Louisiana Surgeon General Warns Parents about ‘Authoritarian’ American Academy of Pediatrics
By Adam Dick | Peace and Prosperity Blog | September 6, 2025
In February, I highlighted a statement by Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph L. Abraham, commending it for its pro-freedom tone. I also noted that “I will be watching for follow-up actions.” Well, on Thursday, Abraham came out with a powerful editorial again strongly arguing for employing a pro-freedom approach in relation to medical issues.
In the editorial, Abraham took on squarely the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) — a large and influential organization of pediatricians that Abraham termed an “authoritarian organization” that has been “captured by special interests.” The AAP, Abraham related, “thinks they know better than any parent or doctor in this country and wants you to bend to their will while they hold your child down and give them whatever pharmaceutical product they choose.”
In his editorial, Abraham threw his support behind United States Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who last week strongly criticized the AAP and its “Big Pharma benefactors” after the AAP took yet another step in its over-the-top campaign to maximize the amount of shots injected into children in America.
Abraham’s passionate and informative editorial, published at The Center Square, begins as follows:
By now, virtually every parent in the U.S. understands that COVID-19 shots for healthy children are a very bad idea. Public health authorities in nearly every country on earth abandoned the practice a couple of years ago. Even the World Health Organization (WHO), which admittedly lost whatever credibility it had left during the pandemic, stopped recommending the shot for healthy kids. At no point did the theoretical benefits outweigh the risks of an experimental product that had unknown long-term risks in the pediatric population.
Many are probably wondering why this topic is still being talked about at all, which would have been a valid question until recently, when an organization formerly known as the gold standard for pediatric advocacy defied logic and commanded that all babies, on their 6-month birthday, receive a COVID-19 vaccine. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) made this recommendation in response to the CDC’s credibility-restoring move of removing the COVID-19 vaccine from the childhood schedule. They have even gone so far as to sue Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and the CDC over the very sound decision.
This is not the first time the AAP has done something crazy. In 2023, its board voted unanimously in favor of recommending transition therapy for “transgender” kids. We don’t let kids choose what they eat for dinner, much less make irreversible, life-altering decisions. To put a cherry on top of the insanity, the AAP has also called for religious vaccine exemptions to be outlawed. This authoritarian organization thinks they know better than any parent or doctor in this country and wants you to bend to their will while they hold your child down and give them whatever pharmaceutical product they choose.
Read Abraham’s complete editorial here.
‘Medically Reckless’: AAP Pushes Mental Health Screenings for Kids as Young as 6 Months Old
‘Parents must know they have the right to refuse these screenings’
By Jill Erzen | The Defender | August 27, 2025
Children as young as 6 months old should begin regular screenings for mental or developmental issues at every well-child visit, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said in a clinical report released Aug. 25.
Critics of the report fear the recommendations will lead to misdiagnosing and further overmedicating children.
“It is alarming that pressure is being put on pediatricians by the AAP to actively look for signs of depression in a 2-year-old,” Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT, told The Defender.
Pushing mental health screening for children leads to the expectation of psychiatric problems being woven into standards of care, said Robert Whitaker, author of “Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.”
“And the screening instruments the pediatricians will employ will have been constructed to identify a certain percentage of children as being in need of treatment,” he said.
The AAP report, published online in the journal Pediatrics, recommends that mental health screening begin at 6 months old and continue as part of well-child visits at ages 1, 2 and 3. After age 3, screening would continue annually.
The report said as many as 1 in 5 children in the U.S., including kids as young as 2, have mental or behavioral issues such as depression, anxiety, ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) or suicidal thoughts.
However, studies show mental health issues are commonly misdiagnosed. Depression has been falsely diagnosed 66% of the time, and generalized anxiety disorder has been incorrectly assessed 71% of the time.
“Parents should be more than just skeptical,” said Whitaker. “They should be alarmed by this push for ‘early detection.’ Screening of children, starting when they are very young, will of course lead a significant percentage to be diagnosed with one disorder or another.”
That diagnosis then “serves to pathologize the child, and that diagnosis may stick to the child for years, possibly through childhood and into adulthood,” he said. And a diagnosis “often will lead to a prescription for a psychiatric drug, and the scientific evidence on this is quite clear: over the long term, this will harm the child.”
Whitaker added:
“Or to put it another way, while screening and early detection is presented to the public as an effort to help the child, in reality it serves as an assault on the child’s right to be — to grow up without being tagged as ‘abnormal’ and forced to take a drug that will change the child’s capacity to experience the world.”
Screening toddlers for psychiatric disorders is ‘medically reckless’
The AAP claims rates of mental, emotional and behavioral problems in the U.S. are rising, and early detection will lead to intervention.
However, an August 2022 study in Preventive Medicine concluded that screening adolescents for depression does not reduce their treatment for suicidal behaviors.
A 2017 review found no evidence that screening children improves mental health outcomes, but instead raises the risk of potential harm and wasted resources.
“Screening babies, toddlers and schoolchildren for psychiatric disorders is medically reckless,” said Jan Eastgate, president of Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) International, a mental health industry watchdog.
She added:
“The questionnaires are based on a subjective and unscientific diagnostic system that pathologizes normal childhood behavior. Instead of helping families, they funnel children into a pipeline of psychiatric drugging — substances that can be addictive, damage the heart, and even drive them to suicide.”
The AAP, which represents 67,000 pediatricians in the U.S., stated that pediatricians are best equipped to work with families to identify issues early and provide children with the necessary help.
The AAP is also a lobbying organization. It spent between $748,000 and $1.18 million annually over the previous six years to advocate for its members, according to Open Secrets.
Some of the AAP’s biggest financial contributions come from major pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly, GSK, Merck, Moderna and Pfizer.
In January 2024, an AAP study published in Pediatrics found that more children were being subjected to restraint drugs — antipsychotics used to sedate — because more children were being admitted to mental health facilities.
During the 2016-2021 study period, the analysis found a 141% increase in the use of restraint drugs overall, and longer inpatient stays. Pharmacological restraints tend to be used with greater frequency on autistic children, low-income children and children of color.
According to the mail-order pharmacy Express Scripts, prescriptions for antidepressants for teenagers increased 38% from 2015-2019.
The AAP has been diagnosing and medicating children for decades, and the data show it doesn’t benefit children, Whitaker said.
He added:
“Early detection will just amplify the harm that is already being done to so many children by diagnosis plus drug treatment.
“What we should be doing if so many of our children are struggling, starting at an early age, is fixing the environment for raising children in our country. The children’s struggles don’t tell of a problem within the child, but within our society, and diagnosing the child just puts the blame inside the child.
“This promotion of early detection. … It’s an assault on our children.”
‘Alarming list of serious side effects’
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are a first-line medication for children diagnosed with moderate to severe depression and anxiety. However, these medications carry a black box warning for a potential, though low, increased risk of suicidal thoughts, according to the AAP’s webpage, Antidepressants: Pediatric Mental Health Minute Series.
“SSRIs have an alarming list of serious side effects, the most egregious of which might be serotonin syndrome, which can cause death,” Seneff said. SSRIs raise levels of serotonin — a hormone and neurotransmitter that regulates mood.
While common side effects of SSRIs include diarrhea, headache, sleepiness and weight gain, the medications are also associated with serious adverse events, including heart rhythm changes, bleeding and thoughts of suicide or self-harm.
The risks of prescribing antidepressants are greater in children than in adults, Seneff said:
“A child’s developing brain will respond to these drugs in unpredictable ways. Early exposure to SSRIs could lead to permanent but currently unknown disruptions in brain development. We should rather be devoting our efforts to figuring out why so many kids are so emotionally disturbed today.”
Studies show benefits don’t outweigh risks
A 2025 study examined the link between antidepressant medications and fatal heart events. Researchers reviewed the death records of every adult ages 18-90 living in Denmark in 2010. In all age groups, the longer people used antidepressants, the more likely they were to die from sudden cardiac death.
In June 2022, the International Journal of Risk Safety Medicine published a study raising concerns about the first U.S.-approved SSRI antidepressant, fluoxetine. The authors reviewed several core studies used as the basis for the drug’s approval, and found that “the two pivotal trials showed that fluoxetine is unsafe and ineffective.”
Fluoxetine is the only SSRI antidepressant approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating major depression in patients as young as 8 years old. Yet, the FDA warns that children treated with antidepressants should be closely observed for agitation, irritability, suicidality and unusual changes in behavior.
The benefits of SSRIs have not been shown to outweigh the risks.
In 2022, FDA researchers published an extensive review of antidepressant studies in the BMJ. In total, the data from 1979-2016 covered 73,388 patients with diagnosed depression.
The analysis found that antidepressants outperformed placebo in just 15% of patients, and the benefit was almost entirely limited to people with the most severe forms of depression. For everyone else, the improvement was likely due to belief and expectation, not the drug itself.
The AAP recommendation for mental health screening was announced just weeks after Illinois became the first state to mandate mental health screenings for students in grades 3-12.
The Illinois law, set to take effect in the 2027-2028 school year, requires schools to conduct self-screenings annually using either digital or paper forms.
CCHR International said such subjective screening has shown an 84% “false positive” rate that could lead to teens being prescribed antidepressants, which in turn have been linked to an increase in suicide and/or acts of violence.
The source of such screening questionnaires can also be suspect, according to CCHR International.
The Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) was first developed in 2001 and administered as a universal intervention in high schools to identify and treat depression, according to CCHR International. It was developed through a grant from Pfizer, the manufacturer of the antidepressant Zoloft (sertraline).
In 2010, the company made both its PHQ-9 and General Anxiety Disorder questionnaire available to primary care doctors “without copyright restriction and at no charge.” Prescriptions of sertraline jumped 33%, from almost 29 million prescriptions in 2004 to over 38 million in 2020.
“Parents must know they have the right to refuse these screenings,” Eastgate said. She added:
“Signing an ‘Opt-Out’ form is essential to protect their child from being falsely labeled with a mental disorder and drugged. Informed consent belongs to parents — not to a psychiatric screening checklist that has no scientific foundation and is often developed by pharmaceutical interests.”
Related articles in The Defender
How the American Academy of Pediatrics Betrayed Children Everywhere
By Clayton J. Baker, MD | Brownstone Institute | August 25, 2025
The prime directive of Western medicine, its golden rule, is expressed by the Latin maxim primum non nocere – first, do no harm. Unfortunately, the Covid era taught us that from the patient’s point of view, a better motto for our times might be caveat emptor – let the buyer beware.
Every medical student is taught that, first and foremost, they should not cause harm to their patients, and every doctor is familiar with this maxim. It is echoed in the Hippocratic Oath, and it forms the basis for the four pillars of medical ethics: autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice.
This rule, and the core tenets of medical ethics that it underpins, were all abandoned during the Covid era. They were replaced with a brutal, inhumane, and unethical martial-law-as-public-health approach to medicine. The results were unconstitutional lockdowns, prolonged school closures, suppression of early treatment, mandated vaccinations, and silencing of dissenting views. These abuses were justified by constant propaganda and lies from public health authorities, the medical establishment, the mainstream media, and medical professional associations.
Enter the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is the largest professional association for pediatricians in the United States. Nearly one hundred years old, the AAP’s motto is “Dedicated to the Health of All Children.” But as with so much of the medical establishment, the Covid era revealed that the AAP has abandoned its stated mission, and in the process, it has betrayed children everywhere.
During the Covid era, no group was harmed more – or more unnecessarily – than children, who lost multiple years of education, socialization, and normal growth and development. Many millions of kids also received the fraudulently tested, toxic, experimental mRNA-based injections that were coercively imposed upon the population at large. Countless children have been harmed or killed by these products, with myocarditis being only the most universally acknowledged of the many toxicities associated with the shots.
Adding insult to injury, it was known from the beginning of the pandemic that the gain-of-function-produced SARS-CoV-2 virus affected children very mildly, rarely causing severe illness, and almost never killing them. Even at the height of the pandemic, an article in the preeminent journal Nature described pediatric Covid deaths as “incredibly rare.” A very large population-based Korean study from 2023 found the case-fatality rate in children from Covid to be well under 1 death in every 100,000 cases.
If no segment of the population was harmed more egregiously than children during the Covid era, few medical organizations betrayed their patient population more thoroughly than the American Academy of Pediatrics.
While the AAP has for many years taken questionable stances on a variety of issues, including the ever-enlarging pediatric vaccine schedule, “gender reassignment,” and others, at one early point during Covid, the AAP did attempt to advocate appropriately in the interest of children. It didn’t last long, however, and a review of this incident shows how the AAP, like so many other medical professional organizations, effectively sold its soul during Covid.
Summer 2020: The AAP Changes Its Tune on In-School Learning
From mid-March 2020, when the Covid lockdowns began, until the end of that school year in June, most American schoolchildren had been kept completely out of school. On July 9, 2020, the AAP released a statement arguing forcefully for the return of American schoolchildren back:
The AAP strongly advocates that all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school. The importance of in-person learning is well-documented, and there is already evidence of the negative impacts on children because of school closures in the spring of 2020.
The July AAP statement went on to say that school closure “places children and adolescents at considerable risk of morbidity and, in some cases, mortality.” It went even further to state that:
… the preponderance of evidence indicates that children and adolescents are less likely to be symptomatic and less likely to have severe disease resulting from SARS-CoV-2 infection. In addition, children may be less likely to become infected and to spread infection.
All of these claims the AAP made in July 2020 were known to be true to those who did the proper research (as the AAP apparently had done), and they have been repeatedly and definitively confirmed in the following years.
I was acutely aware of that July 9, 2020, AAP statement. I used it as an important resource in my own advocacy during the summer of 2020 to try to get schools reopened for full-time learning in New York State by the fall. The July AAP document was a well-researched, well-constructed, and well-argued advocacy tool that supported all children’s best interests.
So far, so good. Very soon thereafter, however, the AAP shamefully succumbed to pressure from public health officials, teachers’ unions, and others pushing for continued school closures. By August 19, 2020, with school reopening imminent, the AAP suddenly “revised” their recommendations. The AAP dramatically changed its tune, stating that they would go along with whatever measures public health officials decreed:
… many schools where the virus is widespread will need to adopt virtual lessons and [AAP] is calling for more federal funding to support both models.
“This is on us – the adults – to be doing all the things public health experts are recommending to reduce the spread of the virus,” said AAP President Sara “Sally” H. Goza, M.D., FAAP.
In an act of cowardice and dereliction of duty, the AAP surrendered. It abandoned the strong and sound advocacy for normalizing children’s education contained in its July document. As a physician actively following the issues of the day surrounding Covid and publicly fighting for school reopening, I can testify that nothing changed regarding our knowledge of the virus that justified the AAP’s abdication of its responsibility to children. In fact, multiple foreign countries had already returned children to school without ill effect. The AAP’s capitulation significantly undermined school reopening efforts, especially in Blue states.
The AAP’s sudden and craven volte-face regarding in-school learning was just one of many disgraceful acts committed by medical associations during the Covid era, and it acted to the severe harm of schoolchildren across the nation. Millions of American schoolchildren continued to languish in “remote” or “hybrid” learning for the entire 2020-2021 school year. Many thousands simply dropped out of school, never to return.
In retrospect, the AAP cannot claim that they “didn’t know” enough to push for school reopening. Their July 2020 document proves they knew the correct course of action – before caving in to the establishment’s false narrative, and then subsequently devolving into just one more shameless shill organization, pushing for the mass inoculation of children with the toxic Covid mRNA injections.
Why would the AAP have done such a thing?
Money, for one thing. And plenty of it.
The AAP’s Federal Funding Windfall During Covid
As the Covid vaccine push intensified, the AAP became one of the trusted legacy medical associations that was handsomely rewarded to “push vaccines and combat ‘Misinformation’.” By 2023, the year for which data is most available, the AAP was absolutely raking it in.
As journalist Michael Nevradakis explains:
AAP… received $34,974,759 in government grants during the 2023 fiscal year, according to the organization’s most recent tax disclosure. The grants are itemized in the AAP’s single audit report for 2023-2024. Documents show some of the money was used to advance childhood vaccination in the U.S. and abroad, target medical “misinformation” and “disinformation” online, [and] develop a Regional Pediatric Pandemic Network.
In summary: in July 2020, the AAP ever-so-briefly and correctly sided with the lockdown dissenters, in service of its self-proclaimed motto to serve “the health of all children.” But by mid-August, the AAP switched sides and subsequently got a massive payout to do so. In fiscal 2023 alone, the AAP was receiving $35 million of tax money, much of it directly tied to pushing the Covid mRNA shots in children and to silence dissenters, whom it knew were telling the truth.
Unfortunately, this is unsurprising. Years before Covid, the AAP had already morphed into a highly compromised organization, straying far from its stated goal of being “dedicated to the health of all children.”
The Dinosaurs Sell Themselves to Survive
The business model for the old establishment medical professional organizations, like the AAP, is a dinosaur. The value of paid membership to these organizations has disappeared over the years, causing income from membership fees to fall. Individual paid subscriptions to their flagship journals have nosedived as well. Their financial survival increasingly relies upon Big Pharma largesse and, as we saw above for the AAP during Covid, government payouts.
In return for Big Pharma and government money, these professional organizations function less and less as champions for their professional members and their patients. They become mouthpieces for government initiatives and advertisers for Pharma. If you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, they have become a strange species of dinosaur-prostitutes.
The AAP in particular is deeply tied to and heavily subsidized by Big Pharma, especially in the area of vaccine promotion.
Starting with the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), which effectively eliminated tort liability for vaccine manufacturers, the CDC pediatric vaccine schedule has ballooned from 7 vaccines in 1985 to 23 vaccines (and over 70 total doses!) in 2024. Since then, the AAP has largely been in the vaccine promotion business.
In accordance with the CDC vaccine schedules, the Federal government purchases huge quantities of the recommended vaccines from pharmaceutical companies. The shots are promoted to the public and to physicians through well-paid organizations like the AAP, and administered by pediatricians, many of whom receive payment – essentially kickbacks – to do so. Every step of the way, palms are greased.
As a result, American children have become what Dr. Meryl Nass calls “a delivery system to transfer taxpayer funds to big pharmaceutical companies, via your child or grandchild’s arm.”
As HHS Secretary Kennedy recently noted, the AAP posts on its own website its financial indebtedness to its corporate “donors.” Lo and behold, the four top vaccine manufacturers for the products on the pediatric vaccine schedule – Merck, Pfizer, Moderna, and Sanofi – stand at the top of the AAP’s corporate “donor” list. (The total amounts of the payouts the AAP receives are not disclosed.)
The AAP, originally created a century ago to advocate for pediatricians and their patients, has devolved into an advertiser and lobbyist for the corporate interests that fund their operations. So much for “dedicated to the health of all children.”
The AAP Goes All-In Against Reform
Fast forward to the present. The second Trump Administration and its reconstituted Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., are attempting to implement much-needed reforms to the corrupt and thoroughly captured Federal regulatory systems for healthcare.
HHS has begun to review and revise the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommended vaccine schedules, including the pediatric schedule. As mentioned above, since the passage of the NCVIA, which provided broad legal immunity to vaccine manufacturers, the pediatric schedule has exploded, from 7 recommended shots in 1986 to an incredible 23 in 2024. For over 3 decades, the AAP has agreed with the recommendations of the CDC with regard to the recommended pediatric vaccines, without argument.
Absolutely no cumulative safety testing for this bloated schedule has ever been performed, and products based on the highly controversial mRNA platform, including annual recommended shots for Covid, have recently been added to the schedule. The CDC pediatric schedule is much larger than those of most other developed countries, many of which boast significantly better pediatric (and general population) health than the United States.
Kennedy’s HHS replaced the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) that reviews vaccines for the schedules, due to documented conflicts of interest that many prior members were found to have.
In May 2025, Kennedy’s HHS announced changes to the Covid-19 vaccination recommendations for children. The changes are in fact modest. Regarding the Covid shots, CDC currently recommends “shared clinical decision-making” between parents and providers for healthy children ages 6 months to 17 years.
How has the American Academy of Pediatrics responded? With actions so blatantly pro-Pharma, and so spitefully anti-parent, anti-patient, and anti-child, that their August 2020 betrayal of schoolchildren seems like, well, child’s play in comparison.
On July 28, 2025, in its flagship journal Pediatrics, the AAP released a policy statement calling for a nationwide end to all religious and other nonmedical exemptions for all mandated vaccinations for children, announcing “The AAP advocates for the elimination of nonmedical exemptions from immunizations as contrary to optimal individual and public health.”
Note that the AAP calls for a blanket ban. It makes no distinction between different vaccines, different educational settings, or different reasons for seeking exemptions. According to the AAP, all mandated vaccines are equally essential to both “individual and public health.” All nonmedical exemptions are totally invalid.
The lead author of the policy statement, one Dr. Jesse Hackell, told MedpageToday that
“We recognize that excluding a child from public education does have problems, and yet, we reach the conclusion that, on balance, assuring the safety of the school and daycare environment outweighs that risk because there are other educational opportunities available.”
What an appalling shift in the AAP’s attitude toward in-school learning. What happened to their July 2020 stance, when barring kids from school “places children and adolescents at considerable risk of morbidity and, in some cases, mortality?”
The AAP’s message to parents and children is crystal clear. They don’t give a damn about your beliefs, your personal autonomy, your Constitutional rights, or even your well-being. You want to go to school? Shut up, line up, and take the shots we tell you to take. Every last one of them. On August 19, 2025, the AAP released its own pediatric vaccination schedule, which is at variance with the Kennedy HHS’s current schedule. The AAP’s website states:
“The biggest difference between the AAP and CDC schedules is around COVID-19 vaccination. The CDC no longer recommends routine vaccination for healthy children, although children can get vaccinated after a conversation with their doctor. In contrast, the AAP recommends all young children ages 6-23 months get vaccinated.”
It is telling that after decades of placid agreement with the CDC as the pediatric vaccine schedule continually expanded, the AAP has decided to take the drastic step of releasing its own childhood vaccination schedule, at variance with the CDC’s, over the issue of “shared decision-making.” Apparently, only slavish adherence to mandatory vaccination suffices for the AAP.
This is the AAP’s stance, despite rapidly declining uptake of the Covid shots in the population, the miniscule risk of Covid to children, and the mountains of evidence building that demonstrate the toxicity of these shots. In addition to myocarditis, peer-reviewed studies are demonstrating numerous autoimmune and immune system toxicities in children receiving these shots. Michael Nevradakis lists some of these:
According to a peer-reviewed study published in Pediatric Rheumatology in May, children and adolescents who received at least one Covid-19 vaccine had a 23% higher risk of developing autoimmune disease compared to unvaccinated children.
A study published in the journal Immunity, Inflammation and Disease in April found that young adults who received a Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine showed elevated spike protein production a year or more after vaccination — significantly longer than the spike protein was expected to remain in the body.Children ages 5-11 who received two doses of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine had heightened levels of a type of antibody suggestive of an altered immune system response one year after vaccination, according to a peer-reviewed study published last year in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal.
Regarding the Covid injections and the CDC vaccine schedule in general, the AAP holds a weak hand, and yet their leadership is going all-in anyway. The AAP’s insistence on annual Covid shots for children is absurd at best, and murderous at worst. As public relations, it appears arrogant, mercenary, and utterly tone deaf. Morally and ethically, it is indefensible.
The Betrayal Is Complete
The leadership at the American Academy of Pediatrics has apparently decided that they would rather torch any residual credibility on the altar of vaccinology than acknowledge any past or present mistakes, or suffer the pain of needed reform. In so doing, with their arrogant and grossly irresponsible attitude to the safety of children, they demonstrate that primum non nocere is not in their vocabulary, and that their motto “dedicated to the health of children” is, quite frankly, a lie.
Such destructive (and self-destructive) actions reveal the AAP’s near-total dependency on the vaccine industry, and its desperation to perpetuate that gravy train at any cost. The American Academy of Pediatrics has sold its soul. Sooner or later, the devil will come to collect.
The AAP’s deep betrayal of its stated core purpose is hardly unique. The AAP is just the poster child for the corruption and corporate capture that have consumed other legacy medical professional associations (the American Medical Association and the American College of Gynecology come to mind).
The Federal Government must stop all funding to medical professional organizations like the AAP. This was always bound to corrupt them, and hard experience has demonstrated that it has. Furthermore, these organizations should be prohibited from accepting Pharma largesse, or at the very least be required to publicly disclose all income from such sources.
Perhaps some of these organizations will choose to reform. Public admission of past wrongdoing, complete divestiture of all Pharma support, and eliminating government subsidy would be the essential, bare-minimum steps to re-establishing independence and credibility.
More likely, the dinosaurs will be replaced by a species of smaller, independent, and uncompromised organizations that incorporate safeguards against the corruption that destroyed their predecessors.
Any legacy medical professional organizations that do not thoroughly and sincerely reform do not deserve the support of physicians, credibility in the eyes of the public, or trust of patients. May they go the way of the dinosaur.
C.J. Baker, M.D., 2025 Brownstone Fellow, is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.
Why is America’s paediatric academy still pushing Covid vaccines for children?
The American Academy of Pediatrics has broken ranks with the CDC, issuing its own “evidence-based” immunisation schedule—but whose interests is the AAP really serving?
By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | August 19, 2025
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has just urged that all children aged 6 – 23 months receive a Covid-19 vaccine, regardless of prior infection, and extended that recommendation to older children deemed high risk.
Their guidance directly conflicts with the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which recently withdrew broad recommendations to vaccinate healthy children and pregnant women in favour of “shared clinical decision-making.”
Now, for the first time, the AAP has broken ranks — issuing its own “evidence-based immunization schedule” that places it squarely alongside its biggest corporate donors, the very companies whose products it promotes.
The boycott
The rupture began in June 2025, when Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr dismissed the CDC’s old Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replaced it with a leaner panel.
The AAP, which had held a privileged liaison seat at ACIP for decades, responded by boycotting the meeting.
AAP president Dr Susan Kressly declared, “We won’t lend our name or our expertise to a system that is being politicised at the expense of children’s health,” branding the restructured ACIP “no longer a credible process.”
But credibility cuts both ways. At the June meeting, ACIP member Cody Meissner — himself an establishment veteran — rebuked the boycott.
“I think it’s somewhat childish for them not to appear,” he said. “It is dialogue that leads to the best recommendations for the use of vaccines.”
The AAP’s absence wasn’t about protecting children from politics. It was about rejecting a forum it could no longer control.
Following the money
The AAP insists its funding has no bearing on policy. But the Academy advertises its dependence on the very companies whose products it recommends for children.
On its own website, the Academy thanks its top corporate sponsors: Moderna, Merck, Sanofi and GSK. These companies produce nearly every vaccine on the childhood schedule — and now the AAP is demanding more of their products be given to babies.
Financial filings show corporate contributions make up a substantial slice of the Academy’s revenue. Even its flagship journal, Pediatrics, carries the fingerprints of industry support.
This isn’t independence, it’s entanglement. When an organisation funded by vaccine makers issues recommendations that boost those same companies’ sales, it is impossible to pretend this is solely about children’s health.
Parents have already rejected the shots
The problem for the AAP is that parents have already walked away. CDC data show that among toddlers, the rate is a mere 4.5%.
The public’s verdict could not be clearer: most families do not want these vaccines for their children.
The AAP knows this — yet it presses ahead regardless. Its recommendations are now performative, directed less at parents than at its corporate benefactors.
Kennedy strikes back
Kennedy seized on the contradiction.
Posting a screenshot of the AAP’s donor list, he wrote: “These four companies make virtually every vaccine on the CDC’s recommended childhood vaccine schedule,” after the Academy released its own list of “corporate-friendly vaccine recommendations.”
Kennedy accused the Academy of running a “pay-to-play scheme” on behalf of “Big Pharma benefactors” and demanded full disclosure of conflicts in its leadership and journal.
He warned that recommendations diverging from the CDC’s official list are not protected under the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act. For now, Covid-19 products remain under a separate regime — the PREP Act and the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), which HHS has extended through to 2029.
Kennedy cast this as a red line for the future: if the AAP keeps inventing its own vaccine schedule, it risks dragging doctors and hospitals into legal jeopardy.
This is no longer about one product but about who dictates the rules of childhood vaccination — government regulators or an industry-backed lobby group.
The deeper problem
This dispute isn’t really about Covid vaccines because parents, even healthcare workers, have already rejected them in overwhelming numbers. It is about who controls the institutions that speak in the name of children’s health.
The AAP claimed it boycotted ACIP in June to resist politicisation. In reality, it walked away from a process no longer stacked with the industry-aligned figures it had long relied on. That was the real affront.
The deeper problem is that the AAP is not a neutral guardian of child health. It is a lobbying arm entangled with corporate sponsors, issuing pronouncements that align with donor interests while ignoring the families it claims to represent.
AAP says it represents 67,000 paediatricians, and by extension America’s children. But its actions tell a different story. It represents the companies that fund it.
Children’s health is jeopardised when those entrusted with protecting it are compromised. The AAP’s latest recommendations are not science-based safeguards. They are corporate advocacy in disguise.
It is not just disappointing — it is harmful.
AAP’s full vaccine schedule [LINK]
20 State AGs Put Top U.S. Pediatric Group On Notice for “Abusive” and “Experimental” Trans Therapy Guidance
By Jefferey Jaxen | September 26, 2024
“It is abusive to treat a child with biologically altering drugs that have an unknown physiological trajectory and end point. It is also inhumane to endorse such experimentation without a confident safety profile, especially if more times than not, it proves to be medically unnecessary.”
This statement unpins the tone of the legal notice signed by 20 state Attorneys General to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) asking the group to answer to possible violations of state consumer protection statutes over its questionable standards on gender dysphoria care for minors.
“… the AAP continues to authoritatively declare that puberty blockers are ‘reversible,’” the letter continued. “That claim is scientifically unsupported and contradicts what is medically known. And because that claim raises questions under most state consumer protection laws, it has the undersigned alarmed,” the letter goes on to state.
Idaho AG and co-signer of the action letter Raúl Labrador stated, “It is shameful the most basic tenet of medicine – do no harm – has been abandoned by professional associations when politically pressured,” said Attorney General Labrador. “These organizations are sacrificing the health and well-being of children with medically unproven treatments that leave a wake of permanent damage.”
Why are these AGs acting now? The momentum has gained breakaway speed regarding the science of gender affirming care for minors.
Puberty blockers are not fully reversible and come with serious long-term consequences. According to the Cass Report commissioned by NHS England, using puberty blockers are used to suppress hormones during or before puberty can interfere with neurocognitive development, compromise bone density and may negatively affect metabolic health and weight.
And when puberty blocker use is followed directly by cross-sex hormone use, which is often the case, infertility and sterility is a known consequence.
The controversial world of gender care isn’t the only space that the AAP has dove into without an abundance of caution. The group made headlines in 2023 by radically altering their front line weight loss recommendations children ages 12 and up to include a new class of risky drugs and weight-loss surgery.
The AAP’s murky ‘science’ recommendations reached an early level of appalling shame in 2019 when, during a public hearing in 2019 to discuss an act before it was signed into law, pediatrician Dr. Helene Felman, representing Washington D.C.’s chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), stated:
“As a pediatrician, I like the legislation as it stands because it offers the opportunity to capture those young adults who can make informed decisions at technically any age.”
11 was ultimately decided upon until a federal court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction in a case funded by The Informed Consent Action Network.
The American Medical Association (AMA) had also thrown its full weight behind attempting to remove the parents from medical decisions involving their children.
Looking at where their energy has gone in key moments, one thing appears clear, the AAP wants children isolated from their parents and given over to the medical system for pharmaceutical interventions with known risk profiles. Why?
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From the Archives
The lies about the 1967 war are still more powerful than the truth
By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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