RFK Jr. changed the CDC’s vaccine panel
The ACIP Recommendation and the Loss of Expertise in Vaccines: Commentary on Robert Kennedy’s Dedication to His 2021 Book The Real Anthony Fauci
An emergency-room doctor, a vaccine critic and an obstetrician are among the advisers that Robert Kennedy appointed to provide advice to the federal government on vaccines.
Several of the new ACIP members have expressed public support for vaccines. A number of them have expressed scepticism, one of them is on the board of an anti-vaccination organization, and another is on social media. As first reported by the biomedical news outlet STAT, Kennedy included four of the new committee members in the dedication to his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.
“This is a disaster for public health,” says Adam Ratner, a paediatric infectious diseases physician in New York City. It could set us back decades. The HHS did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
Even those who can pay for vaccines out of pocket might find them harder to get without an ACIP recommendation, says Arthur Reingold, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, because overall demand for the shots will decrease. Some pharmacies could stop stocking them because of that.
Offit says several independent groups have reviewed previous ACIP members and found no conflicts of interest. The conflicts of interest are real because these people are indebted to RFK Jr., who gave them this position.
Researchers are worried about the loss of expertise. Nancy Bennett, a public-health specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York says the committee’s new lineup is disturbing.
The heads of the CDC and HHS would approve members before they were sent to them. Bennett said the vetting process took a long time. The ACIP was intended to include people with deep expertise in the area. “That’s what we have lost.”
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Hibbeln is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who once worked at the US National Institutes of Health. His recent papers highlight the relationship between nutrition and various disorders, including mental-health conditions, and his profile states that twenty-first-century diet are making mentally ill people more likely. A search of PubMed, a database of biomedical papers, did not turn up any papers he has authored about vaccines or infectious disease. He didn’t say anything when asked for comment.
Kulldorff is a Swedish epidemiologist and senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute, a think tank based in West Hartford, Connecticut, that formed “to provide an independent voice for personal liberty” and to oppose lockdown policies instituted by public officials during the COVID-19 pandemic. The great brest declaration was written by Kulldorff and Jayanta Bhattacharya and was opposed by the medical community.
Last year, Kulldorff wrote in City Journal that he was fired from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for refusing a COVID-19 vaccine even though he already had immunity from being infected. He also wrote that the COVID-19 vaccine is a medical invention that allows people to get immunity without the fear of getting sick, but suggested that the trials were not properly designed. Nature requested comment from Kulldorff, but he did not respond.
Levi is a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He has published several papers on COVID-19, including one2 expressing concerns about side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines. Levi posted on social-media platform X in September of 2023 that the evidence shows that MRNA vaccines causes serious harm, including death. We have to stop giving them immediately!” Levi did not respond to a request for comment.
It financially is difficult for a lot of family medicine physicians in rural areas to stock vaccines.
That designation can also make it less likely that a medical provider will keep a vaccine in stock, he says. The U.S. has a Vaccines for Children program that requires many health care providers to keep often recommended vaccines in stock. That’s not the case when a vaccine is recommended.
I have heard from pediatricians that families will say that you guys are the experts. If you can’t figure out what the right thing to do is, you know, how do you expect us to do that in a ten-minute office visit?” O’Leary says.
A professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, O’Leary says that it makes it hard to have a clear, direct discussion with families.
ACIP’s recommendations and vaccines for children: A statement from Orenstein, the CDC director, and his campaign against vaccine defeasibility
He helped launch the vaccine program in the aftermath of a huge resurgence of measles that resulted in tens of thousands of cases and over 120 deaths. Many of the kids who got sick had not been vaccinated because their families couldn’t afford it.
ACIP’s recommendations also determine which vaccines get covered by the Vaccines for Children program, a federally funded initiative that provides free access to low-income and underinsured children. Around half of all children in the U.S. are eligible for free vaccines from the program, says Orenstein.
The group will demand definitive safety and efficacy data for any new vaccine recommendations, and will review the current vaccine schedule, according to the statement.
If you fired all of the air traffic controllers and replaced them with people who didn’t know how to be air traffic controllers, then you would end up with people who didn’t really know how to fly.
Walter Orenstein, who served as director of the US immunization program at the CDC from 1988 to 2004, is very worried about the situation. “I have spent a career of more than 50 years in vaccinology, and I have never seen the names of most of those people.”
All 17 members of the panel were fired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. On the same day he announced the names of eight people who he wanted to replace them.
The committee’s skepticism of vaccines may make it more difficult for families to get them, and also make some shots more important than others.
The United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Wednesday announced that it will stop giving out all of its COVID-19 vaccines. The decision was taken in light of the rising number of cases and the growing risk of vaccine-preventable diseases, CDC said. The move is a part of its efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19.