A former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) official is sounding the alarm about Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his policies after resigning from his post last week.

Former Director of the CDC’s Center for Immunization & Respiratory Diseases, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, resigned last Wednesday following the White House’s firing of the agency’s director, Susan Monarez. During a Sunday interview on ABC’s “This Week,” he slammed Kennedy and said he can “only see harm coming” as a result of his policies, noting that his leadership wants “to see the undoing of vaccination.”

“I mean, from my vantage point as a doctor who’s taken the Hippocratic oath, I only see harm coming,” Daskalakis said. “I may be wrong. But…based on what I’ve heard with the new members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, or ACIP, they’re really moving in an ideologic direction where they want to see the undoing of vaccination. They do want to see the undoing of mRNA vaccination.”

Daskalakis also criticized Kennedy for changing the childhood schedule for COVID-19 vaccination, saying officials were “directed that only children with underlying conditions would be the ones that should qualify for vaccination.”

“That’s not what the data shows,” he argued. “Six months old to two-year-old, their underlying condition is youth. Fifty-three percent of those children hospitalized last season had no underlying conditions. The data say that in that age range, you should be vaccinating your child.”

Daskalakis also condemned the new leader of the CDC, Jim O’Neill, a senior HHS official with deep ties to Republican donor Peter Thiel.

“Honestly, I really want to trust him, because I do not,” he said of O’Neill.

Daskalakis criticized O’Neill’s post on social media platform X, where he accused the CDC of “manipulating health data to support a political narrative.”

“His destabilization of trust in experts […] that skepticism by the new acting director of CDC should tell you that we have a big problem,” he said.

“If he’s running a health organization, he needs the expertise of people who know health and know science,” he added. “It seems like he doesn’t trust his own people already. It’s not going to be a good path.”

When asked about his departure from the CDC, Daskalakis said he has been worried for months about the future of the agency and what he is leaving behind.

“Of course I’m worried. I’ve been worried for months,” he said.

“I have been ready to do this when I felt that I hit the line,” he added. “And I hit the line when both I didn’t think that we were going to be able to present science in a way free of ideology, that the firewall between science and ideology is completely broken down. And not having a scientific leader at CDC meant that we wouldn’t be able to have the necessary diplomacy and connection with HHS to be able to really execute on good public health.”

Daskalakis’s comments come after Trump fired Monarez and Kennedy instated several changes to the CDC, including plans to limit access to the COVID-19 vaccine. Several CDC officials announced their resignation, including Daskalakis, shortly after the changes.

The 10th test of the SpaceX Starship has been launched and by all accounts was wildly successful in meeting its objectives. What do the results tell us about the likelihood that NASA and its commercial and international partners will beat China back to the Moon?

A recent article by Eric Berger in Ars Technica sent shockwaves through space policy circles. After taking note of several successful tests of Chinese lunar hardware, including a prototype of a crewed moon lander, plus some of the previous setbacks suffered by the SpaceX Starship, Berger has come to a sobering conclusion.

“So it’s now probable that China will ‘beat’ NASA back to the Moon this decade and win at least the initial heat of this new space race.”

The conclusion is enough to ruin one’s entire decade.

Berger may be throwing in the towel too soon, but he does provide a much-needed wake up call. Sometime in the near future we might all be gathered around our television screens and watching the first people to walk on the moon since December 1972 speaking Mandarin.

The Human Landing System version of Starship is one of the two tall tent poles of the Artemis program to take Americans back to the lunar surface for the first time since December 1972. The other is the development of extravehicular activity spacesuits.

While NASA will send people around the moon with the Artemis II mission early in 2026, Artemis III cannot proceed unless the lunar lander version of Starship can take astronauts the rest of the way to the moon. A lot of things have to occur before that happens.

According to another piece in Ars Technica, those things include:

• Reuse: Developing a rapidly reusable heat shield and landing and re-flying Starship upper stages
• Prop transfer: Conducting a refueling test in low-Earth orbit to demonstrate the transfer of large amounts of propellant between Starships
• Depots: Developing and testing cryogenic propellant depots to understand heating losses over time
• Lunar landing: Landing a Starship successfully on the Moon, which is challenging due to the height of the vehicle and uneven terrain
• Lunar launch: Demonstrating the capability of Starship, using liquid propellant, to launch safely from the lunar surface without infrastructure there
• For Musk’s Mars ambitions: “Demonstrating the operation of Starship over months and the capability to perform a powered landing on Mars.” 

Officially, Artemis III is scheduled to take astronauts to the lunar surface in 2027, two years from now.

SpaceX’s Gwynne Shotwell has assured NASA Interim Administrator Sean Duffy that the Starship Human Landing System will be ready. No independent space observer believes that a 2027 moon landing is possible now. In 2028, maybe.

Two questions present themselves. Will China beat the United States back to the moon? In the long run, will that matter?

Despite Berger’s unsettling conclusion, a Chinese victory in the second moon race is by no means certain.

With the success of its latest test flight of Starship, SpaceX could be getting its act together and will start racking up successes in advance of the Artemis III moon landing. China could stumble, with failures and setbacks that delay its own moon landing attempt.

If the Chinese land people on the moon before NASA does, the event will be a monumental embarrassment for the United States. Fingers will be pointed. Blame will be placed. The argument over “who lost the moon race” will ensure.

The answer to the last question would be everybody. Mistakes by politicians of both parties and people in the commercial sector will have contributed to a defeat in the second moon race.

Those mistakes go back decades with two stillborn attempts to start a deep space exploration program, too much focus on “space pork” over sensible technology development and the overregulation of commercial space launches.

The argument can be made that a flag and footsteps recreation of an Apollo mission by the Chinese won’t matter in the long run. If NASA and its partners press on, using the Starship and later the Blue Origin Blue Moon to establish a nuclear-powered lunar base, China’s victory will be fleeting.

In the end, the winner of the new moon race may not be who gets back there first, but who establishes a permanent presence first.

The United States and its allies have a decided advantage in Starship and its ability to move massive amounts of people and material from the Earth, to the moon, then to Mars and beyond.

Mark R. Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman said in a Friday post on Substack that President Trump is facing “self-inflicted disaster” amid his global trade war.

“One crucial thing to understand is that Trump is facing a completely self-inflicted disaster here,” Krugman said in the post. “He probably could have gotten Republicans in Congress to vote for insane trade policy. But he was impatient, and wanted to start ruling as a dictator right away.”

On Friday, Trump criticized a federal appeals court decision that went against the administration’s claims that the president’s emergency powers justify his expansive tariff agenda.

The ruling backed up a lower court opinion that the tariffs were not allowed via the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

Trump defended the steep tariffs as needed on his Truth Social platform, adding that “ALL TARIFFS ARE STILL IN EFFECT!”

“Today a Highly Partisan Appeals Court incorrectly said that our Tariffs should be removed, but they know the United States of America will win in the end,” Trump said. “If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country.”

Krugman said in his Substack that “the International Economic Emergency Powers Act gives the president substantial room to set tariffs during an, um, economic emergency.”

“But Trump himself keeps saying that the economy is in wonderful shape, booming without inflation, and any claims to the contrary are fake news. So how can things both be terrific and an emergency calling for drastic action?”

The Hill has reached out to the White House for comment.

Earlier this month, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification — a group of experts that monitor hunger for the U.N. — used data submitted by 21 humanitarian organizations and made a finding that 500,000 residents of Gaza City are experiencing acute malnutrition, starvation or death.

Deir al-Bala and Khan Younis are likely to qualify as official famine areas by September, and the rest of Gaza’s population is struggling to cope with severe hunger.

Given intensifying military conflict, the collapse of health care, hospitals, water and sanitation services, the destruction of homes, and Israel’s restrictions on the delivery of food, the group predicted that conditions are likely to get worse.

A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the U.N. report as “an outright lie,” and allegations of famine as a “fake campaign” by Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel, which recently summoned 60,000 reservists to active military duty, is going forward with plans to invade Gaza City.

Although President Trump previously indicated that he believed Palestinians in Gaza were starving, neither the White House nor the State Department commented on the finding. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee asserted on social media, “Tons of food has gone into Gaza but Hamas savages stole it, ate lots of it to become corpulent.”

“Just as we spoke out and had compassion for the victims and families of October 7,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) asked, “how can Americans not speak out and have compassion for the masses of innocent people and children in Gaza? Is one type of innocent life worthy and another type of innocent life worth nothing?”

Greene has also blasted the State Department for halting grants of temporary visitor visas to Gaza residents seeking privately funded medical treatment in the U.S., many of them with life-threatening injuries.

Almost immediately, Greene was slammed for characterizing Israel’s war in Gaza as “genocide.” “I don’t care what crazy pants thinks,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) said. “It’s not a genocide, you know, that’s just not the case.”

People of good will and partisan conviction continue to argue, often at the top of their lungs, about whether genocide applies legally or morally to the situation in Gaza. In 2024, the International Court of Justice found that Palestinians who live there “have a plausible right to protection” and Israel must take additional steps to prevent genocide from occurring. A formal judgment from the court about whether Israel has violated the Genocide Convention, however, is unlikely to be issued until 2028. The debate is certain to continue.

That said, Taylor Greene’s plea to do more to reduce acute malnutrition, starvation and death should resonate with Americans across the political spectrum and by implication the federal government, which has considerable leverage with Israel, whether or not they think genocide is occurring right now.

The criteria for a famine are very specific: extreme food shortages in one or more of every five households, and death by two adults or four children out of every 10,000 inhabitants each day from starvation of a combination of malnutrition and disease.

The number of households in Gaza City reporting severe hunger was found to have tripled between May and July — the period since Israel replaced the U.N. assistance system with distribution sites run by U.S. contractors, at which hundreds of Palestinians have reportedly been killed while surging to position themselves to get food.

These numbers are, of course, almost impossible to verify. But a classified study by the Israeli military found that 83 percent of the Gazans killed in the conflict through May were civilians, an extremely high percentage for modern warfare. Anyone who is paying attention, moreover, can see that the situation in Gaza is dire.

Logistical, capacity and resource challenges can be surmounted, according to Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, head of Mercy Corps, an aid program operating in Gaza. But only with an exercise of political will.

“The time for debate and hesitation has passed,” the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report concludes. Even a brief delay will “exponentially” increase the number of preventable deaths. America should act — now.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.