Global vaccine group Gavi secures $9 billion after funding summit
LONDON (Reuters) -Global vaccine group Gavi has secured $9 billion for its work over the next five years helping to immunize the world's poorest children, its board chair, Jose Manuel Barroso, said on Wednesday.
The group announced the total at the end of a fundraising summit in Brussels. It includes new pledges from donors like the United Kingdom and the Gates Foundation, as well as money left after COVID-19.
It did not include a pledge from the United States. Earlier on Wednesday, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr said that the United States would no longer fund Gavi and accused it of ignoring vaccine safety, without citing any evidence. In response, Gavi said safety was its primary concern.
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Atlantic
11 hours ago
- Atlantic
‘I'm Not Quite Sure How to Respond to This Presentation'
The past three weeks have been auspicious for the anti-vaxxers. On June 9, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. purged the nation's most important panel of vaccine experts: All 17 voting members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which sets recommendations for the use of vaccines and determines which ones must be covered through insurance and provided free of charge to children on Medicaid, were abruptly fired. The small, ragtag crew of replacements that Kennedy appointed two days later met this week for the first time, amid lots of empty chairs in a conference room in Atlanta. They had come to talk about the safety of vaccines: to raise concerns about the data, to float hypotheses of harm, to issue findings. The resulting spectacle was set against a backdrop of accelerating action from the secretary. On Wednesday, Kennedy terminated more than $1 billion in U.S. funding for Gavi, a global-health initiative that supports the vaccination of more than 65 million children every year. Lyn Redwood, a nurse practitioner and the former president of Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization that Kennedy used to chair, was just hired as a special government employee. (She presented at the ACIP meeting yesterday.) A recently posted scientific document on the ACIP website that underscored the safety of thimerosal, an ingredient in a small proportion of the nation's flu vaccines, had been taken down, a committee member said, because the document 'was not authorized by the office of the secretary.' (A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told me in an email that this document was provided to the ACIP members in their meeting briefing packets.) What's clear enough is that, 61 years after ACIP's founding, America's vaccination policy is about to be recooked. Now we've had a glimpse inside the kitchen. The meeting started with complaints. 'Some media outlets have been very harsh on the new members of this committee,' said Martin Kulldorff, a rangy Swedish biostatistician and noted COVID contrarian who is now ACIP's chair. (Kuldorff was one of the lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial proposal from the fall of 2020 to isolate seniors and other vulnerable people while reopening the rest of society.) In suggesting that he and Kennedy's other appointees are opposed to vaccination, Kulldorff said, journalists were misleading the public, weakening trust in public health, and fanning 'the flames of vaccine hesitancy.' This was, in fact, the most pugnacious comment of the two-day meeting, which otherwise unfolded in a tone of fearmongering gentility. Robert Malone, a doctor and an infectious-diseases researcher who has embraced the 'anti-vaccine' label and published a conspiracy-theory-laden book that details government psyops against the American people, was unfailingly polite in his frequent intimations about the safety of vaccines, often thanking CDC staff for their hard work and lucid presentations. With his thick white beard, calm affect, and soldierly diction—Malone ended many of his comments by saying, 'Over' into the microphone—he presented less as a firebrand than as, say, the commanding officer of a submarine. When Malone alluded to the worry, for example, that spike proteins from the mRNA-based COVID vaccines linger in the body following injection, he did so in respectful, even deferential, language, suggesting that the public would benefit from greater study of possible 'delayed effects' of immune-system activation. The CDC's traditional approach—its 'world-leading, rigorous' one, he clarified—might be improved by examining this question. A subject-matter expert responded that the CDC has been keeping tabs on real-world safety data on those vaccines for nearly five years, and has not detected any signs of long-term harm. Later, Malone implied that COVID or its treatments might have, through some unspecified, bank-shot mechanism, left the U.S. population more susceptible to other illnesses. There was a 'paradoxical, sudden decrease' in flu cases in 2020 and 2021, he noted, followed by a trend of worsening harm. A CDC staffer pointed out that the decrease in flu during those years was not, in fact, a paradox; well-documented shifts in people's health behavior had temporarily reduced the load of many respiratory illnesses during that same period. But Malone pressed on: 'Some members of the scientific community have concern that they're coming out of the COVID pandemic—exposure to the virus, exposure to various countermeasures—there may be a pattern of broad-based, uh, energy,' he said, his eyes darting up for a moment as he said the word, 'that might contribute to increased severity of influenza disease.' He encouraged the agency to 'be sensitive to that hypothesis.' Throughout these and other questions from the committee members, the CDC's subject-matter experts did their best to explain their work and respond to scattershot technical and conceptual concerns. 'The CDC staff is still attempting to operate as an evidence-based organization,' Laura Morris, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, who has attended dozens of ACIP meetings in the past and attended this one as a nonvoting liaison to the committee from the American Academy of Family Physicians, told me. 'There was some tension in terms of the capacity of the committee to ask and understand the appropriate methodological questions. The CDC was trying to hold it down.' That task became more difficult as the meeting progressed. 'The new ACIP is an independent body composed of experienced medical and public health experts who evaluate evidence, ask hard questions, and make decisions based on scientific integrity,' the HHS spokesperson told me. 'Bottom line: this process reflects open scientific inquiry and robust debate, not a pre-scripted narrative.' The most vocal questioner among the new recruits—and the one who seemed least beholden to a script—was the MIT business-school professor Retsef Levi, a lesser-known committee appointee who sat across the table from Malone. A scruffy former Israel Defense Forces intelligence officer with a ponytail that reached halfway down his back, Levi's academic background is in data modeling, risk management, and organizational logistics. He approached the proceedings with a swaggering incredulity, challenging the staffers' efforts and pointing out the risks of systematic errors in their thinking. (In a pinned post on his X profile, Levi writes that 'the evidence is mounting and indisputable that mRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death'—a position entirely at odds with copious data presented at the meeting.) Shortly before the committee's vote to recommend a new, FDA-approved monoclonal antibody for preventing RSV in infants, Levi noted that he'd spent some time reviewing the relevant clinical-trial data for the drug and another like it, and found some worrying patterns in the statistics surrounding infant deaths. 'Should we not be concerned that maybe there are some potential safety signals?' he asked. But these very data had already been reviewed, at great length, in multiple settings: by the FDA, in the course of drug approval, and by the dozens of members of ACIP's relevant work group for RSV, which had, per the committee's standard practice, conducted its own staged analysis of the new treatment before the meeting and reached consensus that its benefits outweighed its risks. Levi was uncowed by any reference to this prior work. 'I'm a scientist, but I'm also a father of six kids,' he told the group; speaking as a father, he said, he personally would be concerned about the risk of harm from this new antibody for RSV. In the end, Levi voted against recommending the antibody, as did Vicky Pebsworth, who is on the board of an anti-vaccine organization and holds a Ph.D. in public health and nursing. The five other members voted yes. That 5–2 vote aside, the most contentious issue on the meeting's schedule concerned the flu shots in America that contain thimerosal, which has been an obsession of the anti-vaccine movement for the past few decades. Despite extensive study, vaccines with thimerosal have not been found to be associated with any known harm in human patients, yet an unspecified vote regarding their use was slipped into the meeting's agenda in the absence of any work-group study or presentation from the CDC's staff scientists. What facts there were came almost exclusively from Redwood, the nurse who used to run Kennedy's anti-vaccine organization. Earlier this week, Reuters reported that at least one citation from her posted slides had been invented. That reference was removed before she spoke yesterday. (HHS did not address a request for comment on this issue in its response to me.) The only one of Kennedy's appointees who had ever previously served on the committee—the pediatrician Cody Meissner—seemed perplexed, even pained, by the proceedings. 'I'm not quite sure how to respond to this presentation,' he said when Redwood finished. He went on to sum up his concerns: 'ACIP makes recommendations based on scientific evidence as much as possible. And there is no scientific evidence that thimerosal has caused a problem.' Alas, Meissner's warnings were for nought. Throughout the meeting, he came off as the committee's last remaining, classic 'expert'—a vaccine scientist clinging to ACIP's old ways—but his frequent protestations were often bulldozed over or ignored. In the end, his was the only vote against the resolutions on thimerosal. Throughout the two-day meeting, Kuldorff kept returning to a favorite phrase: evidence-based medicine. 'Secretary Kennedy has given this committee a clear mandate to use evidence-based medicine,' he said on Wednesday morning; 'The purpose of this committee is to follow evidence-based medicine,' he said on Wednesday afternoon; 'What is important is using evidence-based medicine,' he said again when the meeting reached its end. All told, I heard him say evidence-based at least 10 times during the meeting. (To be fair, critics of Kuldorff and his colleagues also love this phrase.) But the committee was erratic in its posture toward the evidence from the very start; it cast doubt on CDC analyses and substituted lay advice and intuition for ACIP's normal methods of assessing and producing expert consensus. 'Decisons were made based on feelings and preferences rather than evidence,' Morris told me after the meeting. 'That's a dangerous way to make public-health policy.'
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RFK Jr. says there may be 'more cavities' under fluoride bans: 'It's a balance'
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Thursday that nixing fluoride from public drinking water may result in more cavities. "It's a balance," Kennedy said during interview on Fox News' "The Faulkner Focus" on Thursday, June 26. "You're going to see probably slightly more cavities. Although in Europe, where they ban fluoride, they did not see an uptick in cavities. The issue is parents need to decide because the science is very clear on fluoride." Fluoridation is not banned in Europe, according to the American Dental Association (ADA). However, adding fluoride to drinking water is not as widespread in European countries as in the U.S. Some European countries fluoridate their water, while others do not and the reasoning and result of those actions varies, according to BBC reporting. USA TODAY has reached out to ADA for more information. Kennedy's response came after anchor Harris Faulkner asked him how removing fluoride from public drinking water would affect children who don't have access to dentists or proper oral healthcare. Kennedy has been pushing to ban fluoride in public drinking water. In April, during a meeting with President Donald Trump, he said that kids get "stupider" the more fluoride they take in. Kennedy's remarks were met with backlash, as the study he pulled from was criticized for inadequate statistical rigor and other methodological flaws. A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson told USA TODAY on June 27 that Kennedy's comments reflect an effort to balance reducing exposure to unnecessary chemicals while maintaining protections, like preventing cavities in children. The Department of Health and Human Services has advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to meet with the Community Preventative Services Task Force to study and make a new recommendation on fluoride, the spokesperson added. Fluoride bans: Two states have now passed fluoride bans. These other ones introduced bills. Fluoride is a naturally-occurring mineral found in many foods and water and has been long thought to help prevent tooth decay, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Throughout the day, the protective outer layer of our teeth, called enamel, breaks down. Natural minerals within the enamel are broken down by bacteria, plaque and sugar. This is called demineralization. To gain these minerals back, people must consume food and water that contains chemicals like fluoride, calcium and phosphate, the Cleveland Clinic states. This is known as remineralization. The Cleveland Clinic says with too much demineralization and not enough remineralization, tooth decay may begin. Exclusive: As RFK Jr. targets fluoride, Texas is coming for kids toothpaste In 1945, Grand Rapids, Michigan, became the first city to fluoridate its community water, adjusting existing levels in the supply to the therapeutic 1.0 parts-per-million (ppm). Since then, the levels have been adjusted to a maximum of 0.7 ppm or 0.7 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water, which is considered optimal for preventing tooth decay. Health risks from exposure to fluoride require a much higher concentration, according to the American Dental Association. To get fluoride toxicity from drinking treated water, a person would have to consume 5 liters of water per kilogram of body weight, meaning the average person would die from drinking too much water before fluoridation of that water could hurt them, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Utah and Florida have banned fluoride from public drinking water – Utah in March and Florida in May. Kennedy has championed these states, and others looking to pass bans, including Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, South Carolina, North Dakota, Arkansas, Tennessee, Montana and New Hampshire. After Utah passed its fluoride ban in March, the ADA released a statement saying dentists "see the direct consequences fluoride removal has on our patients." "It's a real tragedy when policymakers' decisions hurt vulnerable kids and adults in the long term. Blindly calling for a ban on fluoridated water hurts people, costs money and will ultimately harm our economy," ADA President Dr. Brett Kessler said in a news release. The ADA has also pointed to studies, like one 2024 study conducted by the University of Queensland, which found that children exposed and not exposed to fluoride showed no difference in IQ testing. This story was updated to add more information. Contributing: Natalie Neysa Alund, Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy and Mary Walrath-Holdridge, USA TODAY
