Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has opened a new chapter of federal vaccine policy that invites questions on issues long considered to be settled and that pushes anti-vaccine priorities into mainstream government guidelines.
During his Senate confirmation hearings, Kennedy said he wouldn’t undermine vaccines.
“I am not going to go into HHS and impose my preordained opinions on anybody at HHS,” he said. “I’m going to empower the scientists at HHS to do their job and make sure that we have good science that is evidence based.”
Over the course of a two-day meeting this week, Kennedy’s handpicked panel of vaccine advisers said they would launch an investigation into the cumulative effect of the childhood and adolescent vaccine schedules and consider new recommendations for shots that have long been on the market.
“Vaccines are not all good or bad,” said Martin Kulldorff, the committee’s new chair and a former Harvard University professor. “No questions should be off-limits.”
The panel also voted to effectively remove an ingredient from flu shots that has long been the target of anti-vaccine activists, including Kennedy, despite numerous studies showing it is safe.
The vote was not unanimous with two of the seven members abstaining or voting “no” on the question of only recommending thimerosal-free flu vaccines.
“I think this is a prelude to them demonstrating their ability to go in with this committee, make recommendations to pull some of these vaccines,” former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said during a recent CNBC interview.
Gottlieb noted the backlash to pandemic-era measures like vaccine mandates launched a backlash Kennedy is taking advantage of.
“We've now built a lot of anti-vaccine sentiment. Secretary Kennedy is fueling that with what he's doing in groups like the ACIP that he's constituted. The consequences of this are going to be felt for years,” Gottlieb said.
In early June, Kennedy fired the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and installed eight new members, several of whom have openly questioned vaccines.
The panel met with just seven members after one person dropped out prior to the meeting.
On Thursday, the ACIP voted to no longer recommend any flu vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal, based on the presentation of a single vaccine critic.
Lyn Redwood, a nurse practitioner and a former leader of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group, said thimerosal is a “developmental and reproductive toxicant” that never underwent proper safety testing.
The CDC removed a copy of her initial presentation from its website earlier this week after it appeared to cite a nonexistent study.
Redwood was recently hired by HHS and is listed as an “expert” in the agency’s employee directory. She presented her argument against thimerosal as a private citizen, however, not as a representative of the federal government.
Thimerosal is a rarely used ingredient, so the real-world impact of the vote is likely minimal. It’s used in multi-dose vials in order to prevent the growth of bacteria and fungi and is more commonly used in low-income countries.
But the vote showed the panel’s willingness to disregard scientific data and empower people with longstanding grievances against the public health establishment and the anti-vaccine movement to make policy recommendations for the entire country.
“What we heard in this meeting was really a false narrative that the current vaccine policies are flawed and that they need fixing,” said Sean O’Leary, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases, in a press conference. “That's completely false. These policies have saved millions of lives, trillions of dollars.”
AAP said it will no longer take part in the proceedings because they are not “credible.”
Public health experts said Redwood’s presentation at the meeting went against the standards of what a group like the ACIP should uphold.
Jerome Adams, who served as surgeon general in the first Trump administration, said in a post on the social platform X that the presentation “bypassed normal CDC vetting, cherry-picked outdated data, and ignored decades of safety evidence.”
Elizabeth Jacobs, professor emerita from the department of epidemiology at the University of Arizona and co-founder of the Defend Public Health advocacy network, described the meeting as a “circus-like atmosphere” rather than the typically staid, academic one.
“Lynn Redwood was permitted to give a presentation that was just simply deceptive about thimerosal and vaccines. And that type of behavior is really not something that a serious scientific body should be considering,” Jacobs told The Hill. “It is entirely inappropriate to have a person present at a scientific meeting one side of an issue with very weak evidence and completely ignore the decades of data showing the safety and effectiveness of thimerosal.”
One ACIP member, the sole member to vote “No” on recommending only thimerosal-free flu shots, expressed concerns that the vote could lead to reduced vaccine access abroad as other countries look to the panel for guidance.
“The recommendations that the ACIP makes are followed among many countries around the world and removing thimerosal from all vaccines that are used in other countries, for example, is going to reduce access to these vaccines,” said Cody Meissner, professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College who previously served on the ACIP.
“It will increase cost. And I think it’s important to note that no study has ever indicated any harm from thimerosal. It's been used in vaccines, as was noted by Ms. Redwood, since before World War II,” he added.
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