Dr. Evelyn Griffin is pushing for more emphasis on wellness and prevention. She has also aligned with the MAHA movement in fighting government mandates and questioning the safety of some vaccines.
Rosemary Westwood is examining public health in Louisiana for Verite News as a part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.
Dr. Evelyn Griffin had led a life out of the spotlight until she testified at the Louisiana statehouse five years ago and experienced what she called her “great awakening.”
The state health department wanted to add Covid vaccines to the school immunization schedule, a move no state has ever implemented. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then known as a leading vaccine skeptic, had already claimed the Covid shot was “the deadliest vaccine ever made” during a poster board presentation at the legislative hearing.
Dr. Griffin, a longtime obstetrician, relied on nearly identical images during her own blistering testimony against the proposal. After the hearing, she expected splashy headlines about Mr. Kennedy’s assertions, shifting the public debate over Covid policies and vaccines. But that did not happen; one news outlet dismissed him as a promulgator of propaganda. Dr. Griffin was shocked.
That is “when I saw how the world worked,” she recalled in a podcast interview. Dr. Griffin said she and her husband, a vascular surgeon, decided to take action and “shine light on things.”
Now, Mr. Kennedy is the nation’s health secretary, and Dr. Griffin holds prominent roles that position her to help carry out his vision.
Last September, Mr. Kennedy appointed her to the advisory panel for federal immunization policy, where she voted to recommend limiting access to Covid vaccines and ending universal newborn immunizations for hepatitis B, steps that a federal judge has blocked. In December, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, a conservative Republican and ally of President Trump, named Dr. Griffin as the state’s surgeon general.
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