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Scientific American
6 days ago
- Health
- Scientific American
Who Is on RFK, Jr.'s New Vaccine Panel—And What Will They Do?
An emergency-room doctor, critics of COVID-19 vaccines and an obstetrician who advises a supplement company are among the advisers handpicked by vaccine sceptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to provide advice on vaccines to the federal government. Kennedy announced his new roster for the influential Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) on 11 June — just two days after he fired all 17 of its previous members and accused the ACIP of 'malevolent malpractice'. The ACIP advises US public-health officials as to who should receive approved vaccines, and when. Those recommendations are then often used to guide whether public and private health-insurance programmes will pay for the shots. Kennedy has pledged that the ACIP will re-evaluate the vaccine 'schedule' for children — the list of which vaccines children should get and when they should get them. This week's shakeup of the committee is 'a major step towards restoring public trust in vaccines,' Kennedy said in a post on the social media platform, X. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Several of the new ACIP members have expressed public support for vaccines. But a number of them have also expressed scepticism; one serves on the board of an anti-vaccination organization, and a second has been a prominent sceptic of the COVID-19 vaccines on social media. As first reported by the biomedical news outlet STAT, Kennedy included four of the new committee members in the dedication to his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. 'This is a disaster for public health,' says Adam Ratner, a paediatric infectious diseases physician in New York City. 'It has the potential to set us back decades.' The HHS did not respond to a request for comment before publication. Far-reaching implications Infectious-disease specialists worry about the implications of the ACIP potentially voting to recommend fewer vaccines or fewer doses than are currently advised. Paul Offit, an infectious-diseases paediatrician at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine who served on the ACIP from 1998 to 2003, says insurers don't have to cover vaccines that aren't recommended by the ACIP. And 'doctors or pharmacists who give vaccines may feel that they would be liable for giving that vaccine', he adds. Even those who can pay for vaccines out of pocket might find them harder to get without an ACIP recommendation, says Arthur Reingold, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, because overall demand for the shots will decrease. That, in turn, could lead some pharmacies to stop stocking them. Offit notes that at the ACIP's next meeting, which starts 25 June, the panel will decide whether to recommend vaccines for COVID-19, the human papillomavirus, meningococcal disease and RSV. 'These are established vaccines, and we're voting on them?' Offit says. 'The entire childhood and adult immunisation schedule is on the table.' Kennedy has criticized the ACIP for what he says are rampant conflicts of interest among its members. On 12 June, the biopharma news outlet Endpoints News reported that two newly named ACIP members, Robert Malone and Martin Kulldorff, have received payment for serving as expert witnesses in lawsuits against pharmaceutical company Merck over two of its vaccines. Malone said on X that this work ended six years ago. Kennedy has also said that past committee members did not demand what he considers to be adequate safety trials with control groups that received a placebo, before recommending vaccines. But many of the vaccine studies included placebo controls, Ratner says, unless it was unethical to conduct the trial with one. And Reingold, who has served on the ACIP in the past, says that the committee has strict policies regarding conflicts of interest and that committee members must recuse themselves from any vote that might pose a conflict. 'The issue of potential conflicts of interest has been radically overblown and unfairly called into question the objectivity of this panel,' he says. Offit says several independent groups have reviewed previous ACIP members and found no conflicts of interest. 'Now, the conflict of interest is real because these folks are indebted to RFK Jr, who just gave them this position,' he says. Vetting process Researchers are also concerned about the loss of expertise. The committee's new lineup is 'disturbing', says Nancy Bennett, a public-health specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. In the past, members were nominated and then vetted by staff at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) before being sent to the head of the CDC and, finally, the head of the HHS for approval. Bennett says the vetting process sometimes took years. 'The ACIP was meant to be composed of people with deep expertise in the area,' Ratner says. 'That's what we have lost.' Joseph Hibbeln Hibbeln is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who once worked at the US National Institutes of Health. His recent papers have focused on the connection between nutrition and various disorders, including mental-health conditions, and his LinkedIn profile states that twenty-first-century diets are contributing to 'inadequate brain nutrients and are likely contributing to the high burden of mental illnesses worldwide'. A search of PubMed, a database of biomedical papers, did not turn up any papers he has authored about vaccines or infectious disease. He did not respond to a request for comment. Martin Kulldorff Kulldorff is a Swedish epidemiologist and senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute, a think tank based in West Hartford, Connecticut, that formed 'to provide an independent voice for personal liberty' and to oppose lockdown policies instituted by public officials during the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with Jayanta Bhattacharya, the current head of the US National Institutes of Health, Kulldorff wrote the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, which advocated against COVID-19 lockdowns except for vulnerable populations, and drew much pushback from the medical community. Last year, Kulldorff wrote in City Journal that he was fired from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for refusing a COVID-19 vaccine even though he already had immunity from being infected. He also wrote that 'vaccines are a vital medical invention, allowing people to obtain immunity without the risk that comes from getting sick,' but suggested that trials of COVID-19 vaccines early in the pandemic were not properly designed. Kulldorff did not respond to Nature 's request for comment. Retsef Levi Levi is a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He has published several papers on COVID-19, including one expressing concerns about side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines. In a post on social-media platform X in 2023, Levi said, 'The evidence is mounting and indisputable that MRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death, especially among young people. We have to stop giving them immediately!' Levi did not respond to a request for comment. Robert Malone Malone is a physician and scientist whose research contributed to the development of mRNA vaccines. He maintains that he has not received the credit he deserves for his role, but in a 2023 video, he said the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 would damage children's organs and had no benefit to children. He also promoted ivermectin, an anti-parasite medication, as a treatment for COVID-19; mounting evidence shows that it has no effect. Malone declined to comment but said in an e-mailed statement that he will do his 'best to serve with unbiased objectivity and rigor'. Cody Meissner Meissner studies paediatrics at the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and has served on multiple federal committees on vaccines. He was a member of the ACIP from 2008 to 2012. He has emphasized the importance of COVID-19 vaccines, saying in 2021 that 'it's important that the main message we transmit is that we've got to get everyone two doses.' In 2021, he co-authored a newspaper commentary opposing mask mandates for children, and he has expressed scepticism about the benefits of repeated COVID-19 booster shots for children. He did not respond to a request for comment. James Pagano Pagano, now retired, has worked as an emergency medicine physician and emergency-room medical director. Kennedy described him as a 'strong advocate for evidence-based medicine'. He has published two fiction books about hospital physicians and in 2014 wrote a blog post questioning whether climate change is real. His public record on vaccines is thin. He did not respond to a request for comment. Vicky Pebsworth Pebsworth is a nurse, health-care administrator and health-policy analyst who has been a voting member of an FDA advisory committee on vaccines. She's also a volunteer at the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a non-profit organization that highlights vaccine risks and informs about 'biological mechanisms involved in vaccine injury and death'. Her NVIC profile says that her interest on vaccine safety started after her son experienced 'long-term health problems following receipt of seven live viruses and killed bacterial vaccines administered during his 15-month well-baby visit'. Pebsworth was part of a working group for the FDA's National Vaccine Advisory Committee that monitored post-marketing vaccine safety and potential risks. In 2020, she told an FDA committee that the NVIC's position was that 'using coercion and sanctions to persuade adults to take an experimental vaccine, or give it to their children, is unethical and unlawful,' as first reported by CBS. She did not respond to a request for comment. Michael Ross Ross is an obstetrician and chief medical officer at Manta Pharma, an implantable device company in Maryland. He has been a board member and adviser for nearly a dozen pharmaceutical and medical-device companies, including LarreaRx, which distributes an herbal supplement. Ross was a presidential appointee on a CDC committee for preventing breast and cervical cancer, and a professor at George Washington University for 46 years. His LinkedIn profile lists his specialties as 'Contact lenses, International Business, Healthcare and pharmaceutical executive management, pharmaceutical consulting.' He did not respond to a request for comment.
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Gabbard and RFK Jr. Were Nominated to Destroy, Not to Lead
DONALD TRUMP, IN HIS SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS, promised to make America 'merit-based' again. This week, the Senate will hold hearings for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard—Trump's nominations for secretary of health and human services and director of national intelligence, respectively. Kennedy is a professional conspiracy theorist whose top qualification (if it can be called that) to run America's public health agencies is his chairmanship of an anti-vaccine advocacy group. Gabbard is a former House member and Army veteran with no intelligence experience. Of course, the nominees' merits or lack thereof are irrelevant—they're MAGA sycophants who are being considered for two of the most important jobs in the country because they're loyal to Trump. In truth, it would be a relief if Kennedy and Gabbard were merely grossly unqualified. The deeper issue is that Kennedy and Gabbard are anti-qualified. The only conceivable reason to elevate them to the top of the United States's public health apparatus and intelligence services is to destroy the agencies they have been selected to run. In his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, Kennedy accuses his subject of leading a 'historic coup d'état against Western democracy.' He argues that the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic was the 'onset of totalitarianism' in the United States, that American democracy has been 'shattered,' and that the pandemic turned the country into a totalitarian police state: 'Some 250 years after America's historic revolt against entrenched oligarchy and authoritarian rule, the American experiment with self-government was over.' Conspiracy theories are easier to find than ever. Smart reporting and honest analysis are much rarer. That's why The Bulwark exists. Support our mission and join our community by becoming a Bulwark+ member. Kennedy relentlessly attacks the Department of Health and Human Services throughout the book. For example, he explains that HHS led a 'virus war game scenario' (called 'Crimson Contagion') just months before the pandemic hit, which 'achieved eerily accurate forecasting with numbers that precisely predicted the official casualty data for COVID-19.' He implies that this was no coincidence. Kennedy has special ire for HHS Assistant Secretary Robert Kadlec, who oversaw Operation Warp Speed and Crimson Contagion. He writes that Kadlec had spent two decades 'writing scripts for using a pandemic to overthrow democracy and curtail constitutional rights.' He continues: 'With this virus simulation, he [Kadlec] included all the key players who would manage what was to become a de facto coup d'état sixty days hence.' Kennedy concludes: Crimson Contagion's planners precisely predicted every element of the COVID-19 pandemic—from the shortage of masks to specific death numbers—months before COVID-19 was ever identified as a threat and . . . their overarching countermeasure was the pre-planned demolition of the American Constitution by a scrupulously choreographed palace coup. Trump's nominee to lead HHS believes the department used the COVID-19 pandemic to destroy American democracy—while Trump was still in office. Will any GOP senators ask him about his paranoid hatred for the department he's nominated to lead? Will they ask if he still believes American democracy was destroyed during the pandemic? The list of Kennedy's disqualifying statements and beliefs is long. He believes vaccines cause autism but HIV doesn't cause AIDS. He says unvaccinated Americans were worse off during the pandemic than Jews were during the Holocaust, and he has suggested that the 'people who are most immune' to COVID-19 are 'Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.' He has claimed that the COVID vaccine is the 'deadliest vaccine ever made.' Operation Warp Speed was a Trump administration initiative, so Kennedy thinks the president he wants to serve is implicated in the creation of a deadly vaccine and a totalitarian police state. Kennedy now promises that 'we're not going to take vaccines away from anybody.' He says he just wants to 'make sure that Americans have good information' and calls for 'evidence-based science and medicine.' Kennedy knows he needs to sane-wash himself in a hurry. But his oft-repeated past statements are readily available to anyone who cares to look, and they demonstrate that Kennedy is a rabid conspiracy theorist who has spent many years targeting the very department Trump nominated him to run. Any senator who doesn't make this the focus of his confirmation hearings is derelict in their duty. Share GABBARD HAS A LONG HISTORY of attacking American intelligence agencies. She has argued that the intelligence community is part of a 'shadow government pulling the strings' in the United States. She claimed that the 'real power lies with the Deep State, Intel agencies, and propaganda media who got [Biden] elected.' She accused intelligence agencies of working with social media companies in an 'unholy alliance' which 'threatens to destroy what is left of our fragile democracy.' She added: 'Dictatorships need to control the flow of information—and that's what's going on here.' In Gabbard's 2024 book For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind, she expressed her horror at Sen. Chuck Schumer's 2017 comment that Trump was 'really dumb' for attacking intelligence agencies: 'Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.' Here's how Gabbard interpreted this comment: I was not at all naive about the power of the national security state. This admission, however, from one of the most high-ranking, powerful Democrats in the country accepted as normal the fact that we are not the free democratic republic we are supposed to be. He was admitting that our democracy is a charade and that our elected leaders, who have been charged with the critical task of overseeing the national security state, are too afraid to do so. Schumer's comment was careless, but Gabbard's response was far more revealing—particularly for a possible director of national intelligence. She believes American democracy is a 'charade' that is totally subordinate to 'supremely powerful' intelligence agencies. She says it's a 'fact' that the United States is no longer a 'free democratic republic.' These comments are consistent with her long record of paranoid denunciations of the intelligence community, and it's not as if she made them decades ago—her book was published last year. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Gabbard has repeatedly contradicted the intelligence community. After Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against civilians in April 2017, Gabbard immediately declared that she was 'skeptical' that the regime was responsible—despite its gruesome record of atrocities against civilians and the fact that she couldn't have assessed any information about the attack at that point. A few months before the attack, Gabbard met with Assad, whom she would later declare was 'not the enemy of the United States.' She opposed U.S. intervention to support Assad's opponents, so a chemical attack on civilians launched by the regime was politically inconvenient. Gabbard would continue denying Assad's guilt long after American intelligence agencies determined he was responsible. She refused to accept the conclusions of U.S. and French intelligence, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, and the UN. But for some reason, she trusted Theodore Postol—an emeritus professor at MIT and a frequent guest for the Russian propaganda outlet RT who has repeatedly questioned the Assad regime's culpability for chemical attacks. On Gabbard's 2019 campaign website, she claimed there was 'evidence to suggest that the attacks may have been staged by opposition forces for the purpose of drawing the United States and the West deeper into the war.' This was an echo of Russian propaganda, as was Gabbard's claim that Putin deserved credit for fighting terrorism in Syria. Russia was actually involved in the war to prevent a brutal client state from collapsing, and it carried out one of the most indiscriminately destructive bombing campaigns of the twenty-first century (a glimpse at what was in store for Ukraine)—not predominantly against ISIS but against the more moderate opposition to Assad, and often against civilians. Gabbard's rhetoric often echoes Moscow's. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, she blamed the United States for failing to address 'Russia's legitimate security concerns.' In November 2023, she declared: 'The Biden Admin, intel agencies, and propaganda media lied and are still lying to the American people about Ukraine/US sabotage of Nord Stream pipeline.' While there's evidence that American intelligence agencies knew about plans to attack the pipeline, the idea that the U.S. government took part in the operation is unsubstantiated. If anything, the CIA apparently urged Ukraine not to go through with it. Gabbard has consistently demonstrated a complete inability to assess intelligence objectively. What's even more disturbing is that her politicized assessments reliably favor the United States's adversaries. And what's more disturbing still is that she believes the intelligence community she's been selected to lead has been working behind the scenes to destroy American democracy. Share KENNEDY AND GABBARD HAVE A LOT IN COMMON. They're both former Democrats who opportunistically joined the MAGA movement when their own presidential aspirations fizzled. They're both conspiracy theorists and alarmists who routinely announce the death of American democracy at the hands of their political foes. And they're both talented demagogues who put their skills to use for Trump—and are on the cusp of receiving rich rewards for doing so. Trump has always been heavily invested in a narrative of American decline. His political opponents, in his telling, aren't just wrong, they're destroying the United States. Immigration isn't just a problem—immigrants are 'poisoning the blood of our country.' Trump has spent the past few years at war with the American institutions that attempted to hold him accountable for his effort to overthrow the 2020 election—from the House January 6th Committee to the justice system. He needed surrogates who could speak the language of anti-institutional paranoia and hostility to convince American voters that, despite appearances, his political opponents posed the true threat to democracy. Kennedy and Gabbard were perfect for the job. 'When you undermine the authority of the president,' Gabbard writes in For Love of Country, referring to the investigation of Trump's alleged ties to Russia in 2016, 'you take away the power the American people gave him to carry out his presidential duties. This, in effect, is a slow-rolling coup.' She continues: The entire permanent Washington machine was activated to play their role in carrying this out: the Democratic National Committee, propaganda media, Big Tech, the FBI, the CIA, and a whole network of rogue intelligence and law enforcement agents working at the highest levels of our government. If you weren't already aware, when you hear people talking about the Deep State, this is who they're referring to. Kennedy and Gabbard see 'deep state' schemes and coups around every corner. They've spent years raging against the 'Washington machine,' but if they become integral parts of that machine, there's no telling how much damage they'll cause. Kennedy and Gabbard weren't just chosen because Trump wanted to reward loyal surrogates—they were chosen because they will happily indulge his paranoia and any conspiracy theory that serves his purposes. Conspiracism and opportunism have always come naturally to both of them, and these are the only necessary qualifications in Trump's 'merit-based' government. Share
