RFK Jr. Removes All 17 Members of CDC Vaccine Panel

US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has removed all 17 members of a key CDC committee that recommends vaccines and who should get them as he pledged it would “no longer function as a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas”. The Wall Street Journal has the story.

Kennedy wrote Monday in a Wall Street Journal opinion article that he would do a “clean sweep” of the panel’s 17 members, all of whom were appointed during the administration of former President Joe Biden.

The panel, known as the Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices, makes recommendations to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention Director about which vaccines children and adults should get. Current members include infectious-disease doctors, paediatricians and epidemiologists.

“The Committee will no longer function as a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas,” Kennedy said in a subsequent statement, arguing that the change would help restore public trust in science.

Kennedy had earlier been collecting names for potential new members of the panel.

In his op-ed, Kennedy explains why the move is necessary:

ACIP evaluates the safety, efficacy and clinical need of the nation’s vaccines and passes its findings on to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine. It has never recommended against a vaccine — even those later withdrawn for safety reasons. It has failed to scrutinise vaccine products given to babies and pregnant women. To make matters worse, the groups that inform ACIP meet behind closed doors, violating the legal and ethical principle of transparency crucial to maintaining public trust.

In 2000 the House issued the results of an investigation of ACIP and another vaccine advisory committee under the US Food and Drug Administration — the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. It found that enforcement of its conflict-of-interest rules was weak to non-existent. Committee members regularly participated in deliberations and advocated products in which they had a financial stake. The CDC issued conflict-of-interest waivers to every committee member. Four out of eight ACIP members who voted in 1997 on guidelines for the Rotashield vaccine, subsequently withdrawn because of severe adverse events, had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies developing other rotavirus vaccines. A 2009 HHS inspector-general report echoed these findings. Few committee members completed full conflict-of-interest forms — 97% of them had omissions. The CDC took no significant action to remedy the omissions.

These conflicts of interest persist. Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines. The problem isn’t necessarily that ACIP members are corrupt. Most likely aim to serve the public interest as they understand it. The problem is their immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy. The new members won’t directly work for the vaccine industry. They will exercise independent judgement, refuse to serve as a rubber stamp and foster a culture of critical inquiry — unafraid to ask hard questions.

Worth reading in full.