Blue States Are Creating a Shadow Public Health Regime
Northeast Public Health Collaborative
Representatives from Pennsylvania’s Department of Health met with counterparts from Rhode Island, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and New Hampshire last month in Rhode Island for a conference to discuss creating a new public health compact. Reports indicate that the partnership began last winter, following the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to HHS Secretary. Shortly after the Rhode Island meeting, Pennsylvania announced the creation of the Northeast Public Health Collaborative on its state website. The collaborative has now grown to include Maryland, Vermont, and Delaware.
The state website describes the association this way: “The Collaborative’s shared purpose is to work together in new ways – optimizing the use of shared resources, innovating and reimagining core services – to ensure trust in public health, respond to public health threats, advance community health and strengthen confidence in vaccines and science-based medicine. The group’s shared goal is to protect the health, safety, and well-being of all residents by providing information based on science, data, and evidence, while working to ensure equitable access to vaccines, medications and services.”
Trust the “Experts”
The “new ways” proposed include dismissing health recommendations from HHS under Robert Kennedy Jr. and instead relying on advice from conflicted medical associations that take millions in dark money donations. The collaborative put out its own COVID vaccine recommendations on September 15th. This includes a recommendation that all adults, including pregnant women, and all children 2-18 who have not received any COVID vaccines should be vaccinated. It also includes advice that pregnant women can receive a vaccine in any trimester. This advice conflicts with the health advice of many European countries, which stopped allowing COVID-19 vaccines for children under 18 years ago. Japan has gone further and also stopped recommending vaccines for pregnant women. The Collaborative cites the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and American Academy of Family Physicians as the “trusted experts” that they are relying on for these recommendations.
Lobbyists In Doctor’s Coats
What they leave out of their recommendations are the numerous conflicts of interest of each of these organizations. If you stop by the American Academy of Pediatrics website, you will find that they receive major donations from Merck, Pfizer, Moderna, and Sanofi, which are the largest vaccine manufacturers in the world. They also received over 35 million dollars from the federal government during the pandemic to promote vaccines and tackle misinformation. In 2024, AAP gave money to Kamala Harris, Sherod Brown, Tim Kaine, the DNC, and Act Blue, along with other Democratic candidates. They have also spent millions lobbying politicians on issues such as vaccines, gun control, gender affirming care for minors, and immigration.
The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology is also an advocacy group. Their biggest lobbying efforts surround abortion. According to Open Secrets they have donated to both Republicans and Democrats every election cycle since 2010. They have also spent millions lobbying for various bills since 1998.
The American Academy of Family Physicians donated to both the Democrat and Republican Senatorial Committee as well as numerous politicians in both parties. They have also spent millions lobbying Washington. According to Open Secrets, 5 out of 12 of their lobbyists have worked in government as part of the revolving door from lobbyist to lobbied government employee. The same math works out for AAP and The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
While these medical associations have the patina of disinterested doctors, the truth is that they are political organizations receiving dark money, making political donations, and lobbying politicians on behalf of special interests. They are part of the revolving door of corrupt insiders that Robert F. Kennedy has been trying to remove from our federal health agencies. It is no wonder they are speaking out against his policy changes. Are these the “experts” we want our Department of Health taking recommendations from?
More Important than the Budget
The announcement of the new collaborative came out just before the ACIP meeting to decide new federal vaccine regulations. Governor Shapiro was so despondent that changes were being made to the recommendations that he took immediate action. If only he had such concern over the county employees facing furlough and citizens facing reduced services due to the state budget impasse. His office worked quickly to make sure that insurers will pay for vaccines that doctors are not recommending, but is content to sit back and let the legislature hold off payments for our public schools, our county social services programs, and our food banks. Shapiro responded to changes in vaccine recommendations from HHS with an executive order requiring all state agencies to align policies with “trusted medical experts” which is a way of whitewashing the motivations of the associations he has ordered our health department to follow. Here in Pennsylvania, we will follow the science, which apparently means the lobbyists calling themselves doctors.
Executive Overreach
While the governor is the executive of the state and controls the state agencies, he cannot ask them to create or ignore legislation without the approval of the legislature. Pennsylvania voters spoke clearly last November. MAHA put Trump over the top in this state. Since his party lost the election, Shapiro decided to quietly go around the wishes of Pennsylvanians and enter us into this pact. Shapiro’s actions, joining a public health collaborative to reshape Pennsylvania’s healthcare regulations, are a gross overreach. Worse, he has quietly entered us into this pact with little media attention. Shapiro’s executive order has the potential for far-reaching effects beyond the cost and availability of vaccines.
Public Health Tyranny
The Northeast Public Health Collaborative lists emergency preparedness as one of its core objectives. We all remember how a number of these states responded to the pandemic. The appointment of RFK Jr as HHS secretary didn’t end the tyranny of “trust the science.” Blue states are now recreating it as interstate compacts. It is no coincidence that the Pacific Coast states created the West Coast Health Alliance at the same time.
A number of upstart activist groups with ties to MoveOn.org, George Soros, and Peter Daszak also started a movement to demand RFK’s impeachment around the same time. Groups with names reminiscent of Orwellian doublespeak, like “Stand Up for Science” and “Physicians for a Healthy Democracy,” popped up in late summer as supposedly grassroots efforts to “Save HHS.” Another new group, calling itself the “Science Accountability Institute,” is a project of the nonprofit media outlet Accountability Journalism Institute. The Accountability Journalism Institute was one of many groups working to censor social media by tracking and reporting misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. One of the petitions being circulated demanding Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s impeachment was authored by the Accountability Journalism Institute’s scientific advisory board, which includes board members Peter Daszak and Peter Hotez. The institute is coordinating with multiple activist groups to organize a protest on November 5th called the “March for Health and Science.”
An investigation by Children’s Health Defense shows that these groups are all connected and have received large donations from dark money groups like Arabella Partners, who fund MoveOn.org, Indivisible, Center for American Progress, and many other liberal activist groups. This is a top-down, multi-pronged effort to convince the public that medical professionals are sounding the alarm on how Kennedy’s “anti-science” decisions are a clear and present danger to public health. The organizers of the march are even encouraging the participants to dress in scrubs and lab coats to drive home the image of concerned medical professionals. The propaganda campaign is meant to justify actions by Democratic lawmakers to file articles of impeachment and justify the unprecedented move of blue states to form cooperatives pledging to take public health advice from medical activist associations instead of HHS.
Whether you call it a collaborative or an alliance, the new blue state public health regimes are an end run around the 2024 election, in which millions of Americans voted for transparency, an end to regulatory capture of our health agencies, informed consent, and medical freedom.
Big Pharma, their lobbyists in lab coats, conflicted government employees, and Democratic lawmakers are coordinating a coup of Kennedy’s HHS. We need to raise awareness of this tectonic shift in health policy and demand transparency and accountability from Shapiro’s office. Pennsylvanians do not want to be part of a public health collaborative that forces Big Pharma policies on their families. We want health freedom, not more corrupt lobbyists forcing their products on us through our public health department.