For more than a decade, Dr. Joseph Mercola cautioned parents against a potentially lifesaving shot of vitamin K for their newborn babies: “Vitamin K shots are completely unnecessary for your newborn.”

But now, in a break from his past warnings, Mercola is saying he no longer believes that. 

ProPublica contacted Mercola recently as it was preparing an article about babies who died as a result of their parents turning down the vitamin K shot. Mercola’s new point of view is just as unequivocal as his old one: “The data is clear: vitamin K saves lives,” he wrote in an April article on his website two days after ProPublica contacted him. He added: “Based on the totality of the published evidence, I support vitamin K prophylaxis for all newborns.” 

He also directed parents to speak to their children’s pediatricians. 

“Vitamin K deficiency bleeding is rare, but when it occurs, the consequences can be devastating and irreversible,” Mercola wrote. “A single injection at birth can prevent it. Please talk to your doctor.”

Mercola is a leading vaccine skeptic and an ardent supporter of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He is a popular figure online, with a Facebook page that has some 1.7 million followers. He sends out a daily newsletter and sells alternative treatments for a variety of ailments. 

His reversal comes at a critical moment. Hospitals and research studies have documented an alarming jump in babies not receiving the vitamin K shot, which has been recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics since 1961 to help newborns’ blood to clot. Without it, research shows, babies are 81 times more at risk for late vitamin K deficiency bleeding, which can be fatal. 

Just as has happened with measles and other vaccines, vitamin K shots have become the target of a deluge of false information online. That has caused some parents to view it as an unnecessary pharmaceutical intervention amid a lingering mistrust of the medical system following the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Some point to a 2010 post from Mercola, entitled “The Dark Side of the Routine Newborn Vitamin K Shot.” A doctor in Tennessee recalled reluctant families citing the article, as did doctors in Oregon. 

In the years that followed, Mercola stood by his opposition. He reiterated his position in 2014, after four babies in Nashville, Tennessee, suffered vitamin K deficiency bleeding. And he did so again in 2019, after hospital staff contacted child protective services in Illinois and took temporary custody of a newborn whose parents refused the shot for their baby.  

In place of the shot, Mercola had recommended vitamin K drops, which are taken orally and have been touted online as a popular alternative. The drops, however, are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration and research shows they are not as effective as the shot, though they are used in some European countries. 

In his April article, he addressed the rampant false information online regarding the vitamin K shot and acknowledged the role his writing may have played in spreading it. “The internet contains a significant amount of misinformation about vitamin K,” Mercola wrote. “Some of it may reference my own 2010 article. That article reflected the state of a scientific debate that has since been resolved. The science moved forward, and so have I.”

In fact, the science around the vitamin K shot has been settled for decades. The discovery of vitamin K and its role in clotting blood won the Nobel Prize in 1943. Newer studies have confirmed and furthered many of the findings that were available in 2010, but they do not represent a scientific shift from previous research. Some recent studies that Mercola cited in the April article document the rise in babies not receiving the shot and the catastrophic bleeding in the brain that can follow, but again both reinforce the same science that has encouraged giving the shot for more than 60 years. 

In Mercola’s earlier posts, he wrote about what he deemed to be risks from the shot, beginning with “inappropriate” and “unnecessary” pain to the baby. He incorrectly claimed that the amount of vitamin K injected into newborns was far more than the needed dose. In addition, he wrote that the shot may contain preservatives that can be “toxic” to a baby’s immune system. 

Benzyl alcohol is often used as a preservative in vitamin K shots, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other organizations have stressed that it’s safe. In the 1980s, doctors realized that some extremely premature babies suffered benzyl alcohol toxicity, but, according to the CDC, that was because they were on so many medications containing it. In addition, many hospitals now offer preservative-free options.

Some families have also expressed fear about a “black box warning,” which appears on a drug’s label to alert providers of serious risks. The shot does contain a boxed warning, as do more than 400 other medications, but that is primarily related to adults and vitamin K that is given through an IV, not as a shot in the thigh muscle, which is how doctors typically administer vitamin K to babies. None of the dozens of doctors interviewed by ProPublica said they have ever seen an adverse reaction in an infant who received a vitamin K shot.

But even back in 2010, Mercola dispelled one popular misconception that vitamin K injections increased the risk of cancer. That belief stemmed from a pair of older refuted studies. In 2010, he wrote, “that conclusion was in error.” In April, he reinforced that message.

Alternative treatments promoted by Mercola have attracted federal scrutiny. He and his companies have had to pay millions of dollars to settle allegations that he had made false claims about the safety of products. 

During the pandemic, for instance, the FDA sent Mercola a warning letter after he offered unapproved and misbranded products, including vitamin C, on his website as ways to prevent or treat COVID-19. 

In 2017, the Federal Trade Commission announced it was mailing $2.59 million to people who bought Mercola indoor tanning systems. The agency charged that Mercola and his companies claimed the tanning systems were safe and that research showed that indoor tanning doesn’t raise the risk of melanoma, a type of skin cancer. 

Mercola did not admit wrongdoing. His online posts include a disclaimer that they are intended as a way of sharing knowledge and information, not medical advice. He also has said his 2010 vitamin K article was based on an interview with a Dutch researcher who studied vitamin K.

Mercola, a doctor of osteopathic medicine, declined to be interviewed for this story but said his current stance is accurately reflected in the April article. “While I do not agree with all of the characterizations and conclusions in your summary,” he wrote in response to questions from ProPublica, “I have nothing further to add at this time.” 

Even though Mercola has now reversed his position on vitamin K, many on social media still cling to debunked and distorted claims. On Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, unsubstantiated claims often go unchecked.

One theme that has emerged on social media is the notion that God created babies perfectly, and there must be a reason they are born without sufficient vitamin K. In one video on TikTok, a woman who identifies herself as a nurse asked, “Did God really get it wrong?” 

Responding to another, someone wrote, “Just know our creator didn’t make a mistake. Every baby is born like this for a reason.” 

Others lump the vitamin K shot, which is not a vaccine, in with vaccines. A comment on a video about the vitamin K shot declared, “My baby isn’t getting any vaccines.” It received more than 600 likes.

Mercola also is not the only doctor being cited by vitamin K shot opponents. Commenters on Instagram, TikTok and Reddit have directed people to Dr. Suzanne Humphries, who has spoken out about vaccines and the vitamin K shot for many years. 

“My opinion is that the more I read about vitamin K,” she said in a video posted in 2014, “the more I can’t believe that it’s injected into newborn infants.”

Last month, she appeared in a lengthy interview on the website of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit founded by Kennedy. She cited the pair of studies from more than 30 years ago that found an association between the shot and cancer, though they were both called into question shortly after they were published. As even Mercola noted in 2010, several additional studies found no increased risk of cancer following the shot. 

“Those of us that believe in a divine creator,” she said, “believe that maybe it is by design, or that actually it is by design, and that there’s a reason for it.” 

Humphries did not respond to requests for comment.

During Kennedy’s time at Children’s Health Defense, the group published a post in 2020 that claimed aluminum adjuvants — added components that boost the body’s immune response — in vaccines are “significant sources of early exposure” to aluminum. Some vitamin K shots contain a small amount of aluminum, but studies have not found any evidence of serious or long-lasting harm. Adjuvants, according to the CDC, have been used “safely in vaccines for decades.” 

Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer at Children’s Health Defense, said the aluminum concern remains, as does the cancer fear, despite multiple studies that found no basis for them. He said he would like to see more research on the vitamin K shot, as well as other newborn interventions like the hepatitis B vaccine. 

“I do want to look at the individual components of these shots in conjunction with everything else that the infant is getting,” he said, “and to me that body of literature is really incomplete.”

Hooker said he worked with Kennedy for many years and, while they are no longer in direct contact, he has full confidence in the country’s leading federal health official. But Kennedy’s silence has served to deepen skepticism among experts. 

“Now we’re starting to see something that I never saw, which was brain bleeds and gut bleeds in infants,” said Rep. Kim Schrier, a Washington Democrat who worked as a pediatrician for more than 15 years before running for Congress. “And that’s so scary and heartbreaking.”

At an April House subcommittee hearing, Schrier confronted Kennedy about vitamin K, saying that he made parents distrust doctors and shots, and as a result some parents are refusing the vitamin K shot and other standard care. 

“Right now, Secretary Kennedy, given what I just told you about vitamin K, will you just tell pregnant women out there for the record, ‘Yes, you should get your babies the vitamin K shot’?” Schrier asked Kennedy.

Kennedy did not oblige her. He said he has never said anything about the vitamin K shot. 

An HHS spokesperson did not answer ProPublica’s questions but said the CDC recommends that parents give newborns the vitamin K shot within 6 hours of their birth to prevent vitamin K deficiency bleeding. She acknowledged that uptake of the shot has declined during recent years “as public trust in health care institutions has fallen, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic amid heavy-handed mandates and inconsistent messaging during the Biden administration.”

“Rebuilding that trust,” the spokesperson wrote in an email, “requires honesty, informed consent, and respect for individual choice.” 

Schrier said she empathizes with parents who are inundated with so many conflicting messages. She said she recently stepped out of the Capitol building and overheard a woman say — inaccurately — that every childhood vaccine contains glyphosate, which was an ingredient in some forms of the weed killer Roundup. 

“I can just see how this is going to spiral right now. It gets out there, then it’s on social media,” Schrier said. “Every parent just doesn’t want to do the wrong thing.” 

The post A Popular Doctor Had Long Warned That Vitamin K Shots Are Risky for Newborns. Now He’s Changed His Tune. appeared first on ProPublica.

A white Ford pickup truck broke through a thick curtain of fog one morning in February, winding its way down a muddy farm road in California’s Central Valley. From it emerged a 64-year-old dairyman, burly and tan, who left the engine running as he lumbered toward me with open arms. 

“You must be Mark,” I said, warning him I wasn’t one for hugging. 

“I’m a hugger,” he said, pulling me in anyway. “I feel like I’ve known you for a lifetime.”

I had spent the past couple of weeks corresponding with Raw Farm founder Mark McAfee, who’d filled my inbox with messages and PowerPoints extolling the virtues of his most important, and controversial, product:

It is delicious.

It makes you feel good (the gut-brain serotonin and dopamine cycle).

It’s great for asthma and literally saves lives.

He was talking about raw milk, which, if you trust 150 years of bedrock science, offers little reason to consume. By definition, it has not been pasteurized, the simple process of heating milk to kill off harmful bacteria. Before the practice was widely adopted a century ago, thousands of babies died each year from illnesses linked to contaminated dairy. Today, most scientists and health experts agree that raw milk has no significant, proven nutritional benefits over its sanitized counterpart, cannot treat or cure disease and subjects its consumers to over 100 times the risk of foodborne illness, which can be especially dangerous for young children.

And yet, McAfee’s farm, the largest raw-milk dairy in the country, is pulling in about $30 million a year, meeting a growing demand from customers who say they want food that hasn’t been robbed of health benefits by industrial processing. Once drawing a fringe crowd, raw milk has been thrust into the mainstream in recent years by a potent mix of politics, wellness culture and a wave of suspicion that health institutions have been compromised by Big Pharma and Big Food. Its proponents have turned it into a symbol of freedom and defiance. More than 10 million Americans now drink it; national weekly sales rose by 65% from 2023 to 2024 alone.

Raw milk’s success confounded me: How had it gained such a foothold in this country, despite regular outbreaks of salmonella and E. coli, and even the discovery of bird flu in Raw Farm’s milk? More pressing still, what was the government doing to protect the public amid demands for products that scientists warn are risky, even deadly? Speaking with McAfee seemed like a good place to start; federal and state regulators had linked his business to more than a dozen recalls and outbreaks that had left hundreds of people ill.

“I’ve put a couple kids in the hospital, and they have been sick, but they recovered,” McAfee acknowledged before my visit. “But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer. And I’m going against the grain here. I’m climbing a mountain they say you can’t climb.”

McAfee isn’t any ordinary farmer. He is a raw-milk zealot who has escaped serious sanctions despite two decades of skirmishes with the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Justice, which have repeatedly accused him of breaking federal laws and regulations. The Biden administration was on the verge of a crackdown against his farm when President Donald Trump assumed office and turned over leadership of the nation’s health agencies to one of McAfee’s most notable customers. 

The year before he was confirmed as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ran for president, using his campaign platform to decry the government’s “aggressive suppression” of raw milk. In his new role, he said he was “advocating” for it and celebrated the release of a federal report to Make America Healthy Again with a toast of raw-milk shooters in the White House.

For his part, McAfee isn’t just selling Kennedy’s favored milk. He is selling the notion that his dairy products are safe and healthy — for you, your kids, your grandparents — because his farm thoroughly screens its milk for bacteria. 

“They think we’re some kind of a fringe, weird trend, and we are dead serious here,” McAfee said after he greeted me at his farm, which he runs with his adult son and daughter, 20 miles southwest of Fresno. “And you’ll see that in what we’re doing today.”

He led me into a cream-colored bungalow he called his pathogen laboratory, where two workers in lab coats prepared milk samples.

The farm screens each batch for four types of bacteria: salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter and listeria, all of which thrive in the intestines of cattle and can contaminate milk through microscopic flecks of infected feces. The microbes can cause a constellation of symptoms in humans, from vomiting and diarrhea to sepsis, kidney failure and even death.

“We catch these things and divert the milk immediately,” McAfee said of the pathogens. 

I assumed that after diverting batches, the farm discarded them. 

Later that day, I learned otherwise.

“We have a red-flag system here, where if there’s anything that gets really out of whack, they can immediately tag the milk, and it doesn’t go to anything but cheese,” McAfee told me. “Because, you know, cheese is resistant to pathogens.”

Research has shown that raw cheese is not, in fact, resistant to pathogens; while aging can mitigate some risk, harmful bacteria can still survive the usual 60-day maturation process. 

Hearing about the practice took me by surprise — the farm did what with that milk? — so I asked about it again.

McAfee confirmed that milk with pathogens was used to make cheese, except for batches with salmonella, which he said were dumped or sent out for pasteurization. (I later learned the FDA knew he was doing this and had told him to stop two years ago. But no one had alerted the public.) 

“Our cheese is just wildly successful across America,” McAfee said, noting it was sold in hundreds of stores from natural food shops to chains like Sprouts Farmers Market. “H-E-B down in Texas sells 50,000 bucks a week.”

I wondered how long it might take for the cheese to be linked to another outbreak. 

Unbeknownst to me, one was already underway.

Chapter 1: The Pioneer

In the early 2000s, McAfee was producing pasteurized milk for the dairy group Organic Valley when a raw-milk enthusiast named James Stewart made an unusual request. 

Stewart had founded a private food club in Venice, Los Angeles. Its members included movie stars, “crystal worshippers” and other “fanatical people,” McAfee recalled. They were looking for a steady source of raw milk at a time when consumers were waking up to the risks of food contaminated by additives, fertilizers and pesticides.

“How fast can you drive down here with as much milk as you can?” McAfee recalled Stewart asking.

McAfee, not fully grasping why people would want to drink milk that was unpasteurized, nonetheless went to his silo, filled half-gallon containers and packed them in ice chests. Then, with his wife, he made the long drive south to the L.A. coast.

Dozens of people were waiting for them, McAfee said, launching into a scene that unfolded with a Hollywood sheen. “I couldn’t even get out of the car,” he said. “They’re beating on the windows and opening up the back. … Just mayhem, cheering, excitement, crying.” 

As their $20 bills started flying at him, so did their stories, about how raw milk had healed their health issues, including asthma. The moment transformed him, he said: He realized that he was selling more than just milk — it was “food as medicine.”

Twenty-odd years later, Stewart, too, recalls the moment. “I saw the light go off in his head,” Stewart told me. “He was looking for a way to expand what he was doing and not just be a commercial, pasteurized, homogenized milk provider.” 

McAfee, a third-generation California farmer, was born into a family that had charted an unconventional course. His father, whom McAfee described as both a humanitarian and a rebel, founded multiple farm cooperatives and made national news in 1972, when he helped post bail for activist Angela Davis by putting his land up as collateral. 

McAfee didn’t initially follow in his father’s footsteps. He worked for 16 years as a paramedic before taking the helm of family farmland that his grandparents left behind. The farm grew apples, almonds and alfalfa, and, by 2001, McAfee had expanded into commercial dairy. But his days of producing milk for pasteurization were short-lived; within a few months of meeting Stewart, McAfee converted his dairy to sell only raw milk.

He entered a market on the verge of extraordinary growth. 

California had always permitted raw milk to be sold in stores, but Los Angeles County’s more stringent rules had, in effect, curbed its retail sales. In 2001, food-freedom advocates, including Stewart, successfully petitioned the county to weaken regulations, providing McAfee access to a new pool of customers. That would happen again and again, in state and local governments across America, as the internet, and then social media influencers, drew exponentially more people to the cause. 

Around the time McAfee converted his dairy to raw milk, only 27 states allowed its sale. 

In one way or another, nearly all of them ultimately would.

One thing stood between McAfee and all of that business: a federal regulation restricting the sale of raw milk from one state to another. The 1987 ban had the effect of keeping outbreaks contained, making it easier for local officials to address them. 

But there was a loophole: Raw milk could be sold across state lines if labeled as pet food. 

McAfee saw an opportunity, and he wasn’t subtle about it on the website for his farm, which at the time was called Organic Pastures. The farm “creatively labeled its products for sale outside of California in such a way that it is not illegal,” the site said, and it assured people they could still consume them. Justifying the strategy to an Oregon newspaper, McAfee said in 2005, “I am a revolutionist in this, and I won’t overlook any loophole that will get the milk out there.”

As his raw dairy grew, McAfee portrayed himself as an underdog waging a war against industrialized food. “The giants of the marketplace have processed our food to death to extend shelf life and expand distribution,” he said in a 2006 interview. “The raw milk revolution grows right out of this disorder.” 

Two decades later, he still talks about raw milk with the passion of a convert. He answered even simple questions with lengthy explanations, speaking in a quick, torrential style and snapping his fingers or pinching the air for emphasis. Only later did I realize that much of what sounded spontaneous was a pitch he had been refining in years of promotional interviews and farm tours.

McAfee has professed the benefits of unpasteurized milk in public libraries and chiropractor offices. Raw dairy, his farm has claimed, could cure, treat or prevent myriad diseases and ailments, from diabetes and ear infections to allergies, eczema and arthritis. The farm developed the website icanbreathe.org to promote the so-called Milk Cure for asthma. “Only raw milk works in this natural treatment,” the dairy stated. “Pasteurizing milk kills or changes the natural enzymes, antibodies, and fatty acids that are critical to the physiology of how this works in your body.”

McAfee founded a nonprofit, Raw Milk Institute, in 2011, broadcasting similar claims alongside studies he said support them. While a few European studies he cited observed a correlation between drinking raw milk and lower rates of asthma and allergies, they did not prove raw milk directly led to reduced illness, nor did they recommend its consumption due to pathogenic risk. Experts have suggested the association could likely be explained by the “farm effect,” in which children growing up around animals and agriculture have been shown to have stronger immune systems.

Exhaustive reviews of the published science on raw milk have broadly been unable to substantiate claims of its benefits, and most experts agree that it is neither healthy nor safe to consume. But McAfee said his customers know better. To him, the stories of families who believe raw milk has transformed their health are their own form of evidence, revealing truths that institutions have failed to capture. “If raw milk was a fad or a lie, then why would people repeatedly buy raw milk and then tell the world how they love it,” he said. “Our consumers read their gut and watch their kids thrive.”

He also said the government hasn’t invested enough in research to assess its benefits.

“I’m begging you to say: ‘This is not anti-science, this is extremely pro-science,’” he told me. “It’s using science that is not conveniently accepted yet.”

And for many health-conscious people, this possibility that raw milk may help them — or their loved ones — is often enough for them to try it.

Chapter 2: The First

Mary McGonigle-Martin was shopping in a Southern California grocery store in 2006 when she spotted ads suggesting McAfee’s milk could treat allergies and digestive problems. She thought of her 7-year-old son, Chris, who she suspected was dealing with dairy sensitivity, and later visited McAfee’s website to learn more. She knew the risks of forgoing pasteurization, but the site eased her concerns: It said the farm tested its milk and had never found a single pathogen. 

So she started buying it, and her son started drinking it. And about a month later, he fell gravely ill. What began as a trip to the nearest hospital for bloody diarrhea turned into a race to save his life as his kidneys started to fail. Airlifted to a children’s hospital in Loma Linda, Chris was put in a medically induced coma. He spent nine days on a ventilator and 18 days on dialysis, during which time doctors gave him blood, platelet and plasma transfusions. “He was on the verge of death,” Martin told me. “I had flashes of him being in a casket and being at his funeral.”

Chris had a dangerous strain of E. coli, known as O157:H7, which led to hemolytic uremic syndrome. This rare condition, which mostly impacts children, occurs when bacterial toxins spread throughout the body and damage red blood cells, causing clots in the organs, primarily the kidneys. With quick intervention, most people survive. But it can cause lifelong complications.

While sitting in the intensive care unit, Martin overheard another mother mention her daughter had the same condition. It turned out the young girl had also drank milk from McAfee’s farm. Hoping to intervene before others got sick, the families reported the illnesses to the dairy and the state, which quickly issued a recall and quarantine order, suspending distribution of the farm’s products.

McAfee told me that when he learned of the two sick children, he “wanted to know the truth.” So he took his wife’s Volvo and drove four hours to the hospital. Then, somehow, he found a way into the ICU. “I knew how to get back past security,” he said. “A paramedic can get anywhere, and I sucked up to the nurses.”

Martin told me she was surprised when McAfee introduced himself in the waiting area, but nonetheless she shared details of her son’s ordeal. “I listened to her as compassionately as I could,” McAfee told me. But in his recollection, he observed that Martin’s son was not as critically ill as he’d been led to believe. “He’s eating McDonald’s, watching cartoons, doing just great, and they’re telling the story to the world that he’s ready to die,” claimed McAfee. “I was really upset about that.”

McAfee’s version of events was impossible, Martin told me: When he appeared at the hospital, Chris had just been taken off the ventilator and still struggled to breathe on his own; reams of her contemporaneous notes confirm this. Even after being extubated, he couldn’t have solid food for weeks due to severe pancreatitis. “I was so hungry,” Chris told me. “I started crying because I couldn’t eat.”

When I asked Martin why she thought McAfee gave such a different account of their meeting, her response was simple: “Mark is the master of spin.” (McAfee maintained that his recollection was accurate: “This is not spinning; this is simple truth.”)

Six people contracted E. coli during the first outbreak connected to McAfee’s farm, according to federal regulators; their median age was 8. While the outbreak’s specific strain of E. coli was not found in the products, some samples taken by investigators had high bacterial counts, indicating contamination. 

Chris suffered permanent kidney damage. Now 27, he can’t drink alcohol and will spend the rest of his life under a nephrologist’s care because of his elevated risk of chronic kidney disease. 

The illness lingered in other ways, too. “I would have random flashbacks and panic attacks from anything,” he told me. The smell of hospital soap. The sticky feeling of Band-Aids or tape on his skin. His mother found him a trauma counselor, which was “life-changing,” he said, except he still held onto a knot of resentment. Not toward his parents; he views them as victims like him. “Just so much anger towards Mark,” he recently told me. When he later saw McAfee’s milk being sold at a Sprouts, “I wanted to take a bat and smash the entire aisle.”

Martin couldn’t let go either. She hired Bill Marler, a Seattle attorney who specializes in food safety litigation. Alongside the family she met in the hospital, she sued McAfee’s farm in 2008, and the dairy settled for an undisclosed sum. “They couldn’t find the pathogen in our milk,” McAfee told me. “She claims she had it in her milk with her child, and that’s what the insurance company took to settle, and we weren’t going to litigate it.”

Emboldened, Martin, who was a high school guidance counselor, found her second calling as a food safety advocate, testifying against raw-milk-access bills across the country.

Following the settlement, McAfee wrote to Martin to apologize, but also begged her to move on. 

“Mary, please appreciate that so many children thrive and grow very strong on raw milk,” he wrote. “The very remote theoretical risk of illness from tested, retail, approved raw milk is far outweighed by the health and recovery from the illness that children that drink raw milk enjoy.”

Martin appreciated the note, but recognized that even in his seemingly heartfelt apology, McAfee could not adapt his belief system to fit her experience. “He really believed this was like a fluke. It’s not going to happen again,” she said.

Chapter 3: The Pathogens

Eager to keep showing me his farm’s serious approach to pathogens, McAfee ushered me into his truck to see the milking of his cows. Raw Farm keeps about 1,400 of them, which produce up to 8,000 gallons a day, each priced at $19. The smell of sweet milk hung in the air, mixed with the earthy musk of manure. 

“We’ll see what kind of music they’re playing this morning up in the milk barn,” he mused. 

“You play music for the milking?” I asked. 

“Mexican music,” he said, as he got behind the wheel. “It’s very Pavlovian. … You start seeing milk coming out of their teats.”

In the open-sided barn, workers sprayed a small herd of cows with a fire hose, removing flies and flecks of manure from their bellies, which were then inspected, coated with iodine and wiped with a towel. The steady pulsing of milking machines mingled with a thumping musical beat as McAfee marched down the rows, pointing to their light pink udders. “Super clean,” he said with pride. 

Hygiene appeared to be a clear priority everywhere we went, from the thick binders of safety plans — “not one of those documents collects dust,” he told me — to the sterile, full-body moon suits workers wear to package milk. 

McAfee said the 2006 outbreak opened his eyes to the risk of his product and was part of the reason he developed standards for unpasteurized dairies. 

But more awareness and better practices didn’t stop McAfee’s customers from continuing to get sick — in 2007, and 2011, and 2012, and 2016 — and the farm had to issue recalls more than half a dozen times after pathogens were found in its products.

And then between 2023 and 2024, regulators linked the farm to one of the largest publicly known raw-dairy outbreaks in decades, with more than 170 people falling ill from salmonella. McAfee disputed his farm’s connection to many of the outbreaks, including this one.

“I call complete crap,” McAfee said, claiming that his farm was not responsible for all the cases. “It was 25, maybe 30.” He also disagreed that the majority of patients were children, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had detailed in a report published last year. “I challenge that data at the fundamental level.”

It was a typical McAfee defense. Throughout our conversation, he never lost his composure, even when discussing outbreaks. Instead, he calmly dismissed the government’s methodology, explaining that it was counting cases of “standard diarrhea,” which he said have “no claims for illness,” as they could be managed with “good hydration and plenty of good bone broths and electrolytes and stuff.” 

He also seized on instances when the government could not identify an outbreak strain in his products, but instead found it in samples of farm water and cow feces or drew ties to his farm using genetic sequencing or interviews with patients — practices epidemiologists routinely rely upon. McAfee held that none of this was smoking-gun proof that his farm directly caused outbreaks. Instead, such episodes seemed to reinforce his perception that he was climbing a mountain alone, battling institutions that were already biased against raw milk before hearing his case.

When mandated quarantines ended, he would declare victory.

After his dairy reopened following an outbreak that sickened five children in 2011, he revealed how much people were suffering without his product in a celebratory video. McAfee shook the hand of a young man who was wearing a sideways cap. “This guy came all the way from Alaska to get raw milk!” McAfee said. The young man described a kind of withdrawal: “My immune system broke down. I lost a lot of lean body mass.” When a gray-haired woman said she was driving four half-gallons to her grandbabies in Texas — “that’s how desperate I am for them to be healthy” — McAfee kissed her on the head and called her a “raw-milk freedom rider.”

At least 233 people have been sickened in eight outbreaks that federal and state regulators have connected to McAfee’s farm since 2006, and at least 40 of them have been hospitalized. 

The tally is almost certainly an undercount, experts and regulators told me. Many recover at home from foodborne illness and do not seek out testing.

The outbreaks raised an obvious question: Why hadn’t regulators shut down the farm? America’s food safety system aims to balance public health with people’s freedom to eat foods that can harm them, like raw oysters and sushi. Regulators expect some will inevitably get sick, and so they focus on ensuring consumers, at the very least, are aware of the risk.  

State regulators are responsible for overseeing raw milk sold legally within their borders. In California, they require it to be sampled and tested monthly for pathogens. Raw Farm is in good standing, according to the Department of Food and Agriculture, consistently meeting standards for sanitation and cow health. But spokespeople for that agency and the state Department of Public Health emphasized that the best way to prevent illness is to drink milk that has been pasteurized. Otherwise, they wrote in an email, “there will always be some risk of contamination.” 

Many people who turn to raw milk don’t have a full understanding of that risk, John Lucey told me. A professor of food science who directs the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lucey grew up on a farm and has studied dairy products for three decades. “Cows poop all the time,” he said. “Farms are just a reservoir of bacteria: The soil has got bacteria, the walls have got bacteria, the cows are carrying bacteria.”

One of the draws of raw milk is a deeper connection to its source; by knowing a farmer personally, people assume their food will be more safe, Lucey said. But what raw-milk consumers often don’t realize is that many dairy farmers are in a relentless battle to produce clean milk.

“Sometimes you lose because the cow kicked off the milking machine. Something just happens,” he said. “Farmers do the best they can and they are super hardworking people, but just because Daisy is a nice cow and the farmer is a nice guy doesn’t guarantee that things are sanitary and that they can prevent things 100% of the time.”

Over the past two years alone, nine states have experienced outbreaks that regulators linked to raw dairy, not including those connected to McAfee’s farm. In Washington state, about 10 people fell ill with E. coli connected to raw-cheese consumption, and in Florida, where raw milk can be sold only as pet food, about 20 people got sick. Among them was a pregnant mother whose toddler was hospitalized; she said she caught his bacterial infection and had a miscarriage at 20 weeks. (The Florida farm said its products had not tested positive for pathogens and that it informed customers its raw milk was not for human consumption; the Washington creamery voluntarily recalled its cheese.)

Just last week, Idaho’s health officials announced that nearly 60 people had become ill after consuming raw milk.

Discussing the risk of raw milk with McAfee was a challenge. 

As we rode in his truck to the next stop on the tour, I brought up the prevalence of pathogens, as well as his farm’s pattern of outbreaks. He acknowledged that some risk exists, but stressed that it was “very, very, very small” and was “fantastically” outweighed by raw milk’s therapeutic value. And then, he insisted one should disentangle the benefits from the risk, as if that’s even possible.

“Show me the criticism of raw milk if it’s safe,” he told me, one hand on the wheel, the other punctuating his points in the air. “None.”

“Well, the critics would argue that there’s risk—”

“No, if it’s safe,” he said, cutting me off. “If it’s safe, how could you criticize it?”

“But they would argue that it’s not safe,” I said.

“Show me the risk,” he repeated. “I’ve yet to see it. We found it. We immediately diverted it.”

Chapter 4: The Art of War

We’d seen nearly every stage of production — from “grass to glass,” as McAfee called it — when he parked his truck next to the hangar that houses his Cessna 210 Centurion propeller plane. Next to it, steps from his hacienda-style home, is a bungalow he uses as an office. 

He showed me his replica medieval broadsword, his podcasting setup and one of his favored books, Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” He said the ancient Chinese military treatise had informed his longstanding feud with the federal government. 

Two decades ago, his use of the pet food loophole to ship across state lines attracted scrutiny almost immediately. In 2005, an undercover investigator from the FDA called the farm and was told the milk was safe for human consumption. Two years later, according to court records, the farm sent an email to consumers saying, “Raw milk can be shipped via UPS to all US states,” and “Tell everyone who has asthma that they will be cured by raw milk.” 

In 2008, the DOJ pursued criminal charges and a civil suit. McAfee resolved the charges, promising that the farm wouldn’t sell raw milk across state lines again. But prosecutors wanted a court order that would force McAfee and the farm to comply, citing their “unabashed efforts to manipulate the law.” 

To illustrate McAfee’s ongoing defiance, the government pointed to statements he had made online that year and the next. In one post on a blog, he said, “If we ever get raided it will be grand theater. … There will probably be some riots.” In another, he said he would not use guns “until the tipping point” and mentioned “another Wounded Knee, Ruby Ridge or Waco.” Prosecutors argued his conduct demonstrated a “cognizable danger” that he would violate the law again.

In 2010, the judge granted a permanent injunction, requiring, among other things, that the farm stop selling raw milk beyond California and take down any statements promoting its health benefits. McAfee told me the directive was an attack on his right to free speech. “I deeply and passionately believe in the truth, and they were telling me I could not speak the truth,” he said. “I’ve had to have therapy over that, you know. I didn’t want to do something stupid.”

A violation of the order could have led to an enforcement action, but in the years that followed, officials pulled their punches. (McAfee insisted they had no punches to throw.)

The FDA and the DOJ kept finding evidence of violations, in 2016, and 2019, and 2021, according to court records. Though federal prosecutors initially pushed for strong penalties, including holding Raw Farm and McAfee in contempt, they agreed to a consent decree in 2023, which required the farm to undergo independent audits to ensure it was complying with the law.

Then, in early 2024, FDA inspectors discovered the farm had a “standard practice” of producing cheese from milk suspected or known to contain pathogens, according to court documents; lab records showed its cheese had also tested positive even after the mandated aging period. 

That February, federal regulators publicly linked Raw Farm’s cheese to a monthslong E. coli outbreak. Nearly a dozen people across five states fell ill. 

Among them was Paul Panelli, who went to his grocery store in Newport Beach, California, looking for Tillamook cheese to make tacos. Finding it was sold out, he reached for Raw Farm’s cheddar, drawn in by packaging that made it seem organic and all-natural. He told me he didn’t realize the cheese was made with unpasteurized milk.

Both Panelli and his wife, Julie, came down with food poisoning. She was diagnosed with an E. coli infection that left her needing several kidney surgeries. “She literally is afraid to eat things,” her husband told me. The family’s lawsuit against Raw Farm is ongoing; in court records, the farm denied responsibility for their illnesses.

Raw Farm pushed back against the government, maintaining that it followed federal regulations by aging its cheese and claiming to have tested all of it before sale, so no contaminated product reached the market, according to court records. Federal law allows the interstate sale of unpasteurized cheese as long as it’s aged for at least 60 days, though this doesn’t fully eliminate the risk — or account for a farm using pathogenic milk to make it. The FDA told the farm to destroy any cheese made with contaminated milk, arguing that it was violating the law, according to court documents. The farm’s lawyer said it was in compliance, and insisted there was no “bad cheese” to throw out.

To force the farm to follow the government’s orders, it needed a judge’s ruling, but a backlog in the under-resourced Eastern District of California left the case on pause well into 2025. The arrival of the Trump administration that year created a political opening for McAfee.

By the time Kennedy took the helm of the health department, McAfee had already developed close ties to his inner circle. “I go way back with him,” McAfee told me. Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, had made a stop at Raw Farm during his presidential campaign, creating multiple videos featuring McAfee. (She did not respond to my emailed questions.) He was even asked to become an adviser to the FDA, McAfee told me. The position never materialized, but McAfee still benefited from the change in administration. 

Without publicly stating a reason, this past January the government dropped its efforts to take action against the farm. A former federal employee with knowledge of the suit told me that cases involving raw milk were deprioritized in the new administration because of Kennedy’s stance on it. 

Natalie Baldassarre, a DOJ spokesperson, didn’t respond to my questions about the decision, but said in an email that the administration will “always be concerned about risks to public health and will continue to take enforcement action as appropriate to protect American consumers.” The health department and the FDA did not respond to my attempts to seek comment. Kennedy, through his department, also did not respond to my questions.

McAfee called the withdrawal a “big win.” Drawing on Sun Tzu’s teachings, he told me that he had learned not to engage in “their war,” but his own. 

“You win the war they don’t expect you to fight,” he said. While officials were gathering evidence, he was focused on the “education” of consumers. He once delivered his message to dozens at a time. Now online influencers spread it to audiences of millions. “They have the guns and the money,” he said of the government. “I got the truth and the moms.”

His work could soon pay off. A month after I shook McAfee’s hand and left his farm, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, reintroduced the Interstate Milk Freedom Act, which would prohibit “federal interference” with the interstate sale of raw dairy in states where raw milk is already legal. 

Massie, who served raw milk at his recent wedding, has a farm with 50 cattle, and Pingree, a former dairy farmer and the only Democratic sponsor of the bill, raises her own grass-fed beef. “The Interstate Milk Freedom Act would make it easier for families to buy the milk of their choice,” Massie said when he announced the bill, “by reversing the criminalization of specific dairy farmers.”

When asked if she was concerned the bill may increase access to a product that puts people at risk, Pingree told me that the bill was not about marketing raw milk or making any health claims. “I trust state departments of agriculture and health to monitor compliance, assess health risks, and enforce the rules in place to protect consumers,” she said in an emailed statement. Massie did not respond to my questions.

Chapter 5: The Devoted

Six weeks after I left Raw Farm, it happened. 

On March 15, federal regulators publicly linked its cheese to yet another E. coli outbreak. 

Nine people were infected across three states; more than half were younger than 5. Of the three people who had to be hospitalized, according to regulators, one developed the same severe kidney condition that Martin’s son had battled two decades earlier. 

Initially, federal health agencies didn’t urge the public to avoid the cheese or throw it away, as they had under previous administrations. Instead, a CDC notice said consumers should “consider” not eating it; the FDA gave no consumption guidance at all. Three federal health employees later told me political appointees had watered down the original language. (The agencies’ advisories have since been updated. Neither the CDC nor the FDA responded to my questions.)

The fact that the agency was under Kennedy’s leadership didn’t make Raw Farm any more compliant when regulators asked it to recall its products. It refused. “If there was ever a question about whether there was a pathogen in our products,” McAfee later told me, “I’d be the first one to recall immediately, voluntarily.”

He said he texted Kennedy to “call off the dogs,” but got no response. 

When FDA inspectors showed up unannounced at the farm, it complied with an investigation. And when the agency threatened to force a recall, the company reluctantly issued its own, 18 days after the outbreak was announced. 

The farm appended several unusual statements to its April 2 advisory: 

This Voluntary Recall is being performed under protest.

This Voluntary Recall is performed as a path forward.

The farm retracted those statements five days later, but continued to dispute the cause of the outbreak and contest the agency’s findings. It had tested its products, found no pathogens and wasn’t at fault, McAfee said.

However, during its investigation, the FDA also sampled and tested the company’s cheese. While it didn’t find the recent outbreak strain, one sample tested positive for E. coli. In their inspection, agency officials also found the farm’s cheese had recently tested presumptively positive for pathogens even after 60 days, showing the limitations of its aging process. The farm destroyed these contaminated batches. 

I reached out to McAfee and asked him whether the illnesses might be connected to his practice of using problematic milk to make cheese. But now, he told a different story. 

“We would in the past divert to cheesemaking,” he told me. “We no longer do.” He didn’t pinpoint exactly when the farm made the change, throwing out dates from two years ago to last summer. “It’s been quite some time.”

I brought up the fact that he’d made similar disclosures in podcasts in the last year and to me just weeks earlier. But he doubled down. 

“I think you have caught me in something where there’s an issue between practice and what I’m saying,” he said. “If I said it, I believed that at the time to be true, but I do know that now we do not use any questionable milk.” 

In almost the same breath, McAfee noted that his farm would not have violated any laws if it had done so. “It’s not illegal,” he said. “That’s why the FDA dropped their thing.” (California regulators told me such a practice was “concerning.” The FDA refused to respond to questions about it.)

Speaking to a congressional subcommittee on April 16 about the outbreak, Kennedy noted that companies usually comply with recalls right away. “But there was foot-dragging,” he said. “This company was intransigent.” 

U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., asked Kennedy whether in the face of these new, serious illnesses, it wasn’t time for a shift in his messaging: “You are the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Is there not some moral responsibility or compunction to say, ‘Don’t drink raw milk’?”

“Every product can contain contaminants,” Kennedy replied. “What we do is inform the public, and we let people make the choice.” 

On April 30, the FDA closed its investigation without taking any enforcement action. McAfee told me his raw-cheese products were back in stores. Sprouts and H-E-B, two major retail chains that have carried his cheese, did not respond to my emailed questions about the outbreak.

“We don’t feel bad at all,” McAfee told me about the entire episode. “Our sales are highest they’ve ever been, and feedback online with influencers is: If the FDA says something, do the opposite. It’s safer. They don’t trust them at all.” 

On a sunny weekend in early May, hundreds congregated at Raw Farm for its annual Camping With the Cows event. Blue skies extended to the horizon, and a small colony of tents, camper vans and motorhomes sprawled out across the lush alfalfa fields. Influencers in cowboy hats chugged cartons of milk. Matt James, the leading man on Season 25 of “The Bachelor,” ambled around with his mother in a T-shirt that read, “Raw Milk Club.”

Many attendees were unbothered by the recent illnesses. They said they consumed raw dairy because they wanted to reduce their inflammation, and avoid additives, and prevent lactose intolerance, and clear their skin, and bring their hormones into balance. They wanted nutrients that didn’t exist in “boiled to death” milk. They wanted to drink it “the natural way.” 

Alyssa Wolfer, a 42-year-old mother of two from Bakersfield, viewed raw milk as a symbol of “true American freedom,” she said. “I very much lean on the side of freedom of people to choose what they consume and less regulation.”

“I’m seven months pregnant, and I drink raw milk because that’s how God has created it to be,” said Lindsay Espinoza, 34, reclining on a bale of hay with her husband and young son. “There’s so much fear behind raw milk, but it makes sense to us.”

Some, like 58-year-old Melanie Copeland from Huntington Beach, questioned whether the outbreak had occurred at all. “The odds of it being true are slim to none,” she said, “and people need to do their research.”

McAfee mingled among his flock. Some stopped him for pictures as he beamed down the camera and flashed a thumbs-up.

The post He Profits Off Raw Milk That’s Making People Sick. The Government Isn’t Stopping Him. appeared first on ProPublica.

American children lined up for the world’s first measles shots in the early 1960s, but it took nearly 40 years of shoring up immunization programs before the infamous contagion had been so thoroughly controlled that a panel of experts declared in 2000 that the United States had eliminated measles within its borders.

For a quarter century, the U.S. only saw outbreaks when infected travelers brought the virus in from abroad. The resulting waves of measles didn’t last more than a year.

Those days are gone.

Measles began tearing through the dusty plains of West Texas in January last year, and since then, all but a handful of states have seen cases. Two unvaccinated Texas girls and an adult across the border in New Mexico died before the West Texas outbreak seemed to burn out last July.

By then, measles was popping up in Utah, and state health officials couldn’t tell where the earliest patients had caught the virus. Infections in that state took off that fall and winter and continued into May of this year.

The Texas and Utah cases now sit at the center of an unusually technical — and politically fraught — question: whether the United States will lose its measles-free distinction.

Countries aren’t penalized for losing the status, but it’s an indication of cracks in a nation’s once rock-solid immunization programs, a loss of faith in vaccines among its people — or both.

To have any chance of keeping the designation, the U.S. will need to make a strong case that measles didn’t spread endemically — from person to person in a continuous chain within the country for more than a year. If the Texas virus, for example, made its way across the Southwest to Utah and continued infecting people there, that would be a problem. But if cases in Utah were instead sparked by a patient who caught measles abroad, that would be a new chain, restarting the clock.

For clues, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is analyzing the full genetic code of measles viruses that infected patients. Last November, the CDC’s leader at the time said preliminary genomic analysis suggested the Utah cases were not directly linked to those in Texas. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told ProPublica that the work was done by the state laboratories and the CDC is conducting a more comprehensive investigation.

ProPublica embarked on its own analysis, reviewing over 1,800 whole genome sequences, including those released as recently as last month, to compare the genetic fingerprints of measles viruses circulating in the U.S. and Canada. This showed that the measles virus still spreading in Utah as of this May is very closely related to the one that sickened Texans over a year ago.

ProPublica’s analysis isn’t a smoking gun that proves endemic spread. It’s impossible to tell from this information whether the virus spread from state to state or if it at some point left the country and was brought back by a sick traveler.

But given how similar the viruses are in the sequences ProPublica identified, it’s going to be difficult for the U.S. to prove measles isn’t endemic — “unless CDC has something up their sleeves,” said Dr. Alberto Severini, a retired molecular virologist and measles expert who spent two decades at Canada’s Public Health Agency.

This is a small portion of the genetic code from a sample of measles virus collected in Utah in May 2026. Each letter represents one of the four molecules that encode the unique instructions for how the virus is built and operates.

ProPublica compared it to the sequence from a virus collected during the first days of the Texas outbreak in January 2025.

The two sequences are nearly identical. But when you look closely, mutations — tiny changes in the virus’s genetic code — begin to appear. These mutations form a distinct fingerprint.

Out of the nearly 16,000 genetic letters in each sequence, only 12 differ between the original Texas virus and the Utah virus sampled more than a year later. The mutations did not appear all at once.

As the virus spread in Texas, tiny copying errors appeared in its genetic code. One of these cropped up weeks into the outbreak: a G molecule turned into an A.

Over the following months, this branch of the outbreak continued spreading — and continued mutating. By May 2025, a virus collected from a Texas patient bore five distinct mutations.

Then those same five mutations appeared in Utah. A virus carrying this distinctive genetic pattern was found there in June 2025.

Soon, measles cases surged in Utah. Many viruses collected there carried the same five mutations, along with additional new ones. Related viruses continued infecting Utah residents as recently as this May.

The unique fingerprint of mutations hasn’t been limited to these states. The five mutations observed in Texas and Utah were also present in sequences the CDC published of viruses that infected patients last May and June in Iowa, North Dakota, Minnesota and Alaska.

But it’s not clear that the genetic fingerprint is only in the U.S.: No whole genome sequencing has been made public from cases in either Mexico or the Canadian province of Ontario, where measles has also raged.

That matters because whether the virus was spreading continuously in the United States for more than a year — rather than circulating abroad and being brought back into the country by travelers — is a key question facing a panel of experts convened by the Pan American Health Organization.

A regional office of the World Health Organization, PAHO will decide whether the U.S. keeps its measles-free designation. Canada lost its status last year. PAHO invited the U.S. to make its case in April, but American officials asked for more time to investigate how the virus had been spreading. The review was moved to November.

Daniel Salas, a PAHO official, said the kind of thorough analysis that CDC is doing “takes time.”

“What the U.S. is trying to do with this whole genome sequencing is trying to find some patterns that could eventually say, for example, this mutation of the virus occurred in a different country, in a different place to the current outbreak that they’re trying to analyze, so that eventually, that might be taken into consideration to somehow replace the epidemiological information that is missing,” he said. “There’s no country that has done this before.”

One of the biggest questions is how the virus got into Utah. Health officials determined that the first confirmed patient there, identified last June, couldn’t have been exposed to measles in another country or even another state. Utah State Epidemiologist Dr. Leisha Nolen said she and her team reviewed the places the patient had been and the people they had been around, but still couldn’t figure out where they caught the virus.

Clues suggested measles had been quietly spreading in the region. A CDC disease detective investigating subsequent cases that spanned the Utah-Arizona border said there had been reports of community members with rashes last June, but the patients declined measles testing and families were often reluctant to answer questions.

Throughout the outbreak, no interviews suggested any patient was exposed in another country, Nolen said, but she and her team cannot rule out the possibility.

ProPublica asked the CDC whether its epidemiologists had linked any of Utah’s measles cases to an international outbreak, but the agency wouldn’t say, nor would it directly comment on genetic similarities ProPublica found between viruses in Texas and Utah. In a written statement, a spokesperson said, “Sequencing alone cannot determine whether transmission has been continuous or sustained.”

While genomic analysis can provide clues, the spokesperson wrote, “These findings must be interpreted alongside epidemiological data, including travel history, exposure information, and known outbreak connections.”

The CDC is still working on “a comprehensive analysis of potential linkages among cases and outbreaks” and has gathered additional epidemiological data, the spokesperson said, but did not elaborate on what that shows.

With the midterm elections approaching, the spread of measles has become a political liability for President Donald Trump, who picked the founder of an antivaccine organization to be his health secretary. Since Trump’s inauguration last year, there have been more than 4,300 U.S. cases, a high not seen in three decades.

Eliminating the endemic spread of measles is the public health equivalent of slaying a dragon. The disease is among the most contagious humans have ever encountered. Patients are infectious even before the telltale rash appears, and the contagion can linger in a room for two hours after they leave.

Policymakers built the U.S. immunization system on lessons learned from measles outbreaks. To get the sky high-vaccination rates needed to stop the disease from spreading, states made shots mandatory for school and daycare attendance, and the federal government provided them free to low-income kids. When measles still managed to roar back, state lawmakers in California and New York cracked down on exemptions to their school mandates. The U.S. helped other countries fight measles, too, not only to prevent deaths but also because people in power recognized that infectious diseases kept in check abroad are less likely to return to American shores.

During prior U.S. outbreaks, health and political leaders, with unwavering language, urged Americans to vaccinate their children and assured them the shots were safe.

Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. haven’t followed that playbook. Both have fueled doubts about the safety of the MMR shot, which guards against measles, mumps and rubella.

Researchers around the world have found the vaccine does not cause autism. Nevertheless, at a press conference on autism last fall, Trump said he had heard for years that there was a problem with the combination vaccine and urged parents to insist on separate shots for their kids — even though standalone shots don’t exist in the U.S.

Kennedy has said the vaccine offers protection from measles, but he also has repeatedly made the shot sound scarier than the disease.

“There are adverse events from the vaccine,” he told Sean Hannity on Fox News last year. “It does cause deaths every year.”

On a podcast, Kennedy said that when he got the virus as a kid, he got to watch television for a week. “I got chicken soup and vitamin A, which nobody can patent,” he said.

Measles kills 1 to 3 out of every 1,000 people infected and can cause deafness, intellectual disability and brain swelling. In a “know the facts” post, the Infectious Diseases Society of America said there have been no deaths shown to be related to the shot in healthy people. “There have been rare cases of deaths from vaccine side effects among children who are immune compromised, which is why it is recommended that they don’t get the vaccine,” the medical society explained. “That’s why it is so important that everyone who can get vaccinated does so, to protect those who can’t.”

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in an email that Kennedy “believes Americans deserve clear information about both the benefits and risks of medical products so they can make informed healthcare decisions in consultation with their healthcare providers.”

Nixon said “heavy-handed mandates” contributed to the significant loss of trust in health institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. “The Secretary maintains that public health agencies rebuild trust through honesty, transparency, and respect for individual choice — not coercion,” Nixon wrote.

Kennedy has tried to distance himself and the administration from the measles resurgence. He said the U.S. has done a better job of limiting the spread than any other country and pointed to the far higher number of cases in Canada and Mexico, whose populations are much smaller.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai told ProPublica, “Fake News reporters should be spending more time examining why the Trump administration’s efforts to contain America’s measles outbreak has been so much more successful than those of Canada and Mexico instead of regurgitating the same, tired narratives.”

Kennedy has also reminded lawmakers that the Texas outbreak began before he became health secretary.

“We have a global pandemic,” he told senators in April. “It has nothing to do with me.”

Kennedy has been among the most prominent voices in the antivaccine movement for more than a decade.

Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease physician who wrote a book about measles, said Kennedy has done “everything in his power to undermine confidence in vaccines in the U.S.”

During a measles outbreak in New York City that began in 2018, Ratner treated at least five unvaccinated kids who were hospitalized, including a couple who needed intensive care, so he knows that not every child escapes the disease with nothing more than memories of screen time and soup.

While most parents still support immunizations, Ratner worries that the country no longer has the stomach for the kinds of policies that once stopped endemic spread. Rather than making school vaccine requirements stricter, some states are working to do away with them altogether in the name of medical freedom.

“You need a highly vaccinated population to control the spread,” he said. “In the absence of that, I think that we will have ongoing spread, and we’ll have tragedies like the ones that we saw in West Texas with the two kids who died.”

The U.S. may very well find the international travelers it needs to prove that the country is still measles free. But if all remains the same, experts said, it will only be delaying the inevitable.

“It doesn’t change the fact that there’s been transmission of measles in the United States for over a year,” Severini said. “If people don’t vaccinate, measles is going to be endemic.”

The post What ProPublica Found in the Genetic Code of America’s Measles Outbreaks appeared first on ProPublica.

Timmy G. Robinson Jr., founder and owner of what was once Kentucky’s largest drug addiction treatment company, was criminally indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud and money laundering.

The indictment, filed in the Eastern District of Kentucky, charges Robinson with fraudulently selling millions of dollars of the same IRS tax credit to two companies. Robinson “devised a scheme” to “unlawfully enrich himself” by selling those tax credits to two parties, the indictment says. Robinson is also charged with two counts of money laundering  for spending the proceeds of the fraudulent sale. 

Robinson has resigned as CEO of ARC, company spokesperson Vanessa Keeton said Thursday. Robinson, 50, founded the company in 2012 after becoming sober and telling people he felt called by God to help people in the state with addiction. 

ARC, which at one point operated more than 40 drug treatment centers around the state, has been under FBI investigation for Medicaid fraud since July 2024. That investigation is ongoing, the FBI confirmed on Friday. The Lexington Herald-Leader, in partnership with ProPublica, reported in April firsthand accounts from former ARC employees and clients who said they were told by ARC to falsely bill Medicaid, or witnessed others billing for services that were not actually provided. The company said at the time that it “has never knowingly or fraudulently billed Medicaid for services, and there is no evidence that the organization encouraged employees to falsify group notes for billing purposes.”

Robinson’s attorney, Kent Wicker, said he and his client were surprised to learn an indictment had been placed over a “dispute with some investors that is now pending in a civil courtroom.”

That dispute escalated earlier this year, when ARC was sued by two companies to which Robinson had sold IRS credits, including the Bahamas-based Angelica Capital Trust. But both companies allege that when ARC received the IRS credits, it illegally kept more than $8 million the companies were owed. They allege ARC was refusing to repay the money in part so it could pay a preliminary $28 million settlement with the Department of Justice over alleged Medicaid fraud. Robinson has said he would make payments to creditors upon the sale of the company, which he described in January as imminent. 

“To be clear, Mr. Robinson did not defraud anyone, did not gain anything from the transaction at issue, and he has done nothing but deliver high quality care for over a decade to thousands of Kentuckians,” Wicker said in an emailed statement to the Herald-Leader and ProPublica. “We look forward to defending this case in court.”

Starting in 2023, ARC applied for two COVID-19-related tax credits, totalling nearly $7 million.

In July 2025, Robinson sold the rights to the first tax credit to a loan company, the indictment says. Under the agreement, the purchaser would pay ARC $2.7 million in exchange for a future repayment of the tax credit once the IRS funds arrived. Robinson signed that agreement, and later that month the buyer wired ARC the agreed amount. 

Soon after, the indictment says, Robinson “devised a scheme” to sell that same credit amount to a second company and in doing so “falsely represented” that the $2.7 million in initial tax credit was available to purchase. “Robinson concealed the prior transactions” to the new buyer, according to the indictment.

In November, Robinson signed an agreement with the second buyer, who sent a wire transfer that included $2.7 million for the twice-sold tax credit. 

In December, when the IRS paid ARC the COVID-19 tax refunds, “at Robinson’s direction, ARC spent the ERC [Employee Retention Credit] funds on other operational costs and debt obligations,” the indictment reads.

Keeton declined to comment further on the case, citing pending litigation. However, she said ARC continues to operate normally.

“All facilities, programs, and services remain open and fully operational,” Keeton said in an emailed statement. “Our leadership team, employees, and clinical staff remain committed to delivering high-quality care and support to the individuals and families we serve.”

Robinson faces 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, or twice the gain or loss, for the wire fraud count. Each money laundering count carries up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The post Founder of Kentucky Drug Rehab Center Indicted on Fraud and Money Laundering Charges appeared first on ProPublica.

If Eric Murphy loses his primary election on June 9, he believes he already knows one reason why.

Last year, the North Dakota state representative, a Republican, tried to expand the window of pregnancy in which women could access abortion. The state legislature had banned it for almost everyone from the moment of conception.

Tied up in court, the ban hadn’t yet gone into effect. But Murphy wanted to lock in a less restrictive law, making abortion accessible up to 15 weeks and even later for women whose doctors deemed it a medical necessity.

To convince his fellow legislators, he read out loud from two ProPublica stories about women in Texas who died without lifesaving care. “Physicians felt compelled to follow the law,” he said in a hearing, “and both women died so that an inane law could be followed.”

A conservative colleague had warned him not to file the bill, Murphy told ProPublica, recalling the man’s words: “I can no longer protect you from who’s going to come after you.”

There was some truth to that sentiment.

At least four Republican state lawmakers who challenged severe abortion restrictions lost support from anti-abortion groups and key party allies and went on to lose primary elections, ProPublica found.

The blueprint in those races was remarkably similar. Opponents either embraced stricter abortion policies or avoided the issue altogether. Anti-abortion organizations campaigned against the incumbents, party endorsements shifted to their opponents and activists worked to turn out voters in low-participation primary elections.

In some of the races ProPublica examined, lawmakers who replaced abortion-ban reformers went on to support even stricter abortion legislation. In South Carolina, for instance, two new senators supported a bill to eliminate almost all exceptions to the state’s abortion ban. One provision of the bill would send women convicted of illegally terminating their pregnancies to jail.

Murphy is one of at least two Republican state lawmakers now facing a contested primary after trying to modify their states’ abortion restrictions. Richard Briggs, a state senator from Tennessee, is also fighting to keep his seat. In 2019, Briggs voted for the state’s so-called trigger law — a ban that would snap into place if the federal right to abortion was ever overturned.

But he had second thoughts after that actually happened. A cardiothoracic surgeon, Briggs realized the newly activated law didn’t provide adequate protections for patients having medical complications. “As a medical doctor, I drew the line,” he said in an interview. He introduced bills for a clearer medical exception and protection for doctors who intervened in cases where a fatal fetal anomaly risked the mother’s health.

The latter bill failed and now serves as ammunition for the challenger vying for his seat in the state’s Aug. 6 primary. “My opponent consistently works to weaken Tennessee’s pro life laws,” Kent Morrell says on his campaign website, noting that Tennessee Right to Life had revoked its endorsement of Briggs.

Murphy, who teaches biomedical sciences at the University of North Dakota’s medical school, ultimately did not succeed at reforming the state’s ban. His bill failed 87-6, and the state Supreme Court later reinstated the original ban, which forbids abortion from conception, with exceptions for rape and incest up to six weeks and to save the life of the mother.

The first time Murphy ran for election, his county’s Republican Party had endorsed him. Not this time. Instead, the party endorsed his two challengers, including Jill Chandler, the executive director of a “crisis pregnancy center” who believes abortion should be banned from conception.

She told ProPublica she happened to be present in the committee room when Murphy made the case for his bill. “To know that he was an endorsed Republican candidate from my district and one that I had voted for because of that endorsement was eye-opening,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘This can never happen again.’”

It was not the first time either Briggs or Murphy had taken positions that aggravated members of their parties in legislatures that have taken sharp turns to the right. Murphy voted against book bans and private school vouchers. Briggs had urged the public to get COVID-19 shots and has said that medical expertise should trump politics in decisions that involve public health.

Briggs expressed confidence in his election chances; he feels that voters agree with the decisions he’s made and noted that his Republican colleague, Sen. Becky Duncan Massey, survived a primary challenge over her support for abortion-ban exceptions.

Murphy believes the “silent majority” supports the intent of his abortion bill, but primary races historically have low turnout. It could come down to a handful of votes, he said.

“I might lose an election over this,” Murphy said, “but would I rather win an election by not doing the right thing?”

The Fallen Reformers

Mary DuBuisson, a former state Republican representative in a suburb outside of New Orleans, considers herself passionately “pro-life.” Like Briggs, she voted for her state’s near-total abortion ban in 2019. Three years later, just before Louisiana’s trigger law was implemented, it came before the legislature again.

Recognizing that women would now have to live under the restriction, DuBuisson wanted to make sure victims of rape and incest could terminate their pregnancies. When her colleagues refused to include those exceptions, she became the only Republican to vote against the ban.

A year later, she caused a stir when she sponsored a bill that would have allowed women whose pregnancies were not viable to end them. “To force a woman to carry to term with zero chance of survival is heartless and cruel,” she said at the time.

She didn’t feel it would be controversial. Other Republican women in the House told her she was doing the right thing. But when it was time to vote, another female Republican state lawmaker made a motion that ultimately succeeded at killing the bill in committee. “I mean, I just couldn’t understand,” she said of all her colleagues. “What if this was you, your daughter or granddaughter?”

When she came up for reelection, her primary opponent latched onto her record. Brian Glorioso was an attorney she had handily defeated in 2018. He called her proposed legislation a leftist attempt to circumvent the state’s abortion ban and said any “pro-abortion” doctor would falsely deem a pregnancy nonviable in records just to perform the procedure.

She beat him in the Oct. 14, 2023, primary by 384 votes — not enough to avoid a runoff.

Then, he got some extra support.

On Oct. 16, Louisiana Right to Life told its followers this runoff was key. Glorioso was expected to have a 100% “pro-life” voting record, while DuBuisson’s was 77%.

On Oct. 27, the state’s new governor-elect, Republican Jeff Landry, endorsed him, citing issues other than abortion; he wouldn’t tell ProPublica whether DuBuisson’s record on it played a role. But Landry, who had defended the state’s ban as attorney general, made clear during his campaign that he was “an unwavering defender of life, especially in the face of adversity,” citing his 100% rating from a national anti-abortion group.

“I think it partially cost me my election,” DuBuisson said of her attempts to reform the ban.

History repeated itself the following year, this time in South Carolina.

Three state senators — all Republicans who consider themselves “pro-life” — worked across party lines to defeat an abortion bill that essentially banned the procedure from conception and eliminated rape and incest exceptions. At the time, the state allowed abortion up to 20 weeks.

Sens. Sandy Senn and Penry Gustafson spoke out against limitations on abortion access for victims of rape and incest. Sen. Katrina Shealy, who had the longest tenure for a woman in the state legislature, pushed for making abortion accessible up to 12 weeks and later for exceptions in cases involving rape, incest and fatal fetal anomalies. Ultimately, a six-week window with rape, incest and fatal fetal exceptions became law.

Amid the Statehouse showdown, they were nicknamed the “Sister Senators.” All lost their county GOP’s endorsement to their male opponents.

But the bigger repercussions came from anti-abortion groups that mobilized a multifront grassroots campaign against them. Students for Life Action announced that it generated “37,000 pieces of mail, almost 130,000 personal text messages, more than 51,000 phone calls and thousands of doors knocked” to unseat the trio.

“All three of them got voted out — every single one of them lost because of that decision,” said Dr. Matthew Clark, the executive director of Personhood South Carolina, which believes abortion shouldn’t exist at all and that women who have them should be prosecuted for murder.

Clark, an allergist and Presbyterian pastor, said his group’s desired legislation has a better chance to advance now that the Sister Senators have been replaced.

Matt Leber, who beat Senn, previously co-sponsored a bill as a member of the state House that would make abortion a crime equivalent to homicide. It failed to advance, and Leber withdrew his name as a co-sponsor amid a controversy surrounding it in 2023.

This legislative session, Leber and Carlisle Kennedy, who beat Shealy, supported a bill that carries misdemeanor criminal penalties for women seeking abortions, with jail time up to two years. Senate Bill 1095 passed with supermajority support out of a committee Leber sits on.

The bill died before the session, but watchers of abortion restrictions noticed it got further than any other similarly repressive legislation ever has.

A Fateful Disconnect

The outcomes do not neatly match public polling. Surveys in states such as South Carolina and Louisiana have found that many Republican voters support at least some exceptions to abortion bans, including in cases of rape or threats to a woman’s health.

But primary elections often draw only a small share of eligible voters, giving outsized influence to highly engaged activists and organized interest groups.

DuBuisson’s runoff drew about one-third of registered voters. Participation in the South Carolina primaries was lower still. Some races were decided on tiny margins; Senn lost hers by 33 votes.

The North Dakota GOP has moved further to the right on abortion in recent years, even as polling suggested the state’s restrictions were losing support from Republican voters. At its 2026 convention, the party passed a resolution rejecting any policies that “normalize” abortion.

North Dakota is one of the few states with a multimember system, where two representatives and one senator govern together in the same district. District 43, which Murphy currently represents, is one of the only purple districts in an otherwise deeply red state. It includes part of Grand Forks, a growing college town home to the University of North Dakota.

Murphy’s fellow representative, Democrat Zac Ista, told ProPublica he hadn’t been able to make a dent in this legislature. He announced he wouldn’t be seeking reelection, opening up an opportunity for a Republican takeover of the district.

Ista said the lack of support rallying around Murphy is due to his position on abortion, as well as culture-war legislation he refused to support. “I think it’s illustrative of that schism, where at this district level, Republicans are really trying to sort of press the most extreme conservative opinions,” Ista said.

Richard Glynn, the GOP county chair in Murphy’s district, had previously supported Murphy’s abortion bill. In written testimony, Glynn shared his experience hearing about young women performing illegal abortions when he was a freshman at the University of South Dakota in 1966. Four young women who were in sororities died from using metal hangers to terminate their pregnancies, he wrote.

“These deaths were viewed as preventable if these girls could have received competent care. Unfortunately, North Dakota is going down the same path with limited access to obstetric care that negatively impacts the health of the woman,” his letter said.

When reached by phone, Glynn said delegates in the county voted and Murphy had the least amount of votes, which is why he did not receive the county’s endorsement.

Glynn declined to answer more questions before hanging up on a reporter.

One of Murphy’s opponents, Mike Holmes, has drawn a lot of excitement — and an endorsement from Gov. Kelly Armstrong — for his expertise in energy technology and industrial development. The governor said Holmes understands “what it takes to keep North Dakota’s economy strong.” Holmes has been silent on abortion and didn’t respond to ProPublica’s requests for an interview.

Chandler, who touted her “respect for life” in a campaign mailer, is favored among anti-abortion groups. “It’s a pretty stark contrast,” said Bridget Turbide, executive director of North Dakota Right to Life, who called Murphy’s proposal “the most extreme pro-choice bill we’ve ever seen.”

Citizens Alliance of North Dakota, a conservative group that opposes abortion among other causes, paid for a mailer calling Chandler a “champion of family values.” The same group marked Murphy in “bad standing” in an online roster of legislators, questioning his alignment with North Dakota values.

Murphy’s third colleague who also represents District 43, Republican State Sen. Jeff Barta, campaigned alongside him in 2022 as part of a unified Republican ticket when the primary election was uncontested.

Asked about the upcoming race and the candidates, Barta pointed to Murphy’s proposal that would have expanded abortion access in North Dakota.

“Last session, he introduced House Bill 1488, which created a little divide there,” Barta said.

Barta said Murphy has also broken with the party on other issues.

“That probably opened the door for the third candidate to run,” Barta added. Had that not happened, Murphy would have made it to the general election without having to defend his spot on the ballot.

Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, lawmakers taking such nuanced stands on abortion bans may not have risked a career death sentence, said abortion historian and law professor Mary Ziegler.

“The kind of incrementalism that Eric Murphy seems to be doing is something from a bygone era, where people were more pragmatic in the movement and not punished for it,” she said.

The post These Republican Lawmakers Challenged Abortion Bans. Then They Faced Backlash. appeared first on ProPublica.