Anonymous
7/31/2025, 4:04:11 PM No.1423469
https://apnews.com/article/vaccine-committee-cdc-7a81bdbc08b3cca7db18e884e27df666
The 17 experts who were ousted from a government vaccine committee last month say they have little faith in what the panel has become, and have outlined possible alternative ways to make U.S. vaccine policy.
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abruptly fired the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, accusing them of being too closely aligned with manufacturers and of rubber-stamping vaccines. He handpicked replacements that include several vaccine skeptics.
In a commentary published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the former panel members wrote that Kennedy — a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement before becoming the U.S. government’s top health official — and his new panel are abandoning rigorous scientific review and open deliberation.
That was clear, they said, during the new panel’s first meeting, in June. It featured a presentation by an anti-vaccine advocate that warned of dangers about a preservative used in a few flu vaccines, but the committee members didn’t hear from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staffers about an analysis that concluded there was no link between the preservative and neurodevelopmental disorders.
The new panel recommended that the preservative, thimerosal, be removed even as some members acknowledged there was no proof it was causing harm.
“That meeting was a travesty, honestly,” said former ACIP member Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at Stanford University.
The 17 discharged experts last month published a shorter essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association that decried Kennedy’s “destabilizing decisions.” The focus was largely on their termination and on Kennedy’s decision in May to stop recommending COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women.
The 17 experts who were ousted from a government vaccine committee last month say they have little faith in what the panel has become, and have outlined possible alternative ways to make U.S. vaccine policy.
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abruptly fired the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, accusing them of being too closely aligned with manufacturers and of rubber-stamping vaccines. He handpicked replacements that include several vaccine skeptics.
In a commentary published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the former panel members wrote that Kennedy — a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement before becoming the U.S. government’s top health official — and his new panel are abandoning rigorous scientific review and open deliberation.
That was clear, they said, during the new panel’s first meeting, in June. It featured a presentation by an anti-vaccine advocate that warned of dangers about a preservative used in a few flu vaccines, but the committee members didn’t hear from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staffers about an analysis that concluded there was no link between the preservative and neurodevelopmental disorders.
The new panel recommended that the preservative, thimerosal, be removed even as some members acknowledged there was no proof it was causing harm.
“That meeting was a travesty, honestly,” said former ACIP member Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at Stanford University.
The 17 discharged experts last month published a shorter essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association that decried Kennedy’s “destabilizing decisions.” The focus was largely on their termination and on Kennedy’s decision in May to stop recommending COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women.
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