In a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he was removing all 17 current members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) for reasons pulled entirely out of his own ass. Why? Because, he says, he wants to restore public trust in vaccines — which I think we all know full well he does not.
He claims that this “public trust” was lost not because of “misinformation or anti-science beliefs” but because of “a history of conflicts of interest, persecution of dissidents, a lack of curiosity, and skewed science that has plagued the vaccine regulatory apparatus for decades.”
In reality, ACIP has an extremely rigorous conflict of interest policy — members are heavily vetted, required to disclose all conflicts of interest and barred from voting on any matters related to them. It would be very difficult to find 17 people with enough expertise on vaccines to provide guidance but with no “conflicts of interest,” as determined by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This, by his own estimation, would include ever having worked for or had ties to “the vaccine industry.”
So I guess we can assume that, rather than people with any expertise remotely related to vaccines and vaccine safety, he’ll replace them with … Jenny McCarthy? Concerned moms from various Facebook groups? Alex Jones? A few dowsers? Folgers Crystals?
Kennedy writes:
ACIP evaluates the safety, efficacy and clinical need of the nation’s vaccines and passes its findings on to the Centers 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 It has never recommended against a vaccine—even those later withdrawn for safety reasons.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 scrutinize 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.
This is absolute nonsense. There are actual livestreams available for all ACIP meetings and people are allowed to submit requests for public comment during them.
Also, while ACIP has not outright rejected a vaccine, it has recommended more narrow use of certain vaccines than recommended by the FDA. Their job is to set the vaccine schedule, dosage, contraindications, review older vaccines, etc.
To be fair, Kennedy was able to find one actual instance of the ACIP recommending that a vaccine that was later “withdrawn for safety reasons” be added to the childhood vaccine schedule. In 1997 (yes, 1997), the Rotashield virus was withdrawn after it was discovered that it carried a small risk of intussusception, a kind of bowel obstruction. He also brought up a House investigation from the year 2000 that determined that the ACIP had an issue with members having conflicts of interest, which appears to have been heavily corrected since then, and claimed, without evidence, that this was still an issue.
Perhaps ironically, the next ACIP meeting is set to take place in about two weeks, from June 20 to 25, which means there will be nowhere near enough time to properly vet new members.
“Appointing people this fast means they were not properly vetted, and there is no real time to check conflict of interests issues,” Dorit Reiss, a professor of law at UC Law San Francisco, said to CNN.
These new members, Kennedy says, “won’t directly work for the vaccine industry. They will exercise independent judgment, refuse to serve as a rubber stamp, and foster a culture of critical inquiry — unafraid to ask hard questions.”
Like “Does this cause autism?”
The fact is, the most likely result is that these people will not know what actual “hard questions” (or even the basic ones) they should ask in order to ensure vaccine safety. That is one of the problems with focusing on entirely outlandish theories and ideas instead of reality. There are absolutely things that can go wrong with any medication, but they’re not all dramatic like magically causing all of the autism somehow. Real problems are usually pretty boring.
While ACIP members are, in fact, barred from being employed by vaccine manufacturing companies or holding any patents on vaccines while serving, the Committee’s charter specifies that they actually should have a background in vaccines. You know, so they know what they’re talking about?
The Committee shall consist of up to 19 Special Government Employees, including the Chair. Members shall be selected from authorities who are knowledgeable in the fields of immunization practices and public health, have expertise in the use of vaccines and other immunobiologic agents in clinical practice or preventive medicine, have expertise with clinical or laboratory vaccine research, or have expertise in assessment of vaccine efficacy and safety. The Committee shall include a person or persons knowledgeable about consumer perspectives and/or social and community aspects of immunization programs. Members shall be deemed Special Government Employees.
Of course, people with that kind of background probably won’t even know to make sure Bill Gates didn’t put any tracking microchips or the mark of the beast in the vaccines.
One thing is clear — absolutely no one has a stronger “conflict of interest” here than Kennedy, who has spent the last several decades of his life claiming, without evidence, that vaccines are dangerous. The man is not just going to turn around, say, “Whoops! Guess I was wrong!” and accept that they are safe and that the mechanisms we have for approving them work. He has absolutely no intention or desire whatsoever to “restore public trust” in vaccines, he just wants to be proven right … and however much money he’s getting from these anti-vaxx “WisnerBaum” lawsuits right here, which Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden have asked him to divest — and which he hasn’t.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
So he lied during his confirmation. I thought he promised he wouldn't fire these guys.
Personally, I just got bad news on my cancer diagnosis. Not life-ending news, but some of my cancer is growing, so I have to change medications and treatments. I, therefore, am very worried about my already compromised immune system and want to keep up with any vaccines. I worry for every child and elderly person who depend on this system to keep us healthy. I have a personal story, but I don't need it to care about everyone else. I really hate that guy.
You know as cynical as I am, I really didn't expect "white people sacrifice their children to mumps and cholera because they're 'grrr... mad!' about Black people being slightly less oppressed."