(DCNF)—President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be signaling that his administration is attempting to backpedal from its previously critical stance on vaccines.
Trump nominated Dr. Erica Schwartz as his pick to serve as the next director of the CDC, drawing criticism from some Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) advocates who are skeptical about the safety and efficacy of certain vaccines. Unlike Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and other leaders in the MAHA movement who have expressed skepticism of vaccines, Schwartz has publicly supported vaccination.
Toby Rogers, a fellow at the MAHA-aligned Brownstone Institute, criticized Schwartz for not denouncing “the crimes of the COVID era.”
“Unfortunately, Erica Schwartz represents more of the same failed approach that caused this crisis in the first place,” Rogers told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“The CDC is captured and corrupt. It must be massively restructured or closed,” he continued. “To my knowledge, Dr. Erica Schwartz has never publicly spoken out against the crimes of the COVID era, the ineffectiveness of the flu shot, or the injuries caused by the bloated CDC childhood vaccine schedule. She is the wrong choice to lead the CDC at this critical time.”
Schwartz, who requires Senate approval to be confirmed as the CDC’s director, served as Trump’s deputy surgeon general from January 2019 to April 2021, where she led the country’s public health deployment in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to becoming deputy surgeon general, Schwartz worked as chief medical officer for the U.S. Coast Guard, where she oversaw disease surveillance efforts and developed policies addressing pandemic influenza, Ebola and other viral outbreaks.
Trump’s new CDC nominee has previously led government vaccination programs and managed crisis responses, and was involved in drafting vaccine mandates for smallpox and anthrax that applied to certain Coast Guard personnel while she oversaw its health care system.
Moreover, Schwartz helped oversee the nationwide rollout of COVID-19 vaccines and acted as the HHS’ point person during the presidential transition from Trump’s first administration to the Biden administration, ABC News reported.
Schwartz played an instrumental role in the federal government’s testing efforts at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, serving as a physician who oversaw the large-scale ordering of tests used at drive-through sites, Fierce Healthcare reported.
Notably, the White House was seeking a CDC director nominee who possessed more traditional health credentials and would not draw criticism for promoting vaccine skepticism, The Wall Street Journal reported on April 10, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter.
Rogers also emphasized the importance of the Trump administration doing more to improve children’s health in America.
“Over half of all children in this country have one or more chronic health conditions,” Rogers said. “It’s the largest crisis in American history. The evidence is overwhelming that a large percentage of these chronic health conditions are caused by iatrogenic injury. We need to change course in this country.”
It remains unclear how Schwartz, if confirmed, may steer the CDC’s public health policies and vaccine guidance.
Butterfly Network, where Schwartz serves on the board of directors, did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Prior to her transfer to the Public Health Service and Coast Guard in 2005, she was a Navy Occupational Medicine physician, where her assignments included working as the Chief of the Occupational Medicine Clinic and the Immunization Clinic and serving as the Preventive Medicine Department Head at the Naval Medical Clinic in Annapolis, MD, according to her Coast Guard bio.
Aaron Siri, managing partner of Siri & Glimstad LLP and a longtime ally of Kennedy, wrote in an April 18 Substack post that Schwartz “led nationwide Covid-19 vaccine deployment and has, with threat and force, mandated almost every major vaccine on civilians and military members, including mandating injection of smallpox, anthrax, and flu vaccines into U.S. Forces, and disciplining those who refused,” adding that “this track record alone reflects she lacks the basic ethics and morals to lead the CDC.”
“Her prior promotion, let alone mandates, of nearly a dozen different vaccines leave little hope she will objectively oversee CDC’s vaccine program which has, between 1986 and the 2026, gone from 3 injections to 29 injections, including in utero, by an infant’s first birthday, while chronic childhood disease has gone from under 10% to over 40% of children, most related to immune system dysregulation,” he continued.
Siri told the DCNF that if Schwartz is confirmed to lead the CDC, he thinks she should prioritize combating the rising rates of chronic diseases among U.S. children, which he claims corresponds with an increase in childhood vaccines.
“The increase in childhood chronic disease from under 10% in the early 1980s to over 40% today [corresponds] with the rise in childhood vaccines from 3 injections to 29 injections by one year of age, as well as vaccine safety beyond chronic health issues,” he stated.
Siri also emphasized that “all children are precious and we should care about all children: those that could be harmed from an infectious disease and those that could be harmed from the products at issue.” He added that “if vaccines are safe, as claimed by health authorities for decades, why do pharma and physicians need immunity for harms?”
An HHS spokesperson told the DCNF in a statement that “the new CDC leadership team reflects our commitment to restoring the agency to its core mission of fighting infectious diseases.”
“Secretary Kennedy looks forward to working closely with them to rebuild trust in public health by increasing transparency, upholding gold-standard science, and ensuring Americans have the clear, reliable information they need to improve their health outcomes,” the spokesperson added.
White House Spokesman Kush Desai told the DCNF in a statement that Schwartz “is eminently qualified to restore Gold Standard Science at the CDC, from her top-notch credentials to her military service to her experience as a Deputy Surgeon General in the first Trump administration.”
“The White House looks [forward] to her swift confirmation by the Senate to help President Trump deliver on his agenda to Make America Healthy Again,” he continued.
“So, if we’re talking about someone being under attack [from some MAHA supporters], well, the first thing is, if it’s someone that President Trump wants [in the role], then I don’t really see a political issue of it,” longtime pollster and political analyst John Couvillon told the DCNF. “The only time I could see it hypothetically being issue, is if, let’s say, [Schwartz] had advocated [for] you know, not only the COVID vaccines, but the draconian policies that were being proposed in 2020, 21, and 22, Well, that’s the entirely different discussion.”
“[With] vaccinations [and] vaccines in general, where there is fairly broad support, and then you have the COVID vaccines, where that is much less popular [among Americans],” he added.
Former U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who personally selected Schwartz as his deputy surgeon general during the first Trump administration, told CBS News’ “Face The Nation” on Sunday that Schwartz “still has to get through Senate confirmation, where she will clearly be pitted against RFK on vaccines.” Adams has repeatedly publicly supported vaccines in recent years.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Adams promoted the widespread usage of face masks to curb asymptomatic spread, Business Insider reported in July 2020. He also claimed during a June 2020 White House briefing that wearing masks could be “an instrument of freedom” for Americans, The Hill reported.
“Wear a face covering when you go out in public,” Adams said, per The Hill. “It is not an inconvenience. It is not a suppression of your freedom. It actually is a vehicle to achieve our goals.”
“It adds to your convenience and your freedom because it allows us to open up more places, and it allows those places to stay open,” he continued, while holding up his own mask. “This mask, this face covering, actually is an instrument of freedom for Americans if we all use it.”
Kennedy asserted in an August 2025 X post that his “job” as the head of HHS was to “restore trust in the vaccine program so that parents know we’re telling them the truth.” However, he has been publicly talking about vaccines much less in recent months as the Trump administration is aiming to promote low-risk messaging ahead of November’s midterms, Bloomberg reported.
Trump’s HHS Secretary congratulated Schwartz on her nomination in an April 16 social media post, asserting that he is looking forward to “working together to restore trust, accountability, and scientific integrity” at the CDC “so we can return it to its core mission and Make America Healthy Again.” Still, Kennedy publicly declined to commit to backing Schwartz’s vaccine recommendations during a congressional hearing on Tuesday, The New York Times reported.
Trump had previously nominated former Florida Rep. David Weldon, a vaccine skeptic, to lead the CDC, but his Senate confirmation hearing in March 2025 was abruptly canceled just an hour before it was scheduled to start. Weldon later said he had been informed that not enough senators intended to support his nomination.
The Senate confirmed Susan Monarez as Trump’s CDC director in July 2025. The Trump administration ousted Monarez the next month after she refused to step down.
Monarez alleged in September 2025 that she was fired the month prior for not approving changes to vaccine policy “regardless of the scientific evidence,” BBC News reported.
National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya had been serving as acting director for the CDC, but his title expired in March under federal law, according to CNBC. Bhattacharya has been a prominent critic of vaccine mandates, including those enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A recent Politico poll conducted by Public First found that a plurality of Americans currently feel skeptical about the safety of vaccines.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
