(The Epoch Times)—In his department’s latest move related to vaccine-related reform, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Aug. 1 announced more repeals of federal policy that rewarded hospitals for reporting staff vaccination rates.
Kennedy said in a press release that the policy was coercive and denied informed consent.
“Medical decisions should be made based on one thing: the wellbeing of the person—never on a financial bonus or a government mandate,” Kennedy said. “Doctors deserve the freedom to use their training, follow the science, and speak the truth without fear of punishment.”
Created under the Biden administration’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) inpatient payment rule, the policy linked hospital reimbursement to staff vaccination reporting.
“Doctors and other providers should have the same autonomy to choose what’s right for their own individual health care needs as the patients for whom they care. Today’s announcement helps put that power back in their hands,” CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said in the press release.
The move represents the most recent policy repeal under CMS. These moves are “part of a broader HHS effort to restore medical autonomy in federally funded programs and root out financial and regulatory pressures that incentivize physicians towards pre-scripted medical decisions rather than individualized, evidence-based care,” according to the press release.
Since taking office as HHS secretary, Kennedy has implemented multiple changes regarding vaccines.
The Food and Drug Administration in late May said it planned to limit access to future COVID vaccines to people 65 and older and individuals with underlying health conditions.
The agency also announced it would permit vaccine manufacturers to coordinate in-depth studies to assess the efficacy and safety of COVID vaccines in children and younger, healthy adults.
In recent months, HHS has also dismissed all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine advisory panel, ended the CDC’s COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for pregnant women and healthy children, and ordered the removal of mercury from influenza vaccines.
After it voted to advise officials to stop recommending influenza shots that have mercury, the remade Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) said it plans to look at multiple other vaccines.
Martin Kulldorff, the new chair of ACIP, said on June 26 that one proposal is to notify the CDC that young children should not receive the measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella (MMRV) combination immunization.
The agency instead would recommend that children under the age of 47 months get two separate vaccines: the measles, mumps, rubella shot, and the varicella, or chickenpox, vaccine.
Kulldorff noted that the change would reflect data that indicate the MMRV combination vaccine causes more febrile seizures. The CDC reported the same information in a background paper dated June 25.
A vote on the issue could happen as early as the next ACIP meeting, which is expected to be held in August or September.
Dr. Tina Tan, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said in a statement that “re-examining the childhood vaccine schedule and the use of thimerosal are both politically motivated actions that are not based on science.”
“Raising questions without adequate data casts doubt on vaccination, which can further drive down confidence in vaccines. More than any other medications, vaccines are extensively and constantly reviewed and evaluated,” she added.
During the ACIP meeting, Kulldorff explained that Kennedy had given the committee “a clear mandate to use evidence-based medicine for making vaccine recommendations.”
“Vaccines are not all good or bad. If you think that all vaccines are safe and effective and want them all, or if you think that all vaccines are dangerous and don’t want any of them, then you don’t have much use for us—you already know what you want,” he said.
“But if you wish to know which vaccines are suitable for you and your children and at what ages, then we will provide you with evidence-based recommendations,” he added.
ACIP members who were removed by Kennedy said the panel has “lost credibility.” The former members wrote in a July 30 New England Journal of Medicine commentary that the process for recommending vaccines is “rapidly eroding.”
On Aug. 1, the CDC notified some outside groups that they can no longer participate in panels that review vaccine data and form recommendations for the ACIP.
The panels meet behind closed doors and typically include members of the ACIP, which advises the CDC on vaccines. The workgroups are also composed of experts from liaison organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Groups that employ the experts have been informed that they won’t be part of the workgroups any longer, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the CDC’s parent agency, told The Epoch Times on Aug. 1.
An official said some groups are being removed from the workgroups because of concerns that they have conflicts of interest.
For instance, the American Pharmacists Association lists vaccine manufacturers such as GlaxoSmithKline and Moderna among its corporate supporters.
“Under the old ACIP, outside pressure to align with vaccine orthodoxy limited asking the hard questions. The old ACIP members were plagued by conflicts of interest, influence, and bias. We are fulfilling our promise to the American people to never again allow those conflicts to taint vaccine recommendations,” Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the HHS, told The Epoch Times in an email.
Last month, six medical organizations—including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American College of Physicians (ACP) and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM)—and a pregnant woman filed a lawsuit against HHS and Kennedy in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, alleging that they intentionally removed vaccines and unjustly removed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s entire vaccine advisory panel.
The legal action seeks preliminary and permanent injunctions to stop Kennedy’s new COVID vaccine recommendations and a declaratory judgment declaring the decision unlawful.
Jack Phillips and Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
