Latest news with #DrFionaHavers
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Vaccine Expert Tears Into RFK Jr. After Quitting CDC: ‘Americans Are Going to Die'
One of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's top vaccine specialists has warned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s anti-vax policies will cause 'a lot of Americans to die' after resigning from the agency on Monday. Dr. Fiona Havers spent 13 years with the CDC as a senior advisor on vaccine policy, developing a reputation as one of the world's leading figures on immunization. But following a series of escalating attacks on the agency from RFK Jr., starting with his announcement last month that the agency would no longer recommend Covid vaccines to pregnant women and culminating in his sacking of all 17 members of the agency's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACPIC), Havers was forced to hand in her resignation. 'It's a very transparent, rigorous process, and they have just taken a sledgehammer to it in the last several weeks,' Havers told The New York Times. 'CDC processes are being corrupted in a way that I haven't seen before.' Following the dismissal of the ACPIC team, Kennedy appointed eight new members to the committee, at least half of whom have publicly testified against vaccines in high-profile trials. One appointee in particular, Vicky Pebsworth, is a board member of the National Vaccine Information Center, an anti-vax organization which spreads conspiracy theories about vaccine injuries and deaths. 'I could not be party to legitimizing this new committee,' said Havers. 'I just no longer had confidence that the data that we were generating was going to be used objectively.' 'If it isn't stopped, and some of this isn't reversed, like, immediately, a lot of Americans are going to die as a result of vaccine-preventable diseases,' she added. Havers is at least the second CDC official to resign in protest of the Trump administration's increasing antagonism towards vaccines, following Covid expert Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos who resigned two weeks earlier after claiming she 'can no longer help the most vulnerable populations.' 'My career in public health and vaccines was born out of a deep desire to help the most vulnerable. That's a value I can no longer uphold in this role,' she wrote in an internal email to colleagues following the resignation. A number of Havers' colleagues are also considering similar moves, with several officials rumored to be on the verge of resigning in protest of the weakening of the CDC's authority. In an article published in JAMA on Monday, a number of fired ACPIC panelists claimed 'Secretary Kennedy's process blurs lines of legal authority' and that he had 'left the U.S. vaccine program critically weakened.' Dr. Camille Kotton, a former member of ACPIC who departed from the role last year, told the Times 'My whole career, I have relied on everything that came from the CDC as the most powerful and best information available. 'Now, we're at a time where it seems increasingly likely that we will not be able to trust information coming from the CDC,' she added. It's not just the ACPIC committee who have been sidelined by the current administration either—thousands of colleagues at the agency have lost their jobs under Kennedy's tenure. And while Havers says she has nothing but respect for colleagues who choose to stay and fight the new regime, 'what happened last week was the last straw for me.' A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told the Daily Beast that, 'under Secretary Kennedy's leadership, HHS is committed to following the gold standard of scientific integrity. 'Vaccine policy decisions will be based on objective data, transparent analysis, and evidence–not conflicts of interest or industry influence.'
CBS News
6 days ago
- Health
- CBS News
CDC official overseeing COVID hospitalization data resigns after RFK Jr.'s orders to change vaccine recommendations
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who led the agency's network to study hospitalization trends from infectious diseases like COVID-19 has resigned in protest following Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s orders to change the agency's vaccine recommendations and the committee that makes them. Dr. Fiona Havers' last day at the CDC was Monday, according to an announcement sent by an agency official to her branch within the agency's Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Viruses Division. They received the notice shortly after Reuters first reported on the resignation. "I no longer have confidence that these data will be used objectively or evaluated with appropriate scientific rigor to make evidence-based vaccine policy decisions," Havers wrote in an email sent to colleagues before the announcement. An infectious disease researcher who has worked with Havers, and received her email voicing concerns with how the data would be used, described the resignation as the latest in the "dismantling" of the agency's expertise. "It's a big loss to the CDC," the researcher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told CBS News. CBS News sent a request for comment to the CDC about the concerns that Havers expressed, but did not hear back from the agency's spokesperson. Instead, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services responded. "Under Secretary Kennedy's leadership, HHS is committed to following the gold standard of scientific integrity. Vaccine policy decisions will be based on objective data, transparent analysis, and evidence – not conflicts of interest or industry influence," Emily Hilliard, the department spokesperson, said in an email. Havers had led the CDC's Respiratory Virus Hospitalization Surveillance Network, or RESP-NET, that collects and studies trends in hospitalizations from COVID-19, RSV and influenza. Her presentations of RESP-NET's findings have figured prominently into past meetings of the agency's Advisory Committee of Immunization Practices as they weighed updates to the CDC's vaccine recommendations. "Of all the work we have accomplished, I am most proud of how COVID-NET and RSV-NET hospitalization data, presented at nearly every public ACIP meeting since 2020, have been critical drivers of COVID-19 and RSV vaccine policy in recent years," Havers wrote in her email. The CDC's vaccine recommendations are closely watched by doctors and health authorities because they are tied to federal policies enabling access to vaccines, including liability protections and requirements for insurance coverage. Usually, the ACIP deliberates and votes on updated recommendations, which are later adopted by the CDC director. In an unprecedented move this year, Kennedy bypassed the process to order his own changes. In late May, Kennedy first ordered narrowing the guidance to exclude children and pregnant women without other underlying health conditions, sidestepping an ACIP process that had been already underway to discuss changing the recommendations. He then fired the current roster of ACIP members in June — in what he described as a "clean sweep" of the panel — as well as removed the agency officials who oversee the panel's vetting and agenda. In a viewpoint published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the 17 members of the panel fired by Kennedy denounced the health secretary for "dismantling the process by which vaccines have been recommended." "As former ACIP members, we are deeply concerned that these destabilizing decisions, made without clear rationale, may roll back the achievements of US immunization policy, impact people's access to lifesaving vaccines, and ultimately put US families at risk of dangerous and preventable illnesses," they wrote. Kennedy later replaced the panel with a list of picks that included several allies of the health secretary and opponents of recommendations for COVID-19 and some other vaccines. The committee's new membership is set to meet next week to vote on updated vaccine recommendations for COVID-19 and RSV, among other diseases.
