Confessions of a White House Public Health Priestess

I kept Robert F. Kennedy Jr. out of the West Wing. Now I owe him an apology.

It was 2017. We had hauled the CEOs of a bunch of pharmaceutical companies into the Oval Office so that President Trump could berate them about their drug prices. (Always a good time.)

Somehow, the word “vaccine” came up in the conversation. When that happens in the president’s presence, then, now, last month, and probably next week, like clockwork, he always starts telling the same story. A woman who worked for him at the Trump Organization back in the day. Her two-year-old son, who was “perfect, beautiful, magnificent, flawless.” Then he got a shot and he was “just gone. Gone. Never the same. Beautiful boy. Then, just gone.”

The CEOs all shrank back and turned the response to this story over to their colleague Ken Frazier, then-CEO of Merck, a prominent vaccine manufacturer. I don’t remember what he said. I’m sure it was the usual safe-and-effective incantation.

The president had an instinct. I had the credentials. What I didn’t have was an answer.

But it brought me back to 2002.

The autism moms, like other groups of moms did every day, were lobbying me to do something to help their children. I was a staffer on the U.S. Senate committee that oversees CDC. It was my job to recommend, when it came to public health, which bills to write, which bills to move, which bills to kill, which issues to conduct oversight on and which agencies to subpoena.

Each mom told the same story of a vaccination, and the subsequent regression of their children into the signs of autism. They wanted the CDC to rigorously study the safety of vaccines and assess the relationship of vaccination to the subsequent diagnosis of autism.

I was torn.

I was a Harvard-trained infectious disease epidemiologist. I believed, religiously, that vaccines were the gold standard of public health interventions.

Not because I had been shown the evidence for their effectiveness and safety in public health school, by examining the seminal clinical trials demonstrating as much (I hadn’t). But because I had been trained in the orthodoxy of public health, where it was assumed that someone had studied this and it had been demonstrated at some point - so now we could all focus on more pressing matters, like how to get vaccines in more kids’ arms around the world. I had spent my early career gallivanting overseas, controlling infectious disease from guinea worm in South Sudan to HIV/AIDS in Russian drug users and inner city DC prostitutes. I was the hero in the story I told myself.

But also, I am a woman. And I deeply revere the intuition and wisdom of mothers. And it was not my nature, when a bunch of moms tell me about an observed fact pattern in their children’s lives, to disbelieve or dismiss them.

So I did what any young, naive staffer in her first job on the Hill would do: I called the CDC.

They gave me some bland pablum about debunked studies and how “correlation doesn’t equal causation” and what-not. I was left with a weird disquiet and wasn’t sure what to do. But I knew my boss, the committee’s Ranking Republican, would be loath to wade into such a hornet’s nest. Not to mention that the committee’s chairman, (ironically) Ted Kennedy - whose party controlled the Senate - would try to thwart us at every turn - and we were already in enough battles with him.

Besides, Rep. Dan Burton and Rep. Dave Weldon, MD, were already holding hearings over on the House side - if something came of those, I could maybe interest my boss then. So I went on to the next meeting and the next ask from the next group of moms of kids with the next condition.

Fast forward fifteen years and several other Senate staff jobs. It was 2017, and I was now President Trump’s lead health advisor on the Domestic Policy Council, and we were all still trying to find the bathrooms in the White House.

I was now far more experienced and savvy a staffer, and utterly untrusting of federal agencies - especially the CDC. But I still believed with all my heart that vaccines were life-saving, critically-needed interventions to protect children, and that they worked best when uptake and the subsequent herd immunity was high.

I was told that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, an acquaintance of candidate Trump, had gotten him to commit to establishing a Vaccine Safety Commission once he was in office. Mr. Kennedy was now calling and wanted to get the promised commission going.

It was my job to make this problem go away.

I was all in.

We couldn’t have a meeting, an event, or a commission that communicated to the world that vaccines were anything less than the Greatest Public Health Victory we all believed them to be (can I get an “amen?”). So I called up NIH leaders Francis Collins and Tony Fauci and asked them to go ahead and take the meeting, but off-site somewhere, far from the White House and the public view.

That meeting, which took place at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, has become somewhat notorious in MAHA lore.

Mr. Kennedy, as well as Del Bigtree and Aaron Siri with the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), met with The Authorities about The Science. All of them have spoken publicly about that meeting, where Dr. Fauci assured them of the mountains of studies demonstrating vaccine safety. Reportedly, when asked to produce them, he rifled through his papers as if they were just at the tip of his fingertips. When he couldn’t find them, he promised to deliver the studies later. Which never happened. ICAN filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to get them.

HHS settled the lawsuit with a stunning admission - on the record - that no such studies existed.

But I didn’t know any of that. I only knew that I had done my job and saved children.

For the next few years, I worked on a variety of policies I was really proud of (ending secret health care prices, lowering drug prices, combatting opioid addiction) and others that didn’t go quite as well (the doomed repeal-and-replace-Obamacare misadventure). The demands of working in the White House are brutal. While many of my colleagues had become like family, my real family could no longer pick me out of a line-up.

By mid-2019, my stress level had peaked. For many reasons, it was time to move on. My younger sister, a 39-year-old mother of two, was dying of colorectal cancer, and I spent the next five months taking care of her, thinking a lot of deep thoughts about the limits and the hubris of medicine.

When COVID landed on our shores a few months later, there was certainly some FOMO.

Global respiratory disease popping off, and I just left the White House?

I published an op-ed in March of that year, expressing relief that my friend and former colleague, Deborah Birx, had just been appointed the head of the White House COVID response. In the summer and Fall of 2020, I helped the Trump re-elect campaign by doing media interviews defending the administration’s COVID efforts.

I put on a happy face for the cameras, but as the year wore on, the unscientific demands from The Authorities were causing cognitive dissonance.

Masking mania made no sense in light of the size of a viral particle. Masks worn loosely, re-used, touched with unsterile hands all day, and forced onto children were a crime against epidemiology. And yet, The Authorities like Birx and Fauci, who I knew would know better, were still pretending.

Lockdowns were being implemented in ridiculous and scientifically unjustifiable ways. Churches - no. Mom-and-Pop restaurants - no. Gyms - no. Walmart - yes. There seemed to be no effort to explain the totalitarian disconnect that was being imposed from on high.

I had moved to Loudoun County, Virginia shortly after my sister passed away, in order to be close to her two young boys. We wanted to make friends in our new community, and the only people daring to gather were the patriots and dissidents involved in the Loudoun County Parents’ Resistance™, fighting the school closures and other policy malpractice. That put me in touch with the hodge-podge of nontraditional allies that the COVID era united: Catholic homeschoolers and hippie homesteaders. Medical freedom activists and election integrity watchdogs.

Your humble correspondent at a LoCo School Board fracas, trying to avoid the cameras.

We loved the meetups with these unafraid humans, one of whom was a mom of a vaccine-injured child who ran our state’s medical freedom group.

She persuaded me to watch the documentary Vaxxed.

The movie narrated the tale of CDC’s early 2000s vaccine/autism research - the kind those autism moms had demanded, not knowing that the CDC had already done it but was hiding the results.

It documented the U.S. House hearings by Reps. Weldon and Burton, trying to uncover the truth, and the later whistleblower, William Thompson, who confirmed all the moms’ worst fears. It was a searing indictment of my own paralysis during these events decades ago.

Here is the text I sent that same friend as the credits rolled, along with the tears down my cheeks:

Still, because I was an epidemiologist, people in my circle would come to me for answers about The Science, including potential prevention and treatment for COVID.

I became the Underground Railroad in our community for hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, nebulized steroids, and other countermeasures frowned on by The Authorities. Whenever someone in our social circle would fall desperately ill, I would help them get medicines from the semi-secret network of doctors, bravely providing these lifelines by telemedicine across the country.

Wanting more knowledge and credentials to help people, I enrolled in a degree program to become a naturopathic doctor.

I watched in disgust and confusion as the new administration doubled down on crazy, with so many in federal and state governments seeming to throw basic rules of microbiology and epidemiology out the door.

And then, something happened in late summer of 2021 - a set of legal contortions between Big Pharma and the FDA that started to make everything painfully clear.

I was familiar with a public health law called the PREP Act that passed when I had worked in the Senate. It provided liability protection for manufacturers, doctors, and even employers during a declared public health emergency, provided that certain criteria were met. One of those criteria, when it came to drugs or other emergency countermeasures, was that the law’s legal immunity only applied to products with either FDA licensure or Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).

The government had a number of problems brought on by aspects of the PREP Act and the law establishing the EUA process:

Problem #1: To get an EUA for a product, there have to be no other “approved, adequate and available” therapies. And there seemed to be quite a few: ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, for starters. Since it was going to take a while to get FDA licensure for the product that was going in all those arms under the EUA, the EUA had to be protected.

That would only be possible if cheap, generic, widely used, safe and FDA-licensed hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin (or anything else) were intentionally not recognized as effective therapeutics for COVID.

These therapies had to be suppressed and delegitimized by The Authorities as ineffective or dangerous as treatments for COVID, or else the coming vaccines - new, experimental products with limited safety trials conducted at “warp speed” - would be subject to crippling lawsuits if they injured anyone. Given that they would likely be distributed to the entire population en masse, it was a statistical certainty that someone would be injured.

This represented a massive problem for manufacturers. And that meant it was a massive problem for The Authorities, because Pfizer was threatening not to sell their product in any country that didn’t immunize them.

This EUA problem would go away once the vaccine was licensed by the FDA. But the required clinical trials weren’t done yet. Also, they weren’t coming out so great: of the 29 deaths in the clinical trial leading to licensure, 15 were in the vaccinated group, one more than in the unvaccinated group.

Problem #2: Only FDA-licensed products can be mandated or added to the childhood schedule, not EUA products. (And the Biden Administration was plotting nationwide mandates, because, of course they were.)

Problem #3: The FDA license for the Pfizer vaccine would not apply to the whole population because the clinical trials that would form the basis of that approval didn’t include important sub-groups, like pregnant women and children under 16. So the EUA would still be needed to immunize Pfizer against lawsuits arising from injuries to those groups until the FDA-approved product could be added to the children’s schedule (which required more data from kids) - after which nobody could sue Pfizer ever again over the vaccine.

What happened in August of 2021 was a diabolical solution to both problems 2 and 3:

• The FDA approved the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine - a legal artifact because this product label wasn’t actually being used in the U.S..

• Simultaneously, the FDA extended the EUA on Pfizer partner BioNTech’s vaccine, which was the vaccine label being used widely.

In doing so, both problems were solved.

The EUA on the product being used (including for kids aged 12-15 yr) remained protected by the PREP Act liability shield. And the identical product label not being used anywhere in the U.S. by anyone received FDA approval so that it could be mandated by the feds for all employers nationwide.

No news outlet reported what had happened.

They all announced that the vaccine everyone was getting in their arms had received FDA approval, which wasn’t true. Nationwide mandates were announced two weeks later.

That was it. It was clear that there were dark, powerful forces at work behind the public health enterprise and I no longer wanted any part of it.

I had started listening to Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s podcast. Having thwarted his efforts, years prior, in the White House, I was now ironically mesmerized by how rational he (all of a sudden) seemed.

When Mr. Kennedy’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, was released in Fall of 2021, I devoured it.

Kennedy’s meticulously-sourced description of how The Authorities had been planning for a global coronavirus pandemic - just a few months before it actually happened - was chilling.

But even closer to home was the detailed accounting of Fauci’s funding of ghoulish, invasive and debilitating HIV/AIDS experiments on often very ill foster children across the country. I had invested a good portion of my career in combating HIV/AIDS, both at home and abroad, and the book exposed how that career had been aligned with the monsters that tortured helpless innocents to bring the first of Big Pharma’s AIDS drugs to the market. I had made my bones in the Senate demanding the federal government prioritize the delivery of medicines (and not just condoms) to AIDS victims all over the world.

I had cried tears of joy and vindication when that agenda was realized in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, where he unveiled his commitment to funding billions of dollars in antiretroviral treatments.

Now I was seeing evidence that these treatments were developed on the broken bodies of forgotten children, who were powerless to fight the unholy alliance of Big Pharma and Big Science.

If untrue, the claims in Kennedy’s book were so utterly defamatory that they should have spurred a parade of lawsuits. To my knowledge, no such lawsuits have ever been filed.

This cascade of eye-opening episodes eventually forced me to confront a painful reality: my 2017 take on Mr. Kennedy and his Vaccine Safety Commission had been a massive mistake.

What if there had been a Vaccine Safety Commission already in place during Operation Warp Speed? During the consideration of federal mandates by the Biden team? Adding COVID vaccines to the childhood schedule? What if Mr. Kennedy had been given regular access to President Trump in the first term?

Now, I’m not naive enough to think that a commission - any commission - would have had some immediate or obvious influence on vaccine policy. I know better than most how slowly government works. And no doubt Team Biden would have either immediately shut down the commission or replaced the commissioners with card-carrying members of the consensus class.

Still, as I listened to Mr. Kennedy speak out about his experience with the first Trump administration, I understood that at the very least, the vaccine safety conversation that is going mainstream today could have gotten a major head start.

So in January of 2022, I wrote Mr. Kennedy a contrite email confessing my sins, probably hoping for some sort of absolution. He was gracious, and he looped in his colleague Lyn Redwood from Children’s Health Defense. When we spoke shortly thereafter, she slyly asked me what I planned to do to atone for my sins - how I would contribute to the movement. I had no answers at that time. I was still totally disoriented.

The Secretary is ever gracious and forgiving - even yesterday, as he posted in support of this story.

The nationwide COVID vaccine mandate that had been announced in the Fall took effect in January (though, thankfully, was stymied in part by a number of lawsuits). Regardless, I would not comply. I never wore a mask again. No one in my family would get another vaccine. And I would never blindly trust a white coat (or many of the products they peddle) ever again. They’re not malicious (most of them anyway), but their education was just as flawed as mine.

Once I was “radicalized,” I started questioning many of the public health shibboleths. I discovered the Weston A. Price Foundation and the Wise Traditions dietary principles prioritizing all the naughty things like saturated fat and raw milk. I embraced the long-suppressed medical frameworks of homeopathy and German New Medicine. I started helping women birth at home, outside the medical system.

It was all quite heretical.

Elder midwife Sister Morningstar - a freebirth advocate - and friends. H/t Matriarch Rising Festival, 2025.

Most importantly, I realized that no one from Washington and no white coat is coming to save my health or anyone else’s.

I became my own primary care provider. You can too.

I still work on making health care less predatory and corrupt. I help employers fire insurance companies and rehumanize the health plans for their workforce. I provide all kinds of “friendly” advice to Congress and the current Trump team, even (especially?) when they don’t ask. And now that I’m a staffer for nobody and answer to no one, I am uncensored and unafraid, writing in my own voice about all of this right here.

So thank you to the autism moms who got under my skin decades ago, even though I didn’t quite know what to do about them.

Thank you to Reps. Burton and Weldon and their staff (who conducted investigations of the CDC autism data).

Thank you to Andy Wakefield (the much-maligned “debunked” study author) and William Thompson (the CDC whistleblower).

Thank you to that friend who urged me to watch Vaxxed, and to Del Bigtree, who made the film.

And thank you most of all, Secretary Kennedy.

When he ran for president, I was nervous. If the Democrats nominated him, I was anxious that President Trump could lose to him. So it was a great relief when the Democrats blew their chance at victory by running him out of their party. And when those pyrotechnic fireworks popped off on the Turning Point USA stage, framing Kennedy and Trump and the birth of MAHA, I knew that a generational opportunity was upon us.

Your humble correspondent at a recent MAHA Action event - where all the cool kids go now.

And yet, even now, I can’t quite shake the image that started all of this.

A line of mothers, sitting across from me in a Senate office in 2002, asking for something so simple: Please look. Please study. Please don’t dismiss what we are seeing in our children.

I trusted The Authorities instead. I told myself there would be time later, that someone else was handling it, that The Science must already be settled.

It’s a strange thing to realize that my biggest failures weren’t the fights I lost - but the ones I didn’t start. And that, in some of the stories I’ve been telling myself about my career, I was the villain and not the hero.

So this is where I am now: I don’t outsource my judgment anymore. I don’t confuse authority with truth. And I don’t ignore mothers, even when the consensus has lost all curiosity.

If that makes me a heretic - consider this my excommunication from the public health cult.