🔍 Don't Look Here, Look There: The CDC Massacre Hidden by Military Theater as RFK Jr. Fires ENTIRE Vaccine Board
While America watched tear gas fly in LA, Kennedy was busy firing decades of scientific expertise—and you almost missed it
😽 Keepin’ It Simple Summary for Younger Readers
👧🏾✊🏾👦🏾
While everyone was watching soldiers 👮♂️ march through Los Angeles 🏙️ because people were protesting immigration raids 🚫✈️, the health secretary quietly fired all the smart doctors 👨⚕️👩⚕️ who help decide which vaccines 💉 keep kids safe 🛡️. It's like when a magician 🎩 makes you look 👀 at one hand 🤚 while the other hand does the real trick 🪄.
The scary 😨 part is that both things hurt the same communities—families 👨👩👧 who need protection from both immigration police 👮♀️ and diseases 🦠. But people are starting to notice the trick 🕵️ and fighting back on both fronts ✊.
🗝️ Takeaways
🎯 While everyone watched 5,000 federal troops occupy LA, RFK Jr. quietly fired ALL 17 CDC vaccine experts—the perfect distraction strategy
💉 Kennedy's "unprecedented" ACIP purge destroys decades of scientific expertise guiding America's vaccine policy
🎪 The LA military spectacle was authoritarian theater designed to hide the real damage: dismantling public health infrastructure
🧬 Public health experts warn Kennedy's coup will "sacrifice decades of scientific rigor" and let "fringe theories" replace facts
🎭 The timing reveals coordinated strategy: manufacture crisis with one hand, destroy institutions with the other
🔬 Communities must now defend both immigrant rights AND scientific expertise against coordinated authoritarian assault
While You Were Watching the War Zone: RFK Jr.'s Silent Science Slaughter
Greetings from the borderlands, where we specialize in spotting sleight-of-hand when the empire's magicians are working overtime.
While everyone's eyes were glued to the dystopian spectacle of Marines marching through Los Angeles—porque sí, that actually happened—Trump's puppet master of public health was quietly conducting his own massacre. But this one targeted lab coats instead of protesters, wielding pink slips instead of tear gas.
Welcome to the pinche perfect distraction strategy: deploy 5,000 federal troops to chase protesters defending immigrant families, then sneak in the real damage while everyone's watching the military theater. Because nothing says "look over here" quite like Marines on American streets.
The Real Coup: RFK Jr.'s Science Slaughter House
On June 9, 2025—the same day Marines were mobilizing against la gente in LA—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. executed what can only be described as a scientific matanza. According to USA Today and STAT News, the newly minted Health and Human Services Secretary dismissed all 17 members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the panel responsible for guiding America's vaccine policies.
All of them. Todos. Gone.
Kennedy's justification reads like a conspiracy theorist's greatest hits: claiming the need to "restore public trust" through "impartial science," he accused the panel of "persistent conflicts of interest" and operating as a "rubber stamp for any vaccine." This is from a man whose own conflicts include decades of peddling anti-vaccine conspiracies and courting the wellness-to-QAnon pipeline.
The irony is so thick you could spread it on pan dulce.
The Scientific Shock and Awe Campaign
Let's be crystal clear about what just happened: Kennedy nuked decades of institutional knowledge faster than you can say "measles outbreak."
The ACIP has been providing evidence-based vaccine recommendations since the 1960s, through Republican and Democratic administrations, through pandemics and political upheavals. These aren't political appointees; they're scientists who undergo rigorous screening for conflicts of interest.
But órale, apparently decades of expertise in immunology, epidemiology, and public health pale in comparison to Kennedy's Google University degree in "doing your own research."
Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, didn't mince words: "We have just demonstrated that politics will overrun science in this administration. It scares me to think of what's ahead."
Former CDC director Tom Frieden was equally blunt, predicting we'll "look back at this as a grave mistake that sacrificed decades of scientific rigor, undermined public trust, and opened the door for fringe theories rather than facts to guide the recommendations that doctors rely on to protect patients."
Paul Offit, a former ACIP member, captured the absurdity perfectly: "They should be given an award, not fired."
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles: The Perfect Distraction
While Kennedy was busy axing epidemiologists, Trump was orchestrating his own authoritarian theater in Los Angeles. The timeline is almost too perfect to be coincidental.
It started June 6th with ICE raids targeting working-class communities—day laborers at Home Depot, clothing workers in the Fashion District, nuestra gente just trying to survive.
According to NBC News, federal agents conducted "military-style" operations, with masked officials failing to show warrants while rounding up over 40 people in what civil liberties groups called an "oppressive and vile paramilitary operation."
When communities rose up to defend their neighbors—as they always have, as they always will—Trump responded with overwhelming force.
According to Reuters, he federalized California's National Guard without Governor Gavin Newsom's consent, then deployed 700 Marines from Camp Pendleton for good measure.
The imagery was designed for maximum impact: National Guard troops with riot shields, tear gas in downtown streets, California Highway Patrol clearing protesters from freeways—pure authoritarian spectacle, guaranteed to dominate news cycles.
The Misdirection Masterclass
Here's the thing about authoritarian regimes: they're excelente at manufacturing crises to hide their real agenda.
While everyone was rightfully horrified by Marines patrolling American streets, Kennedy was quietly dismantling the scientific infrastructure that protects public health.
It's the political equivalent of a magic trick: wave the shiny military object with your right hand while your left hand picks the pocket of American science policy.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass saw through it immediately, describing her city as being used for "an experiment" by the federal government when ABC News reported her press conference.
She nailed it—LA became the testing ground for how much authoritarian overreach Americans will tolerate, while the real damage happened in bureaucratic shadows.
The Systematic Sabotage Strategy
What we're witnessing isn't chaos—it's choreographed destruction.
The LA occupation and CDC purge aren't separate incidents; they're coordinated attacks on two pillars of democratic society: the right to protest and scientific expertise.
Target Practice: Communities and Institutions
The ICE raids targeted the same essential workers who kept America running during the pandemic: day laborers, clothing workers, and service industry folks. Now, the same administration attacking these communities is also destroying the scientific consensus that protected public health during COVID-19.
Both actions serve the same goal: destabilizing institutions that protect vulnerable communities. When immigrants avoid healthcare due to deportation fears, and when vaccine recommendations become political footballs, toda la comunidad suffers.
It's disaster capitalism applied to democracy itself—create the crisis, then profit from the chaos.
The Conflict of Interest Con Game
Kennedy's whole "conflicts of interest" narrative is pure projection.
This is a man who's spent decades monetizing vaccine misinformation, who built his political brand on conspiracy theories, now claiming others have conflicts of interest.
Meanwhile, the scientists he fired?
They undergo extensive ethics reviews. Their potential conflicts are public record. They recuse themselves from discussions involving companies with which they've worked. You know, like actual professionals do.
But in Kennedy's funhouse mirror world, decades of training in immunology somehow makes you less qualified to advise on vaccines than a guy whose expertise comes from YouTube rabbit holes.
The Borderlands Perspective: Familiar Tactics, New Scale
For those of us watching from the borderlands, these tactics feel both shocking and familiar.
We've long experienced militarized enforcement, the erasure of our knowledge systems, and attacks on institutions serving our communities. What's new is the brazenness and scale.
Health Justice Under Siege
The CDC panel dismissal represents a direct assault on health equity. As experts warned, politicizing vaccine recommendations could lead healthcare providers to ignore CDC guidance, creating "uncertainty in care for children and adults and potentially reducing vaccine uptake."
Guess who suffers most when public health guidance becomes political?
Nuestra gente—immigrants, communities of color, the working class. The same folks getting raided by ICE are the ones who'll pay the price when measles outbreaks hit because some Kennedy-appointed crystal-clutcher decided vaccines are muy peligroso.
The Knowledge Colonization Project
There's something deeply familiar about watching white men with inherited wealth dismiss the expertise of qualified professionals. It's the same colonial mentality that's been erasing Indigenous knowledge systems for centuries, now applied to Western science.
Kennedy's anti-vaccine crusade isn't just anti-science—it's anti-expertise, anti-institutional knowledge, anti-anyone-who-knows-more-than-him. It's intellectual colonization disguised as populist rebellion.
The Resistance Networks: Science and Streets
But here's what these authoritarian amateurs don't understand: resistance has many faces.
While LA's streets filled with protesters defending immigrant families, public health experts were already organizing to protect scientific integrity.
Building Counter-Institutions
The beauty of this moment is watching different resistance movements recognize their shared struggle. Immigrant rights activists and public health advocates are finding common cause, understanding that attacks on both fronts target the same communities.
When scientific institutions become unreliable, communities build their own knowledge networks. When federal agencies become political weapons, local organizations step up. It's mutual aid meets epidemiology—beautiful.
The Long Game: Democracy's Immune System
Here's the thing about both viruses and authoritarianism: a robust immune system beats them both. Democracy's immune system includes scientific institutions, protest movements, legal challenges, and communities that refuse to be divided and conquered.
California's lawsuit challenging the National Guard deployment is part of that immune response. Similarly, the public health experts who are refusing to stay silent about Kennedy's sabotage are also speaking out. So are the communities continuing to organize despite military occupation.
The empire wants us to pick sides—science versus streets, expertise versus activism. But la lucha knows better. We need both the epidemiologists and the protesters, both the lab coats and the street medics.
What This Means for Todos Nosotros
The dual assault on immigrant communities and scientific institutions isn't coincidental—it's strategic. Both attacks target the infrastructure of care that keeps communities healthy and whole.
The Health-Immigration Nexus
When immigrants avoid medical care due to ICE fears, disease outbreaks become more likely. When vaccine recommendations become political, herd immunity breaks down. When both happen simultaneously, public health becomes impossible.
Kennedy's CDC purge makes ICE raids more deadly. Trump's LA occupation makes vaccine misinformation more dangerous. They're symbiotic systems of violence disguised as separate policies.
As NPR reported, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass captured this perfectly when she described the "level of fear and terror that is in Angelenos right now, not knowing if tomorrow or tonight it might be where they live, it might be their workplace, should you send your kids to school, should you go to work."
Fighting on Multiple Fronts
This moment demands what movement folks call "both/and" thinking. We need to defend both immigrant rights and scientific expertise, both the right to protest and evidence-based medicine.
The empire wants us to be overwhelmed, choosing between crises.
But resistance movements have always been good at walking and chewing gum simultaneously. We can chase tear gas and chase down vaccine misinformation, defend families from ICE and defend scientists from political purges.
A Call to Action: Science and Solidarity
So, what do we do when the circus comes to town and uses sleight of hand to rob the pharmacy?
Immediate Actions
Amplify the Science Story: Don't let Kennedy's CDC coup get buried under military spectacle. Share the coverage and discuss what this means for community health.
Support Legal Challenges: Fund lawsuits challenging both the troop deployment and scientific sabotage. California is suing the administration over the National Guard deployment, supporting similar challenges to Kennedy's purge.
Build Community Networks: Create mutual aid systems that include health information sharing. When federal agencies become unreliable, communities must become our own epidemiologists.
Document Everything: Bear witness to both street violence and institutional destruction. Follow organizations like the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), which Al Jazeera reported has been tracking enforcement activity.
Connect the Dots: Help others see how these attacks reinforce each other. Share this analysis. Make the invisible visible.
Supporting Independent Media
In times of coordinated disinformation, independent journalism becomes essential survival gear. Consider supporting Three Sonorans Substack—we specialize in seeing through the empire's magic tricks, connecting dots that mainstream media leaves scattered.
Your subscription helps us continue this work of truth-telling from the margins, where the view is clearer and the chisme is better.
The Bottom Line: Resistance is the Antidote
They can deploy all the Marines they want, fire all the scientists they choose, but they can't kill the networks of care that communities build when institutions fail.
While Trump stages his authoritarian theater in LA, and Kennedy conducts his anti-science matanza in DC, remember: the real power lies in communities that refuse to choose between defending immigrants and defending expertise.
From the borderlands to the big city, from community clinics to protest lines, la lucha sigue. The choice isn't between science and solidarity—it's between their manufactured chaos and our organized resistance.
Hasta la victoria, científicamente.
—Three Sonorans
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