RFK Jr. expels the entire CDC Vaccine Advisory Committee
Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. has removed a panel of 17 members at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which issues vaccine recommendations.
No Brands – News Value
A day after abruptly firing the entire committee advising the federal government on vaccine safety, health and human services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he said he would reconstruct it as “highly qualified doctors and scientists” amid backlash from detractors about the end.
In a long post from X on June 10, Kennedy criticized the process of the Vaccination Practices Advisory Committee recommending a new vaccine, implying that “appropriate safety tests” were not being conducted before recommending a new vaccine to children.
Kennedy, who has a long record promoting anti-vaccine views, said there will be no “ideological anti-vaxaxers” on the new advisory committee for vaccination practices, but the committee will apply “evidence-based decisions with objectivity and common sense.”
“The most outrageous example of ACIP’s malicious misconduct was the stubborn unwillingness to require proper safety testing before recommending new vaccines to children,” he writes.
Kennedy said compliant American children received current shots from concepts up to age 18 compared to 1986, but none of them required a placebo-controlled trial. It was the year when the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was established and a federal program was established for vaccine manufacturers to protect against liability and to compensate individuals injured by a particular vaccine.
“This means we can’t scientifically confirm whether these products are avoiding more issues than they are causing,” he writes.
A placebo-controlled study is a type of clinical trial in which one group of participants receives active treatment and another receives an inactive substance, which helps researchers determine whether active treatment is truly effective.
However, conducting placebo-controlled studies on vaccines, which are improvements to existing vaccines, poses ethical and practical challenges, vaccine experts say.
“If a vaccine for serious illnesses (measles, polio, etc.) is already present and proven effective, and participants could be given a placebo in place of the vaccine, wrote in a June 9 post on X, former US surgeon general Jerome Adams, under President Trump’s first term.
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Center for Vaccine Education at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, said the new vaccines are constantly undergoing placebo-controlled studies.
However, Kennedy’s definition of placebo differs from the FDA’s definition, Offitt said.
Kennedy has tried to narrowly define a placebo as salt water, Offitt said, but the FDA defines it as an “inactive substance.”
“Placebos may contain sodium sulfate or potassium sulfate or sucrose, or they may contain emulsifiers, all of which are generally considered safe,” Offit said. “He doesn’t consider them safe.”
HHS did not respond to USA Today for comment on how Kennedy’s definition differs from the FDA’s definition.
Offit said Kennedy is a long-standing lawyer suing drug companies, saying, “His job is ultimately to scare people about vaccines, and he can bring them back to court and sue the company.”
Meanwhile, in an announcement of the removal of 17 members of the ACIP Committee, Kennedy said the purpose was to isolate the committee from a “conflict of interest.”