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Monday, June 9, 2025

Kennedy overhauls US CDC vaccine panel, replacing all 17 members

 Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has fired all members sitting on a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel of vaccine experts and is reconstituting the committee, his department said on Monday.

Kennedy removed all 17 members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement, and is in the process of considering new members to replace them.

"Today we are prioritizing the restoration of public trust above any specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda," Kennedy said. "The public must know that unbiased science--evaluated through a transparent process and insulated from conflicts of interest--guides the recommendations of our health agencies."

All 17 sitting ACIP members were appointed under former President Joe Biden's administration, including 13 in 2024, HHS said. Not removing them would have prevented President Donald Trump's administration from choosing a majority of the committee until 2028.

"That's a tragedy," said former Food and Drug Administration Chief Scientist Jesse Goodman. "This is a highly professional group of scientists and physicians and others .... It's the kind of political meddling that will reduce confidence rather than increase confidence."

ACIP members are required to declare any potential or perceived conflicts of interest that arise in the course of ACIP tenure and any relevant business interests, positions of authority or other connections with organizations relevant to the work of the ACIP.

ACIP will convene its next meeting June 25-27 at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, the department said.

The FDA approves vaccines for sale to the public, not the committee. ACIP's role is to review data in a public meeting and vote on vaccine recommendations, which are then sent to the CDC director for approval.

The approved vaccines are incorporated in the CDC's vaccine schedule, which helps determine insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act, which generally requires insurers to cover vaccines that are listed on the vaccine schedule.

https://www.marketscreener.com/news/latest/Kennedy-overhauls-US-CDC-vaccine-panel-replacing-all-17-members-50194400/

LA anti-ICE riots descend into looting as thugs raid downtown shops

 The violent anti-immigration enforcement riots that have engulfed downtown Los Angeles since the weekend continued to escalate, with video showing mobs of looters pillaging Foot Locker and T-Mobile stores under cover of darkness late Sunday.

Disturbing footage of the chaos shows criminals, many wearing masks, smashing plate glass windows at the South Broadway cell phone store and disappearing inside before emerging with armfuls of merchandise and fleeing into the night.

Another man sprints out of the destroyed front door carrying a giant promotional teddy bear many T-Mobile locations keep on display, causing onlookers to erupt into laughter.

Looters plundered a T-Mobile cell phone store in Los Angeles Sunday night, loading up their arms with merchandise.Brendan Gutenschwager via Storyful
Other nearby businesses were badly damaged as looters smashed their way inside and took whatever they want.AFP via Getty Images

The havoc spills out into the street, as the adrenaline-charged bandits whoop and holler while cheering on the vandals. One man is seen emptying a fire extinguisher into the air in a huge white chemical cloud as a line of cars waits at a nearby intersection.

Once the crowd dispersed, the videographer pointed their lens on the interior of the store, which has been virtually picked clean, as a high-pitched anti-theft alarm wails in vain.

The footage taken outside the T-Mobile store ends with a woman casually hurling a brick through a window, shattering it to pieces with a loud crash.

Another unsettling scene unfolded at a nearby Foot Locker location, where a large group of hooded thugs piled into the sneaker store, then filing out one by one carrying stacks of Nike shoe boxes, piles of t-shirts and large cardboard boxes, presumably filled with merchandise that had yet to be displayed on shelves.

The photographer shooting video laughs as the mayhem plays out in front of him, and remarks at one point that one of the raiders inside the store was “going for the cash register.”

The violence unfolded not far from where anti-ICE rioters have clashed with cops and feds since Friday after a series of raids on illegal immigrants.AFP via Getty Images
The lawlessness took place in the midst of a spree of violence that has turned the City of Angels into a war zone for three days and counting, resulting in dozens of arrests, several injured law enforcement officers and a so-far-unknown amount of damage caused to property.

More than 1,000 rioters have taken to the streets, clashing with cops after Immigration and Customs Enforcement have rounded up some 150 illegal immigrants in recent days, including a raid at a Home Depot in Paramount, California.

The violence has gotten so out of control that President Trump announced he was sending 2,000 National Guard members to the city to restore order.

https://nypost.com/2025/06/09/us-news/la-anti-ice-riots-descend-into-looting-as-thugs-raid-downtown-shops/

Another Chinese scientist — from Wuhan — charged with smuggling illegal biological material into US

 A Chinese researcher allegedly tried to smuggle biological materials into the US from Wuhan and lied to the feds about the secretive scheme.

Chengxuan Han was arrested Sunday after landing at the Detroit Metropolitan airport on a flight from Shanghai, according to charging documents. She was charged with smuggling goods into the US and making false statements.

Han is the third Chinese scientist to be accused of smuggling biological materials into Michigan in recent weeks.

Upon Han’s arrival to the US, border officers discovered Han sent four packages that “contained biological material related to round worms” from China, according to court documents.

A Chinese researcher allegedly tried to smuggle biological materials into the US from Wuhan and lied to the feds about the secretive scheme.US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan
Chengxuan Han sent four packages that “contained biological material related to round worms” from China, according to court documents.US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan
The packages, which were sent in both 2024 and 2025, were addressed to individuals associated with a laboratory at the University of Michigan.

However, Han lied to officers and said she didn’t send packages to members of the Michigan lab, according to court documents. She also claimed the packages contained plastic cups, rather than petri dishes.

When the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations grilled Han, she admitted to shipping the biological materials to the lab from her research as a Ph.D. student from the College of Life Science and Technology in the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in Wuhan, according to court documents.

The packages, which were sent in both 2024 and 2025, were addressed to individuals associated with a laboratory at the University of Michigan.US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan

Investigators also discovered that Han deleted the content of her electronic device three days before she landed in the US.

“The alleged smuggling of biological materials by Chengxuan Han is a direct threat to public safety and national security, and it severely compromises the integrity of our nation’s research institutions,” said Cheyvoryea Gibson, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Detroit Field Office, in a statement Monday.

“I applaud the relentless efforts of the FBI Detroit Counterintelligence Task Force, working in close coordination with U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations and ICE Homeland Security Investigations Detroit. The FBI in Michigan will aggressively pursue anyone who seeks to harm our country and will deploy every available resource to defend the United States and protect our communities,” Gibson added.

Han was denied a visa to travel to the US on two separate occasions in March. In one of her attempts to obtain a visa, Han “could not clearly answer basic questions about herself or her research,” according to court documents.

An offer letter from the University of Michigan stated that Han was invited to be a visiting scholar at the lab.

Wuhan is the central Chinese city where COVID-19 emerged before it spread into a global pandemic.

https://nypost.com/2025/06/09/world-news/another-chinese-scientist-from-wuhan-charged-with-smuggling-illegal-biological-material-into-us/

California Dreamin'

 by James Howard Kunstler via kunstler.com,

"Call me crazy, but I think Dem politicians in LA publicly encouraging riots helps explain why they’re also incapable of issuing building permits for the fires months ago." —Mark Hemingway

And pretty soon, expect action in a dozen other states, you can be sure, because just as it was in the scorpion’s nature to sting the frog crossing the river in the old parable, it is likewise in the Party of Chaos’s nature to sow chaos in an American summer.

The operation to cue riots over the removal of illegal immigrants has been well-planned in advance. Chief lawfare artists Norm Eisen and Mary McCord have engineered the legal strategy to oppose enforcement of US immigration law. They will clog the courts with lawsuits to prevent it and enlist their allied federal judges to issue injunction after injunction paralyzing the deportation process. They will work day and night to get their violent street cadres out of jail, just as they did in the 2020 George Floyd riots, so that these mutts can go back into the streets to loot and burn some more.

It is, of course, the most cynical operation imaginable. The Democratic Party hustled XX-millions of border-jumpers into the country under the authority of their phantom president, “Joe Biden” for one purpose: to flood the swing election precincts with enough new voters to keep the Party of Chaos in power permanently. Now that the illegals are here, the party will do anything it can to foil their removal. All the hand-wringing and crocodile tears over “fearful families and communities” is just stage-business to dress-up the CNN videos.

The ultimate goal of this operation is to goad President Trump into declaring some kind of national emergency to put down the violence, and the objective of that is to point at him and holler, “Behold the fascist tyrant!” That’s the game. The catch is, the Democrats are mistaken in thinking they can replay the George Floyd hustle.

This time around, more than 70-percent of the American public is not-insane. They are not fooled by the term “undocumented” — as if some mysterious clerical error was made by the federal bureaucracy in processing these millions. The actual error was allowing them to stroll freely across the border in the first place, with massive assistance from NGOs that provided smart phones loaded with helpful apps, plus free plane and bus tickets, plus freshly-minted debit cards for walking-around-money, plus posh hotel reservations.

You can blame former Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas — since “Joe Biden” was demonstrably non compos mentis during his term in office — for what was a patently treasonous act. How is it possible that Mr. Mayorkas remains unindicted? By the way, before he was sworn in as Secretary of Homeland Security, he was a board member of one of the most aggressive NGOs actively assisting the recent massive wave of illegal immigrants: the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). The org, founded in 1881 under very different circumstances, has been enlisted to serve the Democratic Party’s program for flooding the voter rolls — just as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center have been transformed into attack dogs against the Democratic Party’s political opponents.

So, you watch now as the streets of Los Angeles fill with violent mobs waving Mexican and Palestinian flags burn cars, fling missiles and fireworks at police, and interfere with the deportation process of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. They are coming close to presenting themselves as a foreign enemy army and, as such, would invite a response from the defending US military.

It has the odor, at least, of insurrection, while Democratic Party politicians pretend that this is all just “peaceful protest.” LA Mayor Karen Bass skates at the edge of sedition as she orders her city’s law officers to “not cooperate” with federal authorities who seek to find-and-deport illegal immigrants. In her youth as a leftist activist, Ms. Bass joined the Cuba-sponsored Venceremos Brigade. She traveled to Cuba eight times in the 1970s for training in regime change operations. (She claims it was only to do “humanitarian work.”) Ms. Bass is also alleged to have been affiliated in the 1980s with the Oakland-based Maoist organization Line of March, in the 1980s.

California Governor Gavin Newsom appears to be just recklessly grandstanding, looking for a kayfabe fight with Donald Trump as he primps for his party’s 2028 nomination. You have to wonder whether the citizens of California — that is, documented citizens with bona fide US birth certificates — have noticed how Governor Newsom managed to wreck the state during his terms-in-office (and before that, as Mayor of San Francisco). By now, even the steadfast, Woked-up Democratic voters of Pacific Palisades must be a little bit suspicious that Governor Newsom does not really have their best interests at heart as he blusters at the president.

There’s another angle on the current violence, you understand. As the old song goes, Summer’s here / and the time is right / for dancing in the streets. Or fighting in the streets, as the Rolling Stones famously updated the idea in December 1968 — after the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August that year. Street fighting is one of the capital amusements of the sore-beset Gen Z, stuck with unpayable college loans, faced with a daunting job market, reduced to living in Mom’s basement, addled with sexual bamboozlement, and jacked-up on prescription drugs and other mind-altering substances.

All of that feeds a lack of purpose and meaning, one of the more baleful plights of the human condition, in turn, feeding mass delusion, mob violence, and social upheaval. But it’s also party time, an opportunity to get outside in nice weather and consort with your peers, Z’s among fellow Z’s, illegal immigrants with fellow illegals. It affords opportunities for intrepid acts of daring-do — taunting the cops, flinging bricks, doing wheelies and “donuts” with motor vehicles — in order to impress potential sex partners. In other words, looking for fun and excitement, as youth will.

Alas, none of this works too well in an era of profound boundary problems — exploited very deliberately by the Democratic Party, which has erased the moral boundaries between decent behavior and crime, just as it tried to erase the boundary between the United States and Mexico. All of that needs to be fixed. Mr. Trump is aiming to fix it. It is liable to be a heck of a struggle, perhaps even as bad as a new civil war.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/california-dreamin

Merck Gets FDA Approval for Respiratory Treatment for Infants

 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Merck's Enflonsia, a treatment to prevent respiratory syncytial virus lower respiratory tract disease in newborns and infants.

The company said Monday the approval is based on results from its Phase 2b/3 trial evaluating a single dose of the treatment for infants up to one year old.

The trial showed about a 61% reduction in RSV-associated lower respiratory infections or severity compared to a placebo through 5 months. It also demonstrated about an 84% reduction in RSV-associated hospitalizations, showing higher efficacy with increasingly severe cases of disease, the company said.

An advisory committee from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to meet later this month to make recommendations regarding use of the treatment. The company expects orders of the treatment to begin in July, with shipments delivered before the start of the RSV season this fall.

Enflonsia aims to provide rapid protection through 5 months, or a typical RSV season, with the same 105 mg dose regardless of weight, the company said.

https://www.morningstar.com/news/dow-jones/202506095894/merck-gets-fda-approval-for-respiratory-treatment-for-infants

Pentagon to deploy 700 Marines to Los Angeles, official says



The U.S. military is set to temporarily deploy about 700 Marines to Los Angeles while additional National Guard troops arrive in the city, a U.S. official told Reuters on Monday.

About 300 California National Guard troops were deployed to the streets of Los Angeles on Sunday to help quell a third day of protests over President Donald Trump's immigration enforcement, a step Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom called unlawful.

The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said a battalion would be sent, but for now, the Insurrection Act is not expected to be invoked.

The number of National Guard troops is expected to rise to 2,000 by Wednesday and until then, the Marines are expected to provide support. It is unclear what exactly they will be doing.


The official added the situation was fluid and could change.

While the U.S. military cannot perform law enforcement activities inside the United States without invoking the Insurrection Act, the Pentagon often is called to respond to national crises, from the border mission to disaster relief to health emergencies. For example, during the pandemic, the U.S. military set up temporary hospitals.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/pentagon-deploy-700-marines-los-201732877.html

Owens & Minor scraps plan to acquire home medical supply company

 Owens & Minor, a healthcare supply company, said June 5 it mutually agreed to end its planned acquisition of Rotech Healthcare, a home medical equipment company. 

The $1.36 billion cash transaction was called off due to what the company described as an “unviable” regulatory environment.

“For many months, our teammates, along with the Rotech team, have worked tirelessly in cooperation with the Federal Trade Commission to close this transaction,” Edward Pesicka, president and CEO of Owens & Minor, said in a statement. “And while we believe there would have been ample benefits to patients, payors, and providers by adding Rotech to our Patient Direct business, the path to obtain regulatory clearance for this merger proved unviable in terms of time, expense and opportunity.”

As part of the merger agreement, Owens & Minor said it has paid $80 million to Rotech. 

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/supply-chain/owens-minor-scraps-plan-to-acquire-home-medical-supply-company/