After removing all 17 members from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advisory board on vaccinations earlier this week, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced eight new members to the board on Wednesday, including a number of anti-vaxxers.
On Monday, Kennedy, a noted anti-vaxxer himself, dismissed every member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), claiming in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that a “clean sweep” of the board was needed “to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.”
Notably, according to a Quinnipiac University poll published this week, only 38 percent of voters approve of Kennedy’s work so far within HHS, with 53 percent expressing disapproval. The poll also found that only 5 percent of voters say they trust Kennedy the most for guidance on whether to vaccinate themselves or their family members.
In a post on X on Wednesday, Kennedy announced the eight people he was naming as replacements to ACIP.
“All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense,” Kennedy wrote. “They have each committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations.”
Several health experts, however, have expressed skepticism regarding Kennedy’s selections.
Among those Kennedy named to the board is Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and biostatistician who was a coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document that argued against stay-at-home orders and other preventative measures during the coronavirus pandemic and instead advocated for so-called “natural herd immunity.”
According to an analysis from the Global Autoimmune Institute (GAI) published in December, the paper did not include any scientific backing or modeling and was not peer-reviewed before publication. If advice from the Great Barrington Declaration had been followed, it would have had devastating consequences, said Bruce Werness, a pathologist and chief scientific adviser to the organization who authored that analysis.
“To date, approximately 1.2 million Americans have died from COVID-19, with millions more hospitalized and a large but growing number suffering from complications of COVID-19 infections, including Long COVID. These numbers would be much higher if the recommendations of the Great Barrington Declaration had been widely implemented,” Werness said.
Another pick by Kennedy for the ACIP board, biochemist Robert Malone, promoted disinformation and conspiracy theories during the pandemic, including wrongly stating that COVID-19 vaccines were ineffective. Malone also promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as effective treatments, despite studies showing they were unhelpful for those who had contracted the virus.
More recently, Malone falsely claimed that the death of an 8-year-old in Texas from measles was actually due to sepsis — at a time when anti-vaccination lies have resulted in multiple measles outbreaks and over 1,000 infections across the country so far this year.
Critics decried Kennedy’s dismantling of and new appointments to the ACIP board.
“The biggest hit here is the irony of him, RFK, talking about regaining the public’s trust,” said Paul Offit, a former ACIP committee member and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “What he just did was, he lost the trust of the medical community, so much so that people are thinking, ‘Should we try and create our own ACIP, our own vaccine advisory committee?’ Because you can’t trust this one.”
“The previous ACIP was made up of technical experts who have spent their lives studying vaccines,” Abram Wagner of the University of Michigan’s school of public health told ABC News, adding that most on the new list “don’t have the technical capacity that we would expect out of people who would have to make really complicated decisions involving interpreting complicated scientific data.”
Dorit Reiss, a law professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who specializes in vaccine policy, also condemned Kennedy’s recent selections to ACIP.
“Kennedy did not pick people with strong, current expertise in vaccines,” Reiss told NPR. “It tells me that Kennedy is setting up a committee that would be skeptical of vaccines, and possibly willing to implement an anti-vaccine agenda.”
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