RFK Jr.’s FDA Denies COVID Vax to Millions of Americans

INSIDE: Susan Monarez ... Susan Collins ... Kari Lake

Aug 29, 2025

(Mikala Compton/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images)

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

News You Can Use: COVID Edition

I’m a little surprised that the refusal of CDC Director Susan Monarez to go quietly and the resignations of other top CDC officials seemed to eclipse rather than to amplify the FDA anti-science decision to restrict the access of healthy Americans to the annual COVID booster.

The shift away from mass immunization for COVID by making healthy people under 65 ineligible for it without a scientific basis for doing so and outside the normal process has adverse health implications for millions of Americans.

What’s it mean for you and your family? Here’s an initial survey of landscape:

Are you eligible for the annual COVID booster?
CVS is holding back on rolling out the annual COVID booster in 16 jurisdictions that require approval from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which isn’t scheduled to meet until next month and was stacked by RFK, Jr., with vax skeptics. The jurisdictions are: Arizona, Colorado, D.C., Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.
If the CDC ratifies the FDA decision, as expected, then insurers and employers will not be required to cover the annual COVID booster for those under 65 without an underlying condition. The uninsured out-of-pocket cost for a COVID vaccine is about $225.

More Fallout From The CDC Massacre

Politico: Monarez would not cross ‘red lines’ before she was fired, confidant says
WaPo: CDC leaders who resigned said RFK Jr. undermined vaccine science
NYT: Inside the C.D.C., a Growing Sense of Despair

Susan Collins Is Fucking Alarmed Again

Maine Sen. Susan Collins (R), who voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as HHS secretary, is a parody of herself:

Sandwich Thrower Charged With Misdemeanor

After a D.C. grand jury refused to indict the Subway sandwich thrower, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office charged him with a misdemeanor. While that is a more appropriate charge, it is still part of a larger pattern of pursuing federal charges during the Trumpian occupation of the District of Columbia rather than handling them in D.C. Superior Court.

Quote of the Day

Journalist Radley Balko:

[T]hey’re going to have to hire the kind of people who are going to be looking at these videos that are coming out of ICE — terrorizing families, arresting children and pulling grandmothers out of their homes. They’re going to be hiring people who look at those videos and say: That’s what I want to do for a living. …
What I think we are seeing right now is Trump is attempting to build his own paramilitary force. They want people whose first and ultimate loyalty in this job is going to be to the president.

Good Read

Anna Merlan at Mother Jones: “The Most Transparent Administration In History” Refuses to Say Who’s Behind Their Batshit Social Media

The Authoritarian Checklist

Political scientist Don Moynihan: “The consolidation of Trump’s power has happened very quickly, more rapidly than we have seen in other examples of competitive authoritarian systems. His success is driven by two factors. First, Trump learned a lot from his first term and had personnel with detailed plans in place for his second term. Second, people in institutions decided to accept the new arrangements.”

The Fed’s Lisa Cook Sues to Block Her Firing by Trump

U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb of Washington, D.C., will oversee Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook’s lawsuit seeking to overturn her firing by President Trump.

Judge Overturns Kari Lake’s Ouster of VOA Director

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth of Washington, D.C., ruled that Kari Lake did not have the authority to remove Michael Abramowitz as the Voice of America’s director and issued a permanent injunction blocking his removal.

For the Legal Nerds …

This is very in the weeds, but important. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals did some very unusual maneuvering late yesterday that seems to have reversed its own course and re-opened the door to challenging the Trump administration’s unlawful freezing of foreign aid. That’s as simply put as I can make it. For a deeper dive:

Chris Geidner: The D.C. Circuit’s realpolitik orders in the foreign aid funding case
Bloomberg’s Zoe Tillman: Appeals Court Keeps Fight Alive Over Trump Foreign Aid Freeze
Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman: “This was an extraordinarily shrewd *and* principled resolution by the en banc court, in a case in which the various arguments in the trial court and on appeal were *almost* hopelessly entangled and hard to parse.”

Meanwhile … Carbon Emissions Continue to Soar

Susan Crawford: If we’re serious about risk assessment, two recent pieces of climate news should be grabbing at least as much attention as the AI bubble on Wall Street.
Grist: The Trump administration is trying to revive the climate change “debate.”
American Meteorological Society: The Trump Department of Energy’s recent attempt to synthesize climate science has five foundational flaws.

Hard To Believe It’s Been 20 Years

My own sense of the passage time used to be detailed, sequential, and reassuringly clear in my own mind. Then COVID hit, and I still haven’t been able to reconstitute the mental file drawer of life and world events. So I was dumbfounded not just that it’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans but also that it’s been a decade since we published this piece by my high school classmate Cheryl Wagner on Katrina’s 10th anniversary. Cheryl, who wrote a book on her post-Katrina experience, captured the mix of ambivalence, aversion, and avoidance that some survivors feel about remembering. It holds up well as an antidote to the onslaught of anniversary content.