks emerge or when additional groups of patients could benefit.”
We previously explained the validity of immunobridging when addressing claims from Makary and Høeg in 2022 about the COVID-19 vaccine approvals in children, which were approved based on the method.
“As a former chair of the vaccine advisory committee, VRBPAC, I can say that vaccines are carefully and meticulously assessed for effectiveness and safety and the reviewers at the FDA are experts,” Edwards said, when asked about Prasad’s policy changes. “These comments do not consider any of the adverse events caused by the diseases that the vaccines prevent. None of the benefits of vaccines are acknowledged and none of the rich history and experience of vaccinologists is being called on.”
Experts took issue with several of Prasad’s other claims, including the suggestion that the Biden administration mandated COVID-19 vaccines in schools — the federal government does not have that power — and the idea that there is not “reliable” data on the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination in children.
The FDA commissioners called the latter assertion incorrect. “Reasonable scientists should engage in open debate about how best to shape recommendations for children at lower risk for Covid-19,” they wrote, “but substantial evidence shows that vaccination can reduce the risk of severe disease and hospitalization in many children and adolescents.”
Prasad also implied that the U.S. should have first identified myocarditis as a rare side effect of vaccination instead of Israel. But as Durbin pointed out, Israel began vaccinating earlier and also had the benefit of a universal health care system, which makes it much easier to detect safety signals.
Prasad said that he has seen “no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines, which do not halt transmission, benefit third parties.” Morris told us that his comments misrepresent the evidence. Before the arrival of the omicron variant in 2021, the vaccines were quite effective in preventing infection and thereby reducing transmission. That has since changed significantly, but even now, there is evidence that vaccination helps prevent spread of the virus to at least some degree for a period of time. The main benefit of the vaccines, however, is to prevent severe disease and death.
In the aftermath of the deadly ambush shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump and others in his administration immediately blamed Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, for failing to vet the Afghan national accused of the attack. Here, we’ll answer some questions about what we know so far about the suspect and the vetting process.
The suspect, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is alleged to have driven across the country from his home in Washington state and then shooting West Virginia National Guard members Sarah Beckstrom, 20, an Army specialist, and Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24. Beckstrom died later from her injuries, and Wolfe remains in critical condition. They were serving as part of what Trump has called a crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital.
Despite Trump’s claims that Lakanwal and other Afghans were “unvetted” and “unchecked,” there are reports that Lakanwal was vetted several times, in Afghanistan and in the U.S., most recently as part of obtaining asylum status earlier this year. Trump officials say Lakanwal may have become radicalized while living in the U.S.
Details about the shooter’s history and possible motivations are still emerging.
Lakanwal is an Afghan national who is reported to have been a member of a paramilitary force that worked with the CIA during the two-decade war in Afghanistan.
Fox News Digital, citing unnamed intelligence sources, reported that Lakanwal “had a prior relationship with various entities in the U.S. government, including the CIA, due to his work as a member of a partner force in Kandahar.”
CBS News reported that in Afghanistan, Lakanwal was part of a so-called “Zero Unit,” an Afghan intelligence unit and paramilitary force that worked with the CIA.
“The units were exclusively composed of Afghan nationals and operated under the umbrella of the National Directorate of Security, or NDS, the intelligence agency established with CIA backing for Afghanistan’s previous, U.S.-backed government,” CBS News reported. “They were considered by the U.S. and its international partners to be among the most trusted domestic forces in Afghanistan.”
FBI Director Kash Patel and CIA Director John Ratcliffe both confirmed that Lakanwal worked with a “partner force” in Afghanistan that included work with the U.S. government, including the CIA.
When the country was overtaken by the Taliban after U.S. forces withdrew in 2021, Lakanwal was among the more than 190,000 Afghans who were resettled in the United States. Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said Lakanwal was living in Bellingham, Washington, with his wife and five children.
Fellow guardsmen who responded to the scene shot Lakanwal, who is “under heavy guard” at a local hospital, Pirro said on Nov. 27. On Dec. 2, he appeared before a judge via video from a hospital bed and pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder, assault with intent to kill and illegal possession of a firearm.
Lakanwal came to the country under Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome following the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Operation Allies Welcome was initiated via a memo from the Biden administration in August 2021 “to lead the coordination of ongoing efforts across the Federal Government to resettle vulnerable Afghans, including those who worked on behalf of the United States.”
According to a contemporaneous press release about the program from the Department of Homeland Security, those brought to the U.S. would undergo a “rigorous screening and vetting process.”
“The U.S. government is working around the clock to conduct the security screening and vetting of vulnerable Afghans before they are permitted entry into the United States, consistent with the dual goals of protecting national security and providing protection for our Afghan allies,” the press release stated. “As with any population entering the United States, DHS, in coordination with interagency vetting partners, takes multiple steps to ensure that those seeking entry do not pose a national security or public safety risk.”
DHS said it deployed 400 personnel from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Coast Guard, and the Secret Service to so-called “lily pad” countries — Bahrain, Germany, Kuwait, Italy, Qatar, Spain and the United Arab Emirates — to process, screen and vet Afghan evacuees in conjunction with the Departments of Defense and State.
The “multi-layered” vetting process included “biometric and biographic screenings conducted by intelligence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism professionals from DHS and DOD, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), and additional intelligence community partners,” the press release said. “This process includes reviewing fingerprints, photos, and other biometric and biographic data for every single Afghan before they are cleared to travel to the United States. As with other arrivals at U.S. ports of entry, Afghan nationals undergo a primary inspection when they arrive at a U.S. airport, and a secondary inspection is conducted as the circumstances require.”
“I can report tonight that based on the best available information, the Department of Homeland Security is confident that the suspect in custody is a foreigner who entered our country from Afghanistan, a hellhole on Earth,” Trump said in a video message on Nov. 26. “He was flown in by the Biden administration in September 2021 on those infamous flights that everybody was talking about. Nobody knew who was coming in.”
In a Thanksgiving call to military service members, Trump held up a photo of Afghans crowding onto a plane to flee their home country after its government fell to the Taliban in 2021.
Trump claimed all of the Afghan nationals brought to the U.S., including Lakanwal, were “unvetted.”
“They were unchecked,” Trump said. “There were many of them. And they came in on big planes and it was disgraceful. … They just walked in. Whoever the strongest people were physically … they got on the planes, there was no check-in. They just swamped the planes, they took off. We had no idea who they were.”
In a press conference about the shooting the same day, Pirro said, “This is what happens in this country when people are allowed in who are not properly vetted.”
“This individual is in this country for one reason and one reason alone, because of the disastrous withdrawal from the Biden administration and the failure to vet any way, in any way, shape or form this individual and countless others,” Patel said at the same press conference.
“The individual, and so many others, should have never been allowed to come here,” Ratcliffe told Fox News Digital. “Our citizens and service members deserve far better than to endure the ongoing fallout from the Biden administration’s catastrophic failures.”
Contrary to the claims of Trump and others in his administration, the Washington Post reported that Lakanwal “underwent thorough vetting by counterterrorism authorities before entering the United States, according to people with direct knowledge of the case.”
While critics have claimed many evacuees were able to enter the U.S. without proper vetting, “Lakanwal, however, would not have been among them, according to the individuals, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation,” the Post reported. “One of the individuals said Lakanwal was vetted years ago, before working with the CIA in Afghanistan, and then again before he arrived in the U.S. in 2021. Those examinations involved both the National Counterterrorism Center as well as the CIA, the person said.”
According to Rolling Stone, Lakanwal “underwent more vetting than most Afghans. No one just joined the CIA’s Zero Units. Soldiers had to be recommended by a close family member or friend. The CIA then vetted each member before even offering a probationary period. The vetting process was so successful that Zero Units never suffered an insider attack — when Afghan soldiers turned against U.S. advisers.”
In addition, the Rolling Stone story said that the roughly 10,000 Zero Unit veterans who resettled in the U.S. “were vetted again” after arriving in the country and “before receiving Special Immigrant Visas, meant for Afghan and Iraqi nationals who worked for the U.S. government.”
Samantha Vinograd, a former top counterterrorism official at the Department of Homeland Security under Biden and now a national security contributor at CBS News, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Nov. 30 that Lakanwal’s first vetting would have been over a decade ago by the CIA prior to beginning work in the Zero Unit, “which was a paramilitary and intelligence force that partnered with the CIA incredibly closely on some very intense missions.”
“But, to be clear, Afghan evacuees have been re-vetted since coming to the United States,” Vinograd added. “They were re-vetted under the Biden administration.”
Lakanwal also would have been vetted as part of his application for asylum, which was initiated during the Biden administration but was approved in April under the Trump administration.
Asked about the Trump administration signing off on Lakanwal’s asylum application, Trump said, “When it comes to asylum, when they’re flown in, it’s very hard to get them out. No matter how you want to do it, it’s very hard to get them out. But we’re going to be getting them all out now.”
“The vetting process … happens when the person comes into the country,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Nov. 30. “And Joe Biden completely did not vet any of these individuals, did not vet this individual. Waited until he got into the United States, and then that application for asylum was opened under the Joe Biden administration, when he was the president in the White House, and allowed that to go forward with the information that they provided. That’s the Biden administration’s responsibility. This is the consequences of the dangerous situation he put our country in when he allowed those people to infiltrate our country during that abandonment of Afghanistan.”
Noem said the Trump administration has since tightened the vetting process to include social media checks.
Asked if there was any vetting as part of the process to approve Lakanwal’s asylum request, Noem said, “The vetting process all happened under Joe Biden’s administration.”
On the same news program, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly dismissed the Trump administration’s blame of the Biden administration.
“Well, this administration, they’re going to blame Joe Biden on everything,” Kelly said. “I mean, it is almost getting comical, you know, at this point. It sounds like there was some vetting done in the last administration. It sounds like they did not do enough vetting before they gave him his asylum claim. She [Noem] talked about changing the vetting process. I think that’s a good idea. I mean, when you see an issue and a process that isn’t quite working, especially after we go through an investigation on this individual, if there are things that need to be changed, we should change them.”
A Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report issued on Sept. 6, 2022, during the Biden administration, warned that vetting of Afghan evacuees was fraught.
“After meeting with more than 130 individuals from the Department of Homeland Security, we determined DHS encountered obstacles to screen, vet, and inspect all Afghan evacuees arriving as part of Operation Allies Refuge (OAR)/Operation Allies Welcome (OAW),” the report stated. “Specifically, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) did not always have critical data to properly screen, vet, or inspect the evacuees. We determined some information used to vet evacuees through U.S. Government databases, such as name, date of birth, identification number, and travel document data, was inaccurate, incomplete, or missing. We also determined CBP admitted or paroled evacuees who were not fully vetted into the United States.”
“As a result,” the report said, “DHS may have admitted or paroled individuals into the United States who pose a risk to national security and the safety of local communities.”
DHS disputed the inspector general’s findings, saying that “the draft report does not adequately acknowledge, and account for, the interagency and multilayered vetting process that started overseas, continued at the U.S. Port of Entry (POE), and is currently ongoing with recurrent vetting.”
A subsequent Justice Department audit issued in June looked at the FBI’s role in vetting the national security risk posed by Afghan evacuees.
“According to the FBI, the need to immediately evacuate Afghans overtook the normal processes required to determine whether individuals attempting to enter the United States pose a threat to national security, which increased the risk that bad actors could try to exploit the expedited evacuation,” the audit said.
However, the review found that while 55 Afghan evacuees who made it to the U.S. were on the terrorist watchlist, as of July 2024, just nine remain on the list and were “being tracked, as appropriate.” According to the report, “The remaining 46 were removed from the watchlist for a variety of reasons, which included a determination by the FBI that the individual was no longer considered a threat to the United States.” (According to the DOJ, “Watchlist nominations are based on derogatory information, which the TSC [Terrorist Screening Center] defines as intelligence or other information that serves to demonstrate the nature of an individual or group’s association with terrorism.”)
Vinograd, the former Biden administration official, acknowledged on “Face the Nation” that while there was pressure to expedite vetting “to help our Afghan partners and bring at-risk Afghans here … protecting national security and public safety was the foremost priority. And that’s why a process was designed that vetted individuals overseas, but it was never intended to be a one-and-done. It was a multistage process with various U.S. government agencies. Afghan evacuees were vetted overseas by graphic and biometric vetting. And then there were other stages of vetting that occurred once individuals were here. So we have to put this vetting process in context.”
In an appearance on CNN on Dec. 1, Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, said that while some Republicans are “trying to create the presumption that the mistakes were made under the prior administration,” Lakanwal was vetted repeatedly.
“Vetting is a very imprecise, imperfect science,” McCabe said. “Vetting depends exclusively on checking someone out by accessing information that we have in our own possession or can get from the country that that person’s coming from. … Essentially we’re left with a process where the absence of any negative information equals a positive result. And that is by definition, you know, not completely reliable.”
“There is no guarantee when you look into someone’s background to grant them entry, that they’ll come here and never make a mistake or commit a crime or do something violent,” McCabe said. “This appears to be one of those instances that obviously has gone horribly wrong.”
“At this point, we don’t have indications that the horrific tragedy was a result of a vetting failure,” Vinograd said. “Instead, the attorney general also said this morning it appears the individual was radicalized once here.
“And let’s be clear on what the vetting system is and what it isn’t,” Vinograd said. “The vetting system is a system in which an individual’s identifiers, their biographic information and biometric information, iris scans, fingerprints, facial images, are run against datasets of information about individuals with ties to terrorism and criminal history. The vetting system is not predictive of whether an individual with no derogatory information is or is not at some point going to become violent.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Nov. 30, Noem said, “We believe he [Lakanwal] was radicalized since he’s been here in this country. We do believe it was through connections in his home community and state, and we’re going to continue to talk to those who interacted with him, who were his family members, who talk to them.”
A more nuanced picture of Lakanwal has begun to emerge since the shooting. Rolling Stone quoted an Afghan veteran who fought alongside him saying Lakanwal was struggling with mental illness and an inability to financially provide for his family. The man said Lakanwal reached out to the CIA for help.
The former unit mate, who was not named in the story, said Lakanwal lost his job at a laundromat because he didn’t have a work authorization card — even though he was granted asylum. He said Lakanwal spoke of isolation and increasing desperation.
ABC News reported that the recent death of an Afghan commander revered by Lakanwal had deepened Lakanwal’s depression and compounded the stress of his financial burdens.
According to the New York Times, the units Lakanwal served with in Afghanistan “had been trained for nighttime raids targeting suspected Taliban members, and were accused by human rights groups of widespread killings of civilians.” The Times said, “The C.I.A. has denied the allegations of brutality among the units, saying they were the result of Taliban propaganda.”
CBS News obtained emails sent by a case worker who was working with Lakanwal’s family in Bellingham, Washington, which described a deterioration of Lakanwal’s mental health in the last two years.
One email described “manic episodes for one or two weeks at a time where he will take off in the family car” and other “interim” episodes in which he “tries to make amends.” According to CBS News, “The case worker, who is not a mental health professional, later said in the email that they believed Lakanwal is suffering ‘…PTSD from his work with the US military in Afghanistan.'”
“Rahmanulla was a man who was extremely proud and capable in the world he came from, who felt defeated in the world he came to,” the case worker said.
“The investigators haven’t revealed any indication that he was in touch with other radicals,” McCabe said on CNN. “But what is pretty clear is that this person, this Lakanwal, went down, really his life sort of devolved in the last year. We know that he was vetted before he was allowed to work with the CIA and our special forces folks. If there had been any indication at that time that he had contacts with known terrorists or with sympathetic to Taliban or other terrorist viewpoints, he never would have been approved to work with the U.S. military or the CIA.”
In his video message, Trump said, “We must now reexamine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden, and we must take all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country who does not belong here, or add benefit to our country.”
On X, Joe Kent, Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, also blamed poor vetting by the Biden administration. “This is why the DC attack happened,” Kent wrote. “The solution is rounding up everyone Biden let in & deporting them immediately.”
In response, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced, “Effective immediately, processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols.”
The State Department, meanwhile, announced on Nov. 28 that it had paused visa issuance for individuals traveling on Afghan passports.
Trump subsequently announced that he would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover.” On Dec. 2, USCIS announced in a memo it was pausing the review of all pending applications for green cards, citizenship or asylum from immigrants from 19 countries that were part of travel restrictions implemented in June.
The vaccine advisory committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is scheduled to meet Dec. 4 and 5. On the agenda: the hepatitis B vaccine, the overall childhood vaccine schedule and vaccine ingredients. We’ll summarize what we’ve written about these topics and what the committee has said about them in recent meetings.
The group, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, was reconstituted in June by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The committee has since departed from its normal evidence-based procedures and has made changes to its vaccine recommendations amid misleading claims about vaccine safety.
As we have written, the panel previously was scheduled to vote in September on a recommendation to delay the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine but tabled the vote at the last minute. The committee presented no clear rationale for why it was considering delaying the birth dose, and one member cited “trust,” and not safety, as the motivator. Since universal hepatitis B vaccination for infants was recommended in 1991, hepatitis B infections in children have fallen by 99%. Babies and young children who are infected with the hepatitis B virus are disproportionately likely to develop chronic infections, which can lead to liver failure and liver cancer.
Also on the bare-bones agenda are items related to the vaccine schedule, vaccine safety monitoring and a presentation titled “Adjuvants and Contaminants.” The committee also typically votes during its fall meeting to approve the next year’s vaccine schedule documents, Jason Schwartz, who studies vaccination policy at the Yale School of Public Health, told us in an email. These documents compile existing recommendations as a resource for health care providers and parents. Such votes are on the design and footnotes of the documents but do not affect “the underlying recommendations” and do not have “immediate consequences for vaccine access or affordability,” he explained.
The committee will meet this week under new leadership. On Dec. 1, HHS announced that biostatistician and epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff’s short tenure as chair of the committee was over and that he had been appointed to a leadership role in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. The committee’s new chair is pediatric cardiologist Dr. Kirk Milhoan, another Kennedy appointee, who has a history of promoting treatments for COVID-19 that are not evidence-based and making unfounded claims about COVID-19 vaccination.
Milhoan confirmed to the Washington Post that the group would vote on delaying the hepatitis B birth dose, although the extent of the delay is “still being finalized,” he said. He also said that the group would discuss the effects of the childhood vaccine schedule on chronic health conditions.
In October, the CDC staffers tasked with supporting the committee were let go, according to the Guardian.
Meanwhile at the Food and Drug Administration, a leaked Nov. 28 letter from vaccines regulatory division head Dr. Vinay Prasad announced a new, stricter framework for regulating vaccines. He justified this proposal by claiming, with little detail to back it up, that COVID-19 vaccines had killed at least 10 children. FDA senior adviser Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician, was involved in the investigation into the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, Prasad wrote. Høeg is an ex officio member of ACIP.
Hepatitis B vaccination takes up the majority of the agenda on the meeting’s first day, which includes an anticipated vote on whether to delay the birth dose. Kennedy long has misleadingly claimed that it’s unnecessary to give a dose of the hepatitis B vaccine at birth because the virus is spread via sexual contact and drug use. But an infected mother can transmit the virus to her baby during birth or after, and it also can be spread by other family members or close contacts through minute amounts of blood.
Getting a hepatitis B vaccine at birth provides a safety net for babies, in case an infection in a mother is missed or the baby is later exposed to another infected person. About half of people in the U.S. who have hepatitis B do not know it, according to data presented at the September meeting by a CDC staff scientist.
A Dec. 2 review by the Vaccine Integrity Project, conducted in advance of the anticipated hepatitis B vaccine vote, found “no evidence of any health benefit with delaying the birth dose and identified only risks related to changing current US recommendations for universal hepatitis B vaccination.” The Vaccine Integrity Project is an initiative of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy that provides evidence-based information on vaccination.
Opponents of the universal birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine have questioned why some countries have different hepatitis B vaccine strategies than the U.S., but the CDC presentation pointed out that many of these countries have a higher rate than the U.S. of successfully screening mothers for hepatitis B before they give birth and also have universal health care systems.
The move toward changing hepatitis B vaccine recommendations was introduced during an ACIP meeting in June, preceding the September meeting in which the group discussed but failed to vote on whether the birth dose should be delayed by one month.
The group did vote to recommend that all women be tested for hepatitis B during pregnancy. However, this is “already standard clinical practice and outside ACIP’s purview,” a review of the meeting by former ACIP members pointed out.
The member who made the motion to table the hepatitis B vaccine vote, Dr. Robert Malone, subsequently said he had done so because the proposed delay was “not sufficient.” Malone has for years spread false and misleading information about vaccines. Later in September, President Donald Trump suggested that the first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine should be delayed until 12 years of age.
The September presentations leading up to the tabled hepatitis B vote offered little detail on topics that would ordinarily be discussed before changing vaccine recommendations, including whether there could be practical ramifications from changing the vaccine schedule. However, the nonprofit Vaccinate Your Family and others have expressed concerns that changing the timing of a child’s first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine could affect subsequent doses, making it more difficult to use certain commonly used combination vaccines. The childhood vaccine schedule recommends three hepatitis B vaccine doses.
“Changes to recommendations for any component within a combination vaccine risk reducing options for families and could disrupt vaccine supply and limit access for years,” the pharmaceutical company Sanofi wrote in a Nov. 25 public comment posted in advance of the ACIP meeting. “These supply challenges would extend beyond combination vaccines to include stand-alone vaccines that prevent diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, Haemophilus influenzae type b, and polio.” Sanofi makes Vaxelis, a combination vaccine protecting against hepatitis B along with these other listed diseases.
The second day of the meeting will focus on a wide variety of topics related to vaccine safety, “Adjuvants and Contaminants,” and the vaccine schedule overall, per the agenda. No votes are listed on the agenda for this day.
It is unclear precisely what the presentations will cover, but the topics overlap with interests of a new ACIP work group established under Kennedy. This group will review “the safety and effectiveness” of the childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule, per a document posted in October.
In this document, the work group suggested it would revisit when and in what order vaccines are given and which vaccines should be given together, for example. As we have written previously, new vaccines are studied in the context of the current vaccine schedule and are approved if shown to be safe and effective. A Dec. 2 post on the Substack Unbiased Science explained that the vaccine schedule has been built over time based on multiple considerations, related to ideal timing to get the best protection, established safety of giving immunizations at the same time, and practicality.
ACIP chair Milhoan also told the Washington Post that the committee is beginning a discussion of aluminum adjuvants, an interest also noted in the new work group document.
Adjuvants are substances added to vaccines in small amounts to improve a person’s immune response to the vaccines’ main ingredients. The most commonly used vaccine adjuvants are aluminum salts, which were discovered to work for this purpose nearly 100 years ago.
In recent months, Kennedy has made incorrect and misleading statements about aluminum adjuvants, cherry-picking and misusing data from a July 15 Danish study to claim that aluminum in vaccines has been linked to autism. In fact, this large study found no association between aluminum in vaccines and 50 chronic conditions, including autism.
Kennedy also ordered a Nov. 19 update to a CDC webpage on vaccines and autism, which repeated these claims about the Danish study. The webpage also cited evidence of “a positive association between vaccine-related aluminum exposure and persistent asthma,” based on a 2022 CDC-funded study.
However, the new CDC webpage failed to note that the Danish researchers, who originally set out to replicate the 2022 study, did not find an association between aluminum content in vaccines and asthma. The first author of the 2022 study, pediatrician Dr. Matthew Daley of Kaiser Permanente Colorado’s Institute for Health Research, in July told STAT that the new Danish study was “well done” and “reassuring.”
The ACIP agenda does not specify what “contaminants” will be discussed. At the group’s September meeting, presenters discussed alleged “DNA contamination” in mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. However, claims of higher-than-expected levels of DNA in COVID-19 vaccines are based on flawed analyses that have been contradicted by other assessments. Moreover, as we have written before, the small quantity of DNA left over in vaccines from the manufacturing process is expected and is not considered contamination.
The House voted nearly unanimously on Nov. 18 to force the Department of Justice to release “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” related to the investigation and prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein. After resisting the release for months, President Donald Trump threw his late support to the bill, which he signed shortly after the Senate also passed it by unanimous consent.
Epstein, a financier, was arrested on charges of sex trafficking of minors in July 2019 and died in prison a month later. His death was ruled a suicide by the Department of Justice. Federal prosecutors alleged Epstein had “sexually exploited and abused dozens of underage girls” from 2002 to 2005.
A week before the vote, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released several emails that they said called into question Trump’s relationship with Epstein and whether he had knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. The same day, Republicans on the committee released 20,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate.
In the days before and after the bill passed, lawmakers from both parties hurled accusations against political opponents related to Epstein and the contents of some of the released documents. Here, we’ll sort out what’s behind some of those claims.
Democratic Rep. Melanie Stansbury claimed during a Nov. 17 appearance on CNN that the recently released Epstein documents “name multiple cases involving sexual assault conversations Epstein had that involved the president and his time at his house, and the evidence that Donald Trump absolutely knew that Ghislaine Maxwell was recruiting and grooming young women from Mar-a-Lago and bringing them to Epstein’s house.”
Both parts of that claim overstate what the documents have revealed so far. Stansbury’s comments leave the false impression that evidence has been released showing that Trump “absolutely knew” about recruitment and sexual abuse of underage girls. Her office referred us to emails that only show Epstein making comments that could be interpreted that way but don’t show evidence of Trump knowing about criminal acts. Maxwell was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in jail in 2022 for helping Epstein to recruit and groom victims under 18 years of age.
When we asked Stansbury’s office for the evidence to support the claim, a spokeswoman provided four email exchanges from the recent release.
Some of them show that Epstein had said that Trump knew about his recruitment of girls from Mar-a-Lago through Maxwell. The messages don’t specify if Epstein was talking about underage girls.
Some of them show that Epstein had said that Trump had been at his house with girls, although they don’t explicitly say anything about sexual assault.
First, we’ll assess the claim that “Donald Trump absolutely knew that Ghislaine Maxwell was recruiting and grooming young women from Mar-a-Lago.”
On Nov. 12, Democrats released three emails from a total of about 23,000 documents belonging to Epstein. One of those emails, from Epstein to the author Michael Wolff, referred to Mar-a-Lago and Trump and said, “of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”
When a reporter asked Trump two days later, on Nov. 14, “what did Jeffrey Epstein mean in his emails when he said you knew about the girls?” Trump responded, “I know nothing about that.”
Over the summer, Trump said he knew that Epstein had been hiring female employees from Mar-a-Lago, but the president’s comments didn’t pertain to any knowledge of Epstein abusing girls. The president was receiving questions at the time about a birthday message to Epstein that featured a drawing of a naked woman and appeared to have Trump’s signature — although Trump has denied that he wrote the message.
“I have a great spa, one of the best spas in the world at Mar-a-Lago and people were taken out of the spa, hired by him. In other words, gone. And other people would come and complain this guy is taking people from the spa. I didn’t know that. And then when I heard about it, I told him, I said, listen, we don’t want you taking our people,” Trump said on July 29, referring to Epstein. “Whether it was spa or not spa, I don’t want them taking people and he was fine and then not too long after that, he did it again and I said, ‘out of here.’”
In a follow-up question, a reporter asked if one of the workers recruited from Mar-a-Lago was Virginia Giuffre, who was one of the women who came forward to publicly accuse Epstein of abusing her while she was underage. She died by suicide in April. Giuffre has explained that Maxwell first approached her when she was working at Mar-a-Lago at the age of 16.
“I think that was one of the people. Yeah. He stole her,” Trump said.
Second, we’ll assess the claim that the documents show “multiple cases involving sexual assault conversations Epstein had that involved the president and his time at his house.”
The emails highlighted by Stansbury show that, in 2015, Epstein had corresponded with Landon Thomas, who wrote the 2002 New York Magazine story famously quoting Trump saying of Epstein, “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
In one email to Thomas, Epstein wrote, “would you like photso [sic] of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen,” although it’s unclear whether or not he had such photos.
Another email exchange highlighted by Stansbury was between Epstein and Maxwell in 2011. There, Epstein wrote, “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. [victim’s name was redacted] spent hours at my house with him.”
In an email that Epstein had sent to himself in 2019, he recounted parts of the 2008 plea agreement under which he admitted to soliciting minors for prostitution, which was a state charge in Florida. He wrote in that email that Trump “came to my house many times during that period.”
There have been various accounts over the years about when Trump stopped socializing with Epstein — most of them put the time frame in the early 2000s, before Epstein’s first arrest in 2006. Recently Trump has characterized the time he spent with Epstein as minimal, saying on Nov. 18, while he hosted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, “I have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. I threw him out of my club many years ago because I thought he was a sick pervert.”
When asked about the emails at a Nov. 12 briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “These emails prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong.”
In the released files, Virgin Islands Delegate to the House of Representatives Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat, was confirmed to have had text exchanges with Epstein. On Nov. 18, House Republicans introduced a resolution to censure Plaskett for “colluding with convicted felony sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a congressional hearing.” The censure attempt failed, but a few days later, Republican Rep. James Comer claimed during a Fox News interview that Plaskett was colluding with Epstein to take Trump “down.”
“A few months after that communication between Plaskett and Epstein, Jamie Raskin named Stacey Plaskett as an impeachment manager,” Comer said. “So she was an impeachment manager in Congress, and she was communicating and colluding with Jeffrey Epstein to try to take Donald Trump down.”
Colluding is a subjective word, but we’ll break down the communication between Plaskett and Epstein. (As a delegate, Plaskett can participate in House debates, but she does not get a vote in House floor sessions.)
The text messages, which were first reported by the Washington Post, show Plaskett and Epstein exchanging several texts before and during a congressional hearing in February 2019 involving Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen — 11 years after Epstein pleaded guilty to solicitation of prostitution and to solicitation of prostitution with a minor under the age of 18 in 2008. (A few months after the hearing, in early July 2019, Epstein was arrested on charges of sex trafficking of minors.)
Cohen was testifying about Trump’s alleged misconduct in falsifying business records in order to pay “hush money” to silence a porn star shortly before the 2016 election. Trump was found guilty in a New York court in 2024 of falsifying business records as part of an illegal scheme to influence the 2016 election; he recently appealed the conviction.
The Washington Post reported that Plaskett exchanged several texts before and during the hearing, with Epstein appearing to have influenced Plaskett’s line of questioning with Cohen.
At 12:25 p.m., Epstein texted Plaskett, “Hes opened the door to questions re who are the other hechmen at trump org.”
Plaskett responded, “Yup. Very aware and waiting my turn.”
Later in the hearing, Plaskett asked Cohen about other associates in the Trump Organization whom the House “should be meeting with.”
In another exchange, the Washington Post reported that Epstein texted Plaskett that “Cohen brought up RONA – keeper of the secrets.”
Plaskett responded: “RONA?? Quick I’m up next is that an acronym?”
Epstein was referring to Rhona Graff, a former personal assistant to Trump and senior vice president of the Trump Organization. Following this exchange, Plaskett asked about Graff later in her questioning of Cohen.
Epstein and Plaskett also exchanged personal messages, according to the Post. Earlier in the hearing, Epstein texted Plaskett: “Great outfit” and “You look great” to which Plaskett responded, “Thanks!”
Plaskett has since denied any wrongdoing. After the Washington Post article was published on Nov. 14, Plaskett’s office released a statement distancing the congresswoman from Epstein.
“During the hearing, Congresswoman Plaskett received texts from staff, constituents and the public at large offering advice, support and in some cases partisan vitriol, including from Epstein,” her office wrote. “As a former prosecutor she welcomes information that helps her get at the truth and took on the GOP that was trying to bury the truth. The congresswoman has previously made clear her long record combating sexual assault and human trafficking, her disgust over Epstein’s deviant behavior and her support for his victims.”
Five days later during a Nov. 19 CNN interview, in response to a question asking about her relationship with Epstein, Plaskett responded, “Jeffrey Epstein was a constituent.” (Epstein owned a pair of islands in the Virgin Islands.)
In response to another question asking why she was in contact with Epstein despite his known status as a sex offender, Plaskett responded, “I’ve been a prosecutor for many years. And there are a lot of people who have information that are not your friends that you use to get information for to get at the truth.” She later went on to say, “As a prosecutor, you get information from people where you can. I’ve interviewed confidential informants. I’ve interviewed narcotics, drug traffickers and others, and that doesn’t mean that I’m their friend. … It means that they have information that I need. And that I’m trying to get at the truth, and that’s what I did.”
Plaskett has previously been involved in other controversies surrounding political donations from Epstein. An ABC News report found that in the 2016 and 2018 election cycles, Plaskett received $8,100 from Epstein, which she later pledged to donate to organizations working with women and children.
Defending Plaskett from the House floor on Nov. 18, Rep. Jasmine Crockett said Republicans could spare her “with your moral high grounds.”
“Folks who also took money from somebody named Jeffrey Epstein, as I had my team dig in very quickly: Mitt Romney, the NRCC, Lee Zeldin, George Bush, Win Red, McCain-Palin, Rick Lazio,” Crockett said. “I just want to be clear, if this is the standard we are going to make, just know, we’re going to expose it all. And just know, that the FEC filings, they are there for everybody to review.”
But as Zeldin, now the EPA administrator, later pointed out on X, the Jeffrey Epstein who contributed to his House reelection campaign is not THE Jeffrey Epstein. As the Federal Election Commission records note, the Jeffrey Epstein who contributed a total of $1,000 to Zeldin in 2020 is a Long Island, New York, physician. Another Jeffrey Epstein from New Jersey who contributed $500 to Zeldin in February 2020 is the owner of a beverage company, FEC records indicate.
Moreover, all of the contributions were made in 2020, and Epstein, the convicted sex offender, died in August 2019.
“Yes Crockett, a physician named Dr. Jeffrey Epstein (who is a totally different person than the other Jeffrey Epstein) donated to a prior campaign of mine,” Zeldin posted on X. “NO FREAKIN RELATION YOU GENIUS!!!”
Three $250 contributions to Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012 were also made by a Jeffrey Epstein who is listed as a physician living in Long Island, the same physician who donated $500 in 2008 to the McCain-Palin campaign.
In an interview on Nov. 19, CNN anchor Kaitlin Collins asked Crockett if she wanted to set the record straight.
“Listen, I never said that it was that Jeffrey Epstein,” Crockett said. “Just so that people understand, when you make a donation, your picture is not there. And because they decided to spring this on us, in real-time, I wanted the Republicans to think about what could potentially happen, because I knew that they didn’t even try to go through the FEC. So my team, what they did is they Googled, and that is specifically why I said a Jeffrey Epstein. Unlike Republicans, I at least don’t go out and just tell lies. Because it was not the same one? That’s fine. But when Lee Zeldin had something to say, all he had to say was, it was a different Jeffrey Epstein. He admitted that he did receive donations from a Jeffrey Epstein. So, at least I wasn’t trying to mislead people.”
Zeldin posted a video of Crockett’s comments and responded, via X: “When you find yourself in a hole, it’s best to stop digging.”
In another X post, Zeldin wrote, “It’s such a foolish bet to double down on stupid. I’ll always be ready to push back with receipts. … [T]he right move for Crockett would have been to just confess her mistake, and ditch the spin job.”
Business Insider, citing the Center for Responsive Politics, reported that Epstein, the convicted sex abuser, made a single $1,000 donation to George H.W. Bush’s unsuccessful 1992 reelection campaign. Former Rep. Rick Lazio, a Republican who represented New York’s 2nd district, got $2,000 worth of donations from Epstein in 1996.
But as the Center for Responsive Politics reported in 2018, while Epstein donated to various Republican candidates and groups over the years, the vast majority of his donations were to Democratic candidates and groups, including former President Bill Clinton and Sens. John Kerry and Chris Dodd.
Comer, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, also linked campaign fundraising efforts on behalf of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to Epstein, citing a solicitation email sent to Epstein in 2013 seeking his support. Jeffries denied any knowledge of the email and called Comer “a stone cold liar.”
Speaking on the House floor on Nov. 18, Comer said the email “shows Democrat fundraisers invited Epstein to an event or to meet privately with Hakeem Jeffries as part of their 2013 effort to win a majority. Hakeem Jeffries’ campaign solicited money from Jeffrey Epstein. That is what we found in the last document batch.”
Documents released by Republicans on the Oversight Committee include a May 7, 2013, campaign solicitation to Epstein distributed by the fundraising firm Dynamic SRG, seeking participation in a Democratic fundraising dinner and offering “an opportunity to get to know Hakeem better.”
Comer shared the email from Dynamic SRG in a post on X. The email reads, in part: “Dear Jeffrey — We are thrilled to announce that we are working with Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, one of the rising stars in the New York Congressional delegation. Sometimes referred to as ‘Brooklyn’s Barack’, he is a staunch supporter of President Obama and a progressive voice for the people of New York City. … Hakeem is committed to electing a Democratic majority in 2014 and is encouraging his friends to participate in the DCCC/DSCC fundraising dinner with President Obama this coming Monday night. Shoot us an email or give us a call … if you would like to get involved with the dinner, or would like to get an opportunity to get to know Hakeem better.”
Jeffries responded to Comer at a press briefing on Nov. 20, saying, “I have no idea what James Comer is talking about in terms of anything that any prior consultant may have sent. I had no idea about that either, but James Comer apparently made the representation on the floor of the House that I sat down with Jeffrey Epstein, had dinner with Jeffrey Epstein, have contributions from Jeffrey Epstein. He’s a stone cold liar, and James Comer knows it.”
Jeffries also told CNN, “I have no recollection of the email” referred to by Comer. “I’ve never had a conversation with [Epstein], never met him, know nothing about him other than the extreme things that he’s been convicted of doing,” Jeffries said, and added that he had never received a political donation from Epstein.
Comer responded to Jeffries’ “liar” comment by posting the email, which Comer’s office has said “speaks for itself.”
We reached out to Dynamic SRG for comment on Jeffries’ knowledge of the email solicitation and to whom it was sent, but we did not receive a response.
We could find no record of political donations from Epstein to Jeffries.
After six congressional Democrats released a video advising members of the U.S. military and national security community to “refuse illegal orders,” President Donald Trump said the lawmakers should be tried in court for “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” But legal experts told us this was not sedition and that the legislators were restating the law that only lawful orders must be followed.
“Sedition is trying to overthrow the government with force or violence,” Eric R. Carpenter, a professor of law at Florida International University College of Law, said in an email to us. “In the video, the elected officials are just telling service members to follow the law. They are not telling service members to overthrow the government.”
The White House later said that Trump didn’t mean the Democrats should face the death penalty, but the press secretary argued that the video encouraged troops to defy the president.
Here, we cover what the lawmakers said, how Trump responded, and what legal experts have said about the video and the president’s claims.
The 90-second video was posted on social media and online on Nov. 18 and features Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, Rep. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, and Reps. Chris Deluzio and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania. All are either military veterans or former intelligence officials.
In the video, the lawmakers state their credentials and remind members of the military and national security community that they swore to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution.
“Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home,” Deluzio, a former Navy officer, and Crow, a former Army ranger and paratrooper, say, in turn.
Kelly, a former Navy captain, then says, “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders,” which Slotkin, once a CIA officer, repeats for emphasis. Crow then adds that military members “must refuse illegal orders,” before the other lawmakers say “no one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”
The ad concludes with the members of Congress saying, “Don’t give up the ship,” a reference to a last command attributed to James Lawrence, a Navy captain, during the War of 1812.
The senators and representatives never mention a specific unlawful order they believe was given. But the New York Times reported on Nov. 18 that Slotkin, who organized the video, “said that she had heard from active-duty troops who were concerned about the legality of strikes that have targeted people accused by the Trump administration of trafficking narcotics by sea.”
“Some wondered whether they could be held personally liable for the deaths, she said,” according to the Times. (We have written that some legal experts have said the U.S. strikes on boats off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia were “not lawful.”)
In an ABC News interview on Nov. 23, Slotkin said she was “not aware of things that are illegal” that Trump has ordered the military to do. But she said “certainly there are some legal gymnastics that are going on with these Caribbean strikes.” She also said she has concerns about “the use of U.S. military on American shores,” and she noted that “we’ve seen now the courts overturn” Trump’s “deployment of U.S. military into our streets,” including in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.
The video “was basically a warning to say, like, if you’re asked to do something, particularly against American citizens, you have the ability to go to your JAG officer and push back,” she said, referring to military lawyers known as judge advocates general.
Two days after the video was posted, Trump responded on social media, calling the Democratic lawmakers traitors guilty of sedition.
“It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand – We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET.”
In another post, he labeled it, “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
He also amplified a post from another user, who wrote, “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”
His comments elicited a response from the six Democrats, who issued a joint statement the same day.
“What’s most telling is that the President considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law. Our servicemembers should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oath to the Constitution and obligation to follow only lawful orders. It is not only the right thing to do, but also our duty,” they said.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified in a Nov. 20 press briefing that Trump doesn’t think the lawmakers should be executed. She said he only responded that way because members of Congress “conspired together to orchestrate a video message” encouraging members of the military and national security apparatus “to defy the president’s lawful orders.”
“The sanctity of our military rests on the chain of command and if that chain of command is broken, it can lead to people getting killed. It can lead to chaos. And that’s what these members of Congress who swore an oath to abide by the Constitution are essentially encouraging,” she said.
But the Democrats said to “refuse illegal orders” — not “lawful” ones. It’s a crime to disobey “any lawful general order or regulation,” according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Carpenter told us there is a “strong presumption” that military orders are lawful and must be followed by members of the military. “They refuse orders at their own risk,” he cautioned.
He said that service members have a legal defense for any actions taken while they are following legal orders, but that defense doesn’t apply if they are following unlawful orders. “So, the basic rule is, follow orders unless they are obviously unlawful.”
As for Trump’s sedition claim, generally, federal law says that “seditious conspiracy” occurs when multiple people conspire to “overthrow,” “put down,” “destroy by force,” “levy war against” or “oppose by force” the U.S. government.
The penalty for seditious conspiracy is a maximum of 20 years in prison, a fine or both – but not death. (Active-duty and certain retired members of the armed forces who commit “sedition,” as defined by the UCMJ, may be punished by death, the military code says.)
But legal experts in addition to Carpenter told us that the message in the Democrats’ video does not amount to sedition.
“Trump’s efforts to cast this legal speech as seditious is nonsense,” Victor M. Hansen, a professor of law at New England Law in Boston, said in an email.
“These statements are not seditious or any evidence of a conspiracy,” the former Army JAG officer said. “Simply reminding service members of their legal rights and obligations is not criminal in any way.”
“It is so far from seditious behavior,” Berit Berger, a former federal prosecutor, said in a Nov. 20 CNN interview, noting that sedition “is a specific crime” that “requires advocating” or “planning to overthrow the government through force.”
For example, several people who plotted and participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the transfer of presidential power were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Berger said sedition is rarely prosecuted and “it’s very hard to charge somebody with sedition based just on something they say” since “people have a right to criticize their government, to say things, even inflammatory things, that the government might not like.”
Brenner M. Fissell, a professor of law at Villanova University and vice president of the National Institute of Military Justice, told us that current law prevents the seditious conspiracy statute from being applied as “broadly” as it was written. He pointed to the Supreme Court’s 1969 ruling in the First Amendment case Brandenburg v. Ohio.
“Under the Brandenburg test, speech would have to be intended to produce imminent lawlessness, and also likely to produce imminent lawlessness,” he said. “The lawmakers’ video would fail the imminence requirement, but it also does not advocate lawlessness — it is merely re-stating the military law” that “only lawful orders require obedience.”
“So, the video is not sedition or seditious conspiracy,” Fissell said.
Carpenter said that if an elected official “is retired and an officer, then they could be prosecuted for conduct unbecoming an officer.” But even that would be a “stretch” in this case, he argued, because “they were just telling service members to follow the basic legal structure.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Nov. 24 that Kelly, the Arizona senator who retired as a high-ranking Navy official, is now under investigation for his participation in the video.
Addressing a meeting of McDonald’s restaurant owners, President Donald Trump distorted his predecessor’s record on employment, falsely claiming that government jobs were increasing while “real jobs” were declining. The number of private-sector jobs increased every year under former President Joe Biden’s term and was up about 12% by the time he left office.
At the McDonald’s Impact Summit on Nov. 17 in Washington, D.C., Trump told the franchise owners and operators, “Government jobs were going up, real jobs were going down. … You are so damn lucky that I won that election.”
The president also claimed later, “In nine months, we’ve lifted over 600,000 Americans off of food stamp[s], and that’s a record.” Enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly called food stamps, declined more than that in the final months of Biden’s presidency.
When Trump said that “government jobs were going up, real jobs were going down” under Biden, we assume he meant private-sector jobs when referring to “real” jobs. But the number of private-sector jobs grew every year of Biden’s term.
The White House didn’t respond to our question about Trump’s claim.
The number of private-sector jobs increased by 14.3 million under Biden, an 11.8% increase, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Government jobs also increased by 1.8 million, or 8.3%, a slower rate than private-sector jobs.
Some of Biden’s gains, as we’ve noted, were due to recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic. So, the job gains were larger earlier in his presidency.
Under Trump, between January and September, the last month for which data are available, the number of private-sector jobs increased by 567,000, a 0.42% increase. That was slower private-sector job growth than the same time period during Biden’s last year in office, when private-sector jobs increased by 956,000 jobs, a 0.71% increase.
Previously, Trump has accurately said that during Biden’s last two years in office, about 26% of the jobs added were government jobs. But as we’ve written, about 90% of those jobs were positions in state and local government, where Biden would have no direct influence.
Trump did cut about 97,000 federal government jobs as of September, according to preliminary BLS data, while 31,000 federal government jobs were added in the same period during Biden’s last year in office. The decline during Trump’s first nine months was due partly to the efforts of his new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, purportedly to reduce government costs and increase efficiency. However, hundreds of employees who were fired have been rehired in recent months, according to reports from NPR and the Associated Press, and some government departments, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, have seen a surge in hiring.
Overall, government jobs — including federal, state and local positions — increased by 6,000 jobs from January to September.
Touting his other economic policies, Trump also said in his address to McDonald’s owners, “in nine months, we’ve lifted over 600,000 Americans off of food stamp[s], and that’s a record.”
According to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, 41.7 million people in 22.4 million households, or nearly 1 in every 8 Americans, received benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, in May, the most recent month for which data is available.
As Trump said, more than 645,000 people stopped receiving SNAP assistance between January and May, according to the USDA.
But Kate Bauer, an associate professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, told us that the decline in SNAP recipients since January is not “a record.”
Between October 2024 and January 2025, the month the Trump administration began, SNAP enrollment declined by 870,304, Bauer said in an email. “Based just on this, 600,000 wouldn’t be a record decline. In general, participation has been bouncing around” between 43 million and 41 million over the past few years, she said.
From September 2024 to January 2025, SNAP enrollment did increase by 63,939 individuals, and during Biden’s entire time in office, SNAP participation went up by about 0.6%, or 255,368 people.
We asked the White House about the president’s claim that 600,000 was “a record” decrease in SNAP participants. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told us in an email, “President Trump’s proven economic formula of tax cuts, deregulation, and unleashing American energy has cooled inflation, raised real wages, and promoted growth. As a result,” Kelly said, “Americans have been lifted off of SNAP thanks to this President’s successful policies.”
Sara Bleich, a professor of public health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told us, “By design, SNAP is countercyclical, meaning that enrollment is designed to increase during economic downturns and decrease as the economy improves. During the second quarter of 2025, the economy was a bit stronger and monthly SNAP enrollment numbers are lower in May/June 2025 compared to January 2025. All that is perfectly normal and expected.”
Bleich said “several intentional actions by the Trump Administration during that period may have dampened enrollment.” She cited Trump’s executive order in February that “directed federal agencies to block undocumented people from accessing public benefits (who by the way were already ineligible for SNAP but this may have discouraged participation among immigrants who are eligible).”
Bleich also said that stricter work requirements for SNAP applicants included in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act will result in “more declines in SNAP participation going forward.”
“Bottom line, it is not really accurate to say that people are being ‘lifted out of the program,'” Bleich said. “SNAP is operating as normal (with people rolling off as the economy improves) and participation has simultaneously been discouraged by deliberate actions to dampen participation.”
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