CBS News
Trump’s picks for top health jobs not just team of rivals but “team of opponents”
Many of President-elect Donald Trump’s candidates for federal health agencies have promoted policies and goals that put them at odds with one another or with Trump’s choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., setting the stage for internal friction over public health initiatives.
The picks hold different views on matters such as limits on abortion, the safety of childhood vaccines, the COVID-19 response and the use of weight-loss medications. The divide pits Trump picks who adhere to more traditional and orthodox science, such as the long-held, scientifically supported findings that vaccines are safe, against often unsubstantiated views advanced by Kennedy and other selections who have claimed vaccines are linked with autism.
A situation in which high-ranking policy makers are on the same team with such varying views could make it harder to develop and pursue priorities.
The Trump transition team and the designated nominees mentioned in this article did not respond to requests for comment.
It’s a potential “team of opponents” at the government’s health agencies, said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian policy organization. Kennedy doesn’t have a medical degree.
Kennedy, he said, is known for rejecting opposing views when confronted with science.
“The heads of the FDA and NIH will be spending all their time explaining to their boss what a confidence interval is,” Cannon said, referring to a statistical term used in medical studies.
Those whose views prevail will have significant power in shaping policy, from who is appointed to sit on federal vaccine advisory committees to federal authorization for COVID vaccines to restrictions on abortion medications. If confirmed as HHS secretary, Kennedy is expected to set much of the agenda.
“If President Trump’s nomination of RFK Jr. to be secretary is confirmed, if you don’t subscribe to his views, it will be very hard to rise in that department,” said Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “They will need to suppress their views to fit with RFK Jr’s. In this administration, and any administration, independent public disagreement isn’t welcome.”
Kennedy is chair of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine nonprofit. He has vowed to curb the country’s appetite for ultra-processed food and its incidence of chronic disease. He helped select Trump’s choices to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. If confirmed, he would lead them from the helm of HHS, with its more than $1.7 trillion budget.
Clashes are likely. Kennedy has supported access to abortion until a fetus is viable. That puts him at odds with Dave Weldon, the former Florida congressman whom Trump has chosen to run the CDC. Weldon, a physician, is an abortion opponent who wrote one of the major laws allowing health professionals to opt out of participating in the procedure.
Weldon would head an agency that’s been in the crosshairs of conservatives since the COVID pandemic began. He has touted his “100% pro-life voting record” on his campaign website. (He unsuccessfully ran earlier this year for a seat in Florida’s House of Representatives.)
Trump has said he would leave decisions about abortion to the states, but the CDC under Weldon could, for example, fund studies on abortion risks. The agency could require states to provide information about abortions performed within their borders to the federal government or risk the loss of federal funds.
Weldon, like Kennedy, has questioned the safety of vaccines and has said he believes they can cause autism. That’s at odds with the views of Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon whom Trump plans to nominate for FDA commissioner. The British American said on the “Brian Kilmeade Show” on Fox News Radio that vaccines “save lives,” although he added that it’s good to question the U.S. vaccine schedule for children.
The American Academy of Pediatricians encourages parents and their children’s doctors to stick to the recommended schedule of childhood vaccines. “Nonstandard schedules that spread out vaccines or start when a child is older put entire communities at risk of serious illnesses, including infants and young children,” the group says in guidance for its members.
Jay Bhattacharya, a doctor and economist who is Trump’s selection to lead NIH, has also supported vaccines.
Kennedy has said on NPR that federal authorities under his leadership wouldn’t “take vaccines away from anybody.” But the FDA oversees approval of vaccines, and, under his leadership, the agency could put vaccine skeptics on advisory panels or could make changes to a program that largely protects vaccine makers from consumer injury lawsuits.
“I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” Kennedy said in 2023 on Fox News. Many scientific studies have discredited the claim that vaccines cause autism.
Ashish Jha, a doctor who served as the White House COVID response coordinator from 2022 to 2023, noted that Bhattacharya and Makary have had long and distinguished careers in medicine and research and would bring decades of experience to these top jobs. But, he said, it “is going to be a lot more difficult than they think” to stand up for their views in the new administration.
It’s hard “to do things that displease your boss, and if [Kennedy] gets confirmed, he will be their boss,” Jha said. “They have their work cut out for them if they’re going to stand up for their opinions on science. If they don’t, it will just demoralize the staff.”
Most of Trump’s picks share the view that federal health agencies bungled the pandemic response, a stance that resonated with many of the president-elect’s voters and supporters — even though Trump led that response until Joe Biden took office in 2021.
Kennedy said in a 2021 Louisiana House oversight meeting that the COVID vaccine was the “deadliest” ever made. He has cited no evidence to back the claim.
Federal health officials say the vaccines have saved millions of lives around the globe and offer important protection against COVID. Protection lasts even though their effectiveness wanes over time.
The vaccines’ effectiveness against infection stood at 52% after four weeks, according to a May study in The New England Journal of Medicine, and their effectiveness against hospitalization was about 67% after four weeks. The vaccines were produced through Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership Trump launched in his first term to fast-track the shots as well as other treatments.
Makary criticized COVID vaccine guidance that called for giving young children the shots. He argued that, for many people, natural immunity from infections could substitute for the vaccine. Bhattacharya opposed measures used to curb the spread of COVID in 2020 and advised that everyone except the most vulnerable go about their lives as usual. The World Health Organization warned that such an approach would overwhelm hospitals.
Mehmet Oz, Trump’s choice to head the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, an agency within HHS, has said the vaccines were oversold. He promoted the use of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment. The FDA in 2020 revoked emergency authorization of hydroxychloroquine for COVID, saying that it was unlikely to be effective against the virus and that the risk of dangerous side effects was too high.
Janette Nesheiwat, meanwhile, a former Fox News contributor and Trump’s pick for surgeon general, has taken a different stance. The doctor described COVID vaccines as a gift from God in a Fox News opinion piece.
Kennedy’s qualms about vaccines are likely to be a central issue early in the administration. He has said he wants federal health agencies to shift their focus from preparing for and combating infectious disease to addressing chronic disease.
The shifting focus and questioning of vaccines concern some public health leaders amid the spread of the H5N1 bird flu virus among dairy cattle. There have been almost 60 human infections reported in the U.S. this year, all but two of them linked to exposure to cattle or poultry.
“Early on, they’re going to have to have a discussion about vaccinating people and animals” against bird flu, said Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “We all bring opinions to the table. A department’s cohesive policy is driven by the secretary.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.
CBS News
Sudan civil war sees RSF forces rape women and girls on a shocking “scope and scale,” rights group says
Johannesburg — Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, one side in a civil war that’s torn the African nation apart for more than a year and created one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet, are accused of raping scores of women and girls and using some as sex slaves in a new report by Human Rights Watch. The New York-based rights group says the paramilitary forces’ use of sexual violence in the country’s South Kordofan state since September 2023 constitutes war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.
HRW lays out the findings of an investigation based on the cases of almost 80 women and girls in a report published Monday, detailing horrific new allegations of abuse in Sudan, where both sides in the civil war had already been accused of war crimes.
Researchers gathered evidence on 79 women and girls between the ages of 7 and 50 whom HRW says were raped, with most incidents occurring at an RSF military base in Dibeibat, near the town of Habila in South Kordofan.
Survivors and witnesses told the group that the men who carried out the attacks were all uniformed RSF forces or members of allied militias.
“Survivors described being gang raped in front of their families and over prolonged periods of time, including while being held as sex slaves,” said HRW Associate Crisis and Conflict Director Belkis Wille, who conducted many of the interviews with the survivors.
Ezzaddean Elsafi, a senior RSF adviser, denied the accusations in the HRW report to CBS News, claiming “people wearing RSF uniforms” behind the alleged attacks were impersonators, not actual RSF forces.
“RSF takes this very seriously and will investigate. We are highly sensitive to sexual violence against women and the perpetrators will be held accountable,” said Elsafi, denying that the group even has a significant presence in South Kordofan, though acknowledging it has forces “in the Debibat area,” near the boarder with North Kordofan state.
“This is absolutely disinformation,” he said of the HRW report.
HRW said it had shared a summary of its investigation’s findings with the RSF’s overall commander, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, but had not received a response.
Wille has spent years documenting sexual violence in conflicts around the world, including by ISIS militants against Yazidi women in Iraq, but she told CBS News, “What is really astonishing to me after meeting these women and girls is the scope and scale” of the crimes in Sudan.
CBS News has seen video of the full interview HRW conducted with an 18-year-old woman whom the group identified as Hania. She said she was pregnant in February when RSF fighters burst into her home in Habila and grabbed her, her 17-year-old neighbor and 16 other girls she knew from her neighborhood. She said they were taken in 10 vehicles to the military base in Dibeibat.
Human Rights Watch
When they arrived, Hania said she recognized more than 30 other girls from her town already there, with about 100 fighters holding them captive.
She said when she tried to resist being raped, one of the militants “started beating me with a metal whip.” Over the next three months, she said “the fighters came in groups of three every morning to take some girls to rape them, and then in the evening another group of three would come and take another set of girls to rape them.”
Hania said the RSF men held her and the other women and girls in a type of animal pen constructed with wire and tree branches, where they were chained up in groups of ten.
“What was clear from these cases is that in areas with RSF with control, absolutely nowhere is safe – not if you flee, or even in your home. Woman and girls are at risk of being raped no matter where,” Wille told CBS News.
Another woman, Hasina, 35, told HRW that six uniformed RSF men shot and killed her husband and stole all their cattle and money. She said the cows were her family’s investment so, with them and her money stolen, she felt she had no means to flee like many of her neighbors had done, and she and her six young children, some just babies, had no choice but to stay in their home.
The RSF fighters returned three days later, she said, and “all three men raped me, and left.”
Later that evening, “three more came back and raped me again and told me to stay in my house.”
She said she was gang-raped almost every day for the next month before she fled.
Human Rights Watch
HRW met Hasina at Camp Al-Hailu, a makeshift facility with little to no resources for internally displaced civilians in South Kordofan.
“She really is barely able to wake up and keep going because of what she lived through. Her kids are now in a camp with little food and looked very malnourished when I saw them. … She is struggling to function as a mother,” said Wille, adding that women living in tents next to Hasina were helping to care for her kids.
Wille said there was no psychological support for traumatized women in the camp or across much of the country.
“When I brought up the question of justice and accountability to these women, all of them looked blankly at me, as justice is a meaningless concept to them,” she said. “The scale with which it happens here means it’s become normalized behavior by the RSF. None of these women have ever heard of a soldier or fighter ever being held accountable.”
Hania and a friend who was also pregnant managed to escape from their captors. They were interviewed by HRW in the Nuba mountains. They said 49 girls were still being held at the base and she’d heard of girls being held at two other RSF bases, as well.
“We have no way of finding out more about these women, as access is very difficult and dangerous, and in these areas there is no electricity, no cellphone networks, so no information comes out. There is an absolute silence on these abuses,” said Wille. “We will likely never know what happened to these women and girls.”
The International Rescue Committee charity says the humanitarian crisis driven by Sudan’s civil war has been the biggest ever recorded for the second year in a row in 2024, with more than 30 million people in need of humanitarian aid. It’s estimated that roughly half of Sudan’s 50 million people are suffering from severe hunger.
Last week, some 20 months into the war, the fighting appeared to intensify, with both sides accusing the other of carrying out fresh atrocities. International efforts to broker a peace agreement have stalled and there is no end in sight to the fighting.
Authorities in Ohio launched a homicide investigation after the bodies of three women were found Saturday inside a home in Columbus.
Officers were called to a home on the city’s south side just before 4 p.m. Saturday for what a 911 caller described as a medical event. Police found three women who were pronounced dead at the scene, according to police spokesman Sgt. James Fuqua.
He said the killings were considered homicides, but he did not have further details, including what led up to the killings.
In an update released on Sunday, police said that all three women had been shot and killed, CBS affiliate WBNS-TV reported. The identities of the women have not yet been released.
“Unfortunately, this is a very complex scene with the amount of victims that we have,” he told reporters Saturday. “It’s going to take a little bit longer to make sure that we’re very careful in going through the scene meticulously so we do not miss any key piece of evidence.”
He said investigators were interviewing witnesses and looking for video evidence.
Fuqua said Saturday that no suspects had been taken into custody.
“This time of year — anytime of the year it’s unfortunate when someone loses their life, but particularly this time of the year during the holidays it’s going to be very difficult for these victims’ families to come to the grips that these family members will no longer be in their lives,” Fuqua said.
WBNS-TV reported the incident marked the second fatal shooting in the city’s south side within a week. On Tuesday, 45-year-old Darrell Hambrick was found suffering from a gunshot wound inside a nearby home and died at a hospital a day later. A man was arrested Saturday in connection to his death.
Columbus police declined to say whether the two homicide investigations are connected, the station reported.
Rescue workers were rushing Monday to reach the remote French territory of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean after the archipelago was devastated by Cyclone Chido, the worst storm to hit the region in nearly a century.
While the official death toll stood at 14, officials in Mayotte said they feared hundreds, if not thousands of people had been killed by the storm on the densely populated territory, which is home to around 300,000, according to The Associated Press.
French authorities said entire neighborhoods — many of which consisted of poorly constructed slum-settlements — had been flattened, and public infrastructure including airports and hospitals was badly damaged, the AP reported. Damage to the airport control tower meant only military aircraft could land in Mayotte, complicating the rescue response. Electricity has also reportedly been been knocked out across the archipelago.
KWEZI/AFP via Getty Images
Rescue workers, soldiers, medical personnel and supplies have been sent from France, as well as from the nearby French territory of Reunion. Mayotte is regarded as the poorest territory that falls under the sovereignty of any European Union nation, however it still draws a significant number of economic migrants from nearby nations that are even poorer, due largely to the French state welfare system being implemented there.
The French Red Cross told CBS News partner network BBC News that around 100,000 people live in makeshift slum dwellings on Mayotte, and that most of those had been completely destroyed by Chido.
Cyclone season in the southwestern Indian Ocean began at the start of December, and Chido hit Mayotte on Saturday as an intense tropical cyclone — the equivalent of a category-4 hurricane, the BBC reported. It made landfall on the much larger island nation of Madagascar, just south of Mayotte, late Sunday.
The BBC reported that Chido was likely intensified due to climate change. The BBC said that, while the number of annual cyclones hasn’t increased in recent decades, more of them have been more intense, likely because warmer air and seawater provides perfect conditions to fuel larger storms.
Sudan civil war sees RSF forces rape women and girls on a shocking “scope and scale,” rights group says
Homicide investigation launched after 3 women found dead in home in Columbus, Ohio
Thousands feared dead after Cyclone Chido hits French overseas territory Mayotte
Sudan civil war sees RSF forces rape women and girls on a shocking “scope and scale,” rights group says
Homicide investigation launched after 3 women found dead in home in Columbus, Ohio