Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday that he won’t appoint “anti-vaxxers” to replace all the members of the vaccine recommendation committee he fired earlier this week.
“This has been a long time coming,” Kennedy told reporters of the committee shake-up.
During a press appearance with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Kennedy described the new committee appointees, none of whom have been announced, as “credentialed scientists, highly credentialed physicians” who will use “evidence-based medicine” when deciding which vaccines to recommend.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, makes recommendations on which vaccines should be part of the immunization schedules for both adults and children. Those recommendations then become official CDC policy and impact which vaccines are covered by insurance, required for children to attend schools and recommended by physicians.
Kennedy has long cast doubt on the objectivity of the committee, which has traditionally been made up of established mainstream health experts whom Kennedy derisively claims are under the influence of “Big Pharma.” On Tuesday he reiterated those claims, saying that “four out of five people who added the rotavirus vaccine to the schedule had direct financial interest in that vaccine.”
Kennedy went on to say that “probably the worst example of malevolent malpractice has been adding all of these new products into the schedule without doing prelicensing safety studies.” (All vaccines go through rigorous safety testing before being added to the immunization schedules, and there’s no evidence the committee’s former members were unduly influenced by pharmaceutical corporations.)
One of Kennedy’s key talking points on vaccines is that many haven’t been tested to determine their effectiveness when compared to a placebo. The American Academy of Pediatrics says placebo tests aren’t used on new vaccines with already existing counterparts because “when a safe, effective vaccine already exists against a disease, giving children in the placebo group no protection against that disease is unethical.”
Kennedy said the new ACIP members would be announced ahead of the committee’s next scheduled meeting later this month.
Kennedy’s comments came during an appearance at the Department of Agriculture headquarters, during which Rollins signed several waivers for states seeking to limit what can be bought with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funds, a cause Kennedy has championed.
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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.