InnovationRx: RFK Jr. Purges The Vaccine Advisory Committee

Forbes

11-06-2025

In this week's edition of InnovationRx, we look at RFK Jr.'s vaccine advisory committee purge, a tech billionaire's funding of research on AI and healthcare, Omada's IPO and more. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.
On Monday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. purged the group that advises the CDC on vaccines in order to replace its members with those of his own choosing.
The group, known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, is composed of 17 vaccination experts and is generally not political. In a Wall Street Journal editorial, Kennedy claimed that 'a clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.'
The move by RFK Jr., who has long expressed antipathy toward vaccinations and promoted conspiracy theories, was roundly condemned by public health experts. It typically takes a year to vet individual members of the panel, but the new members appear to be scheduled to meet at the next scheduled ACIP meeting in Atlanta later this month.
The American Medical Association criticized the ousters in a statement, saying that it 'undermines trust and upends a transparent process that has saved countless lives.' The association noted that it would 'fuel the spread of vaccine-preventable illnesses' at a time when the measles outbreak was ongoing and routine child vaccination rates have been declining.
Even before the purge, Kennedy had been chipping away at vaccines. Late last month, he eliminated recommendations for pregnant women and healthy children to receive COVID-19 vaccinations, a move that caused the American Pharmacists' Association to withhold endorsement of the CDC's current COVID vaccination schedule this week.
Trump's first Surgeon General, Dr. Jerome Adams, wrote in Time on Tuesday that the changes 'not only jeopardize public health but also threaten to erode trust in our health institutions at a critical time.'
Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease expert and member of the FDA's independent panel of vaccine advisors, told ABC News that RFK's latest move was extremely dangerous. '[Kennedy] doesn't have a single example to show where a vote by one of these committees has hurt children,' he said. 'In fact, the opposite is true–the votes by this committee over the last 25 years have caused children to suffer less and die less. ACIP should be given awards, not fired.'
Samsara cofounder and CEO Sanjit Biswas
Samsara
Samsara cofounder and CEO Sanjit Biswas built his business by applying AI to an area where that was unusual for its time: industrial and physical operations. Now Biswas, who is worth $4.8 billion by Forbes estimates, wants to apply similar technology to healthcare with his philanthropy. After taking $25 billion (market cap) Samsara public in December 2021, Biswas and his wife Hope Biswas, who has a Ph.D. in epidemiology, established the Biswas Family Foundation with $100 million in funding.
The group began making grants in 2023, and has been giving away funds in batches of $15 million a year since. The grants are typically $3 million to $4 million each.
'I have always thought about technology as a way to have a tremendous amount of impact on the world,' Biswas tells Forbes. With the foundation, he hopes to find the sweet spot between startups, which already have access to VC funding, and pure scientific research that's years or even decades away from commercialization—work that, as Biswas puts it, has 'translational impact.'
One area that Biswas has funded: using AI to find new uses for existing drugs. One effort he's funded, led by Marinka Zitnik, a biomedical informatics researcher at Harvard Medical School, is building a comprehensive benchmark for computational drug repurposing. While physicians have long prescribed drugs off-label, 'it's not done in a systematic way,' Biswas says. With this project, he hopes researchers will be able to find new uses for existing drugs at scale, including for rare diseases, with the help of tools like deidentified medical records..
Another Biswas-funded project, led by Stanford University's Anshul Kundaje, aims to develop an AI chatbot with access to genomic knowledge to improve diagnosis of cardiovascular disease. And a third effort, led by Katherine Pollard, director of data science and biotechnology at the Gladstone Institutes, is developing personalized diagnosis and treatment for colorectal and skin cancers using machine learning models, which can fit the right treatment to the specific genetic mutation of a patient's tumor.
In addition to longstanding researchers like these, Biswas's foundation last December began funding a group of MIT post-doctoral researchers in areas that include AI and health and low-cost diagnostics. These early-career scientists are more likely to stay in the field if they can get funding at that stage, Biswas says—something that's especially critical right now given the drastic cutbacks to NIH and NSF funding under Trump.
The Administration's cutbacks have been so large that private efforts—even enormous ones like Bill Gates' recently announced plans to wind down his foundation and give away $200 billion in 20 years—can't possibly fill the gap. While acknowledging the scale of that hole, Biswas (who says that 'in another life I would go do a doctoral dissertation in this area for sure') notes that he plans to increase his philanthropic commitment over time to fund research at the intersection of AI and medicine to better diagnose and treat disease. 'We are leaning in more heavily,' he says. 'The number will go up over time.'
On Monday, the FDA approved a new monoclonal antibody from Merck to protect against RSV. The new drug, clesrovimab, will be sold under the brand name Enflonsia. The drug protects infants from RSV shortly before their first season of the disease, which is typically in the fall or winter. In clinical trials, the drug reduced RSV-related hospitalizations by 84%. Sanofi and AstraZeneca already market a similar drug, called Beyfortus, but Enflonsia is simpler because all babies get the same dose in an injection, while the proper dose for Beyfortus depends on the weight of the baby.
'It doesn't matter if the baby's small or if the baby's large–a single shot is sufficient,' Merck's chief medical officer Eliav Barr told Forbes. The next step for Enflonsia is to be evaluated by ACIP later this month, assuming the advisory group still meets as scheduled after its shakeup. Barr said that Merck plans to be ready to bring the drug to market in time for RSV season.
Virtual care company Omada Health went public on Friday, following digital health company Hinge Health by a few weeks. The company raised some $150 million from the IPO. That new capital will help Omada (which now has a market cap of $1 billion) expand its business, CEO Sean Duffy said. It currently has more than 700,000 people under active care management for chronic diseases such as diabetes, 31% of whom actually use the company's platform to care for multiple chronic conditions.
Omada's shares shot up Friday, closing at $23, a 21% gain over the initial price of $19. But by Tuesday, investors had pushed the stock back down, to $18.
The American Academy of Medical Colleges detailed the impact of the Trump Administration's proposed budget cuts on hospital systems in a report released Wednesday. Changes to student loan programs will likely reduce the number of medical students, which will exacerbate the existing doctor shortage at hospitals, according to the report.
Proposed changes to how outpatient care is reimbursed could cost hospitals $167 billion over the next 10 years, while proposed cuts to Medicare reimbursement rates will strain already fragile hospital finances. And, of course, NIH budget cuts will eliminate needed research and cancel clinical trials for new medicines. 'Proposed federal actions on multiple fronts not only jeopardize scientific discovery and individual Medicaid patients who might lose health insurance,' the report said. 'They jeopardize the entire academic medicine ecosystem.'
Federal lawmakers grilled 23andMe's leaders on the protection of customers' genetic information during the company's bankruptcy sale.
Senators from both parties pushed back against the Trump Administration's proposed $18 billion cut to the NIH. 'For God's sake, we lead the world in medical research. Why would we give up on it?' Senator Dick Durbin, Dem.-Ill., said after noting that Northwestern University had not received any NIH funding for 11 weeks.
China has adopted a number of policies to incentivize scientists to do their research there.
Hundreds of NIH staff signed a letter criticizing proposed cuts to the agency, writing that '[w]e are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources.'
AI biotech company Recursion laid off 20% of its staff following its pipeline cutback. The company said in an SEC filing that the staff cuts would cost around $11 million in severance and related expenses.