RFK Jr. announces eight new members of vaccine panel after firing all 17 members
Two days after he fired all 17 members of a committee that advises the federal government on vaccine safety, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced eight new members, including a physician criticized for spreading COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Vaccine experts warned Kennedy's abrupt termination of the entire committee on June 9 would create public distrust around the government's role in promoting public health. The new list of members includes scientists, public-health experts and physicians.
"All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense," wrote Kennedy in a post on X on June 11. "They have each committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations."
The Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices makes recommendations on the safety, efficacy and clinical need of vaccines to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It comprises medical and public health experts who develop recommendations on the use of vaccines in the civilian population of the United States.
"The committee will review safety and efficacy data for the current schedule as well," noted Kennedy, who has a history of controversial views on vaccines.
Dr. Paul A. Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Food and Drug Administration Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, previously told USA TODAY that Kennedy was "fixing a problem that doesn't exist," by overhauling the committee.
Picking members for the committee generally involves a three- to four-month vetting process by the CDC. Offit said he would "presumably pick people who are like-minded, and I think that will shake confidence in this committee."
Kennedy's list of picks includes some widely-respected experts, such as Dr. Cody Meissner, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Tufts Children's Hospital.
However, it also includes some prominent figures who have criticized vaccines.
One of them, Dr. Robert Malone, is a virologist and vaccine skeptic who became well-known during the COVID-19 pandemic for spreading misinformation about the virus on conservative shows and podcasts. His appearance on 'The Joe Rogan Experience' prompted public uproar against Spotify after Malone promoted false and misleading conspiracy theories about the vaccine, even invoking Nazi Germany. The physician-scientist and biochemist has falsely claimed spike proteins from COVID-19 mRNA vaccines often cause permanent damage to children's vital organs.
Kennedy's picks for ACIP also includes Vicky Pebsworth, who has been listed on the board of the National Vaccine Information, a group widely criticized for spreading vaccine misinformation.
Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, was also picked to serve on the federal advisory committee. In 2023, he posted a video on X criticizing COVID-19 vaccines. The post is pinned to his profile.
'The evidence is mounting and indisputable that MRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death, especially among young people,' he said. 'We have to stop giving them immediately!'
Dr. Martin Kulldorff, another one of Kennedy's ACIP picks, wrote a paper published in the Journal of the Academy of Public Health in March that called for a 'COVID Commission' that would investigate the National Institutes of Health's handling of the pandemic.
Other appointees include:
Dr. Joseph R. Hibbeln, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist with a career in clinical research, public health policy, and federal service;
Dr. James Pagano, an emergency medicine physician;
Michael A. Ross, a clinical professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: RFK Jr. bring on eight members on vaccine panel
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'Adolescents actually have the capacity to make a reasoned logical decision,' she once told an industry seminar, adding: 'If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.' Perhaps the greatest piece of misinformation believed by liberals, however, is that the American standards of care in this area are strongly evidence-based. In fact, at this point, the fairest thing to say about the evidence surrounding medical transition for adolescents—the so-called Dutch protocol, as opposed to talk therapy and other support—is that it is weak and inconclusive. (A further complication is that American child gender medicine has deviated significantly from this original protocol, in terms of length of assessments and the number and demographics of minors being treated.) Yes, as activists are keen to point out, most major American medical associations support the Dutch protocol. But consensus is not the same as evidence. And that consensus is politically influenced. Rachel Levine, President Joe Biden's assistant secretary for health and human services, successfully lobbied to have age minimums removed for most surgeries from the standards of care drawn up by WPATH. That was a deeply political decision—Levine, according to emails from her office reviewed by the Times, believed that listing any specific limits under age 18 would give opponents of youth transition hard targets to exploit. More recently, another court case over banning blockers and hormones, this time in Alabama, has revealed that WPATH members themselves had doubts about their own guidelines. In 2022, Alabama passed a law criminalizing the prescription of hormones and blockers to patients under 19. After the Biden administration sued to block the law, the state's Republican attorney general subpoenaed documents showing that WPATH has known for some time that the evidence base for adolescent transition is thin. 'All of us are painfully aware that there are many gaps in research to back up our recommendations,' Eli Coleman, the psychologist who chaired the team revising the standards of care, wrote to his colleagues in 2023. Yet the organization did not make this clear in public. Laura Edwards-Leeper—who helped bring the Dutch protocol to the U.S. but has since criticized in a Washington Post op-ed the unquestioningly gender-affirmative model—has said that the specter of red-state bans made her and her op-ed co-author reluctant to break ranks. The Alabama litigation also confirmed that WPATH had commissioned systematic reviews of the evidence for the Dutch protocol. However, close to publication, the Johns Hopkins University researcher involved was told that her findings needed to be 'scrutinized and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender health care.' This is not how evidence-based medicine is supposed to work. You don't start with a treatment and then ensure that only studies that support that treatment are published. In a legal filing in the Alabama case, Coleman insisted 'it is not true' that the WPATH guidelines 'turned on any ideological or political considerations' and that the group's dispute with the Johns Hopkins researcher concerned only the timing of publication. Yet the Times has reported that at least one manuscript she sought to publish 'never saw the light of day.' The Alabama disclosures are not the only example of this reluctance to acknowledge contrary evidence. Last year, Olson-Kennedy said that she had not published her own broad study on mental-health outcomes for youth with gender dysphoria, because she worried about its results being 'weaponized.' That raised suspicions that she had found only sketchy evidence to support the treatments that she has been prescribing—and publicly advocating for—over many years. Last month, her study finally appeared as a preprint, a form of scientific publication where the evidence has not yet been peer-reviewed or finalized. Its participants 'demonstrated no significant changes in reported anxious/depressed, withdrawn/depressed, somatic complaints, social problems, thought problems, attention problems, aggressive behavior, internalizing problems or externalizing problems' in the two years after starting puberty blockers. (I have requested comment from Olson-Kennedy via Children's Hospital Los Angeles but have not yet heard back.) The reliance on elite consensus over evidence helps make sense of WPATH's flatly hostile response to the Cass report in England, which commissioned systematic reviews and recommended extreme caution over the use of blockers and hormones. The review was a direct challenge to WPATH's ability to position itself as the final arbiter of these treatments—something that became more obvious when the conservative justices referenced the British document in their questions and opinions in Skrmetti. One of WPATH's main charges against Hilary Cass, the senior pediatrician who led the review, was that she was not a gender specialist—in other words, that she was not part of the charmed circle who already agreed that these treatments were beneficial. Because of WPATH's hostility, many on the American left now believe that the Cass review has been discredited. 'Upon first reading, especially to a person with limited knowledge of the history of transgender health care, much of the report might seem reasonable,' Lydia Polgreen wrote in the Times last August. However, after 'poring over the document' and 'interviewing experts in gender-affirming care,' Polgreen realized that the Cass review was 'fundamentally a subjective, political document.' Advocates of youth gender medicine have reacted furiously to articles in the Times and elsewhere that take Cass's conclusions seriously. Indeed, some people inside the information bubble appear to believe that if respectable publications would stop writing about this story, all the doubts and questions—and Republican attempts to capitalize on them electorally—would simply disappear. Whenever the Times has published a less-than-cheerleading article about youth transition, supporters of gender medicine have accused the newspaper of manufacturing a debate that otherwise would not exist. After the Skrmetti decision, Strangio was still describing media coverage of the issue as 'insidious,' adding: ' The New York Times, especially, has been fixated on casting the medical care as being of an insufficient quality.' Can this misinformation bubble ever be burst? On the left, support for youth transition has been rolled together with other issues—such as police reform and climate activism—as a kind of super-saver combo deal of correct opinions. The 33-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani has made funding gender transition, including for minors, part of his pitch to be New York's mayor. But complicated issues deserve to be treated individually: You can criticize Israel, object to the militarization of America's police forces, and believe that climate change is real, and yet still not support irreversible, experimental, and unproven medical treatments for children. The polarization of this issue in America has been deeply unhelpful for getting liberals to accept the sketchiness of the evidence base. When Vice President J. D. Vance wanted to troll the left, he joined Bluesky—where skeptics of youth gender medicine are among the most blocked users—and immediately started talking about the Skrmetti judgment. Actions like that turn accepting the evidence base into a humiliating climbdown. Acknowledging the evidence does not mean that you also have to support banning these treatments—or reject the idea that some people will be happier if they transition. Cass believes that some youngsters may indeed benefit from the medical pathway. 'Whilst some young people may feel an urgency to transition, young adults looking back at their younger selves would often advise slowing down,' her report concludes. 'For some, the best outcome will be transition, whereas others may resolve their distress in other ways.' I have always argued against straightforward bans on medical transition for adolescents. In practice, the way these have been enacted in red states has been uncaring and punitive. Parents are threatened with child-abuse investigations for pursuing treatments that medical professionals have assured them are safe. Children with severe mental-health troubles suddenly lose therapeutic support. Clinics nationwide, including Olson-Kennedy's, are now abruptly closing because of the political atmosphere. Writing about the subject in 2023, I argued that the only way out of the culture war was for the American medical associations to commission reviews and carefully consider the evidence. From the July/August 2018 issue: When children say they're trans However, the revelations from Skrmetti and the Alabama case have made me more sympathetic to commentators such as Leor Sapir, of the conservative Manhattan Institute, who supports the bans because American medicine cannot be trusted to police itself. 'Are these bans the perfect solution? Probably not,' he told me in 2023. 'But at the end of the day, if it's between banning gender-affirming care and leaving it unregulated, I think we can minimize the amount of harm by banning it.' Once you know that WPATH wanted to publish a review only if it came to the group's preferred conclusion, Sapir's case becomes more compelling. Despite the concerted efforts to suppress the evidence, however, the picture on youth gender medicine has become clearer over the past decade. It's no humiliation to update our beliefs as a result: I regularly used to write that medical transition was 'lifesaving,' before I saw how limited the evidence on suicide was. And it took another court case, brought by the British detransitioner Keira Bell, for me to realize fully that puberty blockers were not what they were sold as—a 'safe and reversible' treatment that gave patients 'time to think' —but instead a one-way ticket to full transition, with physical changes that cannot be undone. Some advocates for the Dutch protocol, as it's applied in the United States, have staked their entire career and reputation on its safety and effectiveness. They have strong incentives not to concede the weakness of the evidence. In 2023, the advocacy group GLAAD drove a truck around the offices of The New York Times to declare that the ' science is settled.' Doctors such as Olson-Kennedy and activists such as Strangio are unlikely to revise their opinions. For everyone else, however, the choice is still open. We can support civil-rights protections for transgender people without having to endorse an experimental and unproven set of medical treatments—or having to repeat emotionally manipulative and now discredited claims about suicide. I am not a fan of the American way of settling political disputes, by kicking them over to an escalating series of judges. But in the case of youth gender medicine, the legal system has provided clarity and disclosure that might otherwise not exist. Thanks to the Supreme Court's oral questioning in Skrmetti and the discovery process in Alabama, we now have a clearer picture of how youth gender medicine has really been operating in the United States, and an uncomfortable insight into how advocacy groups and medical associations have tamped down their own concerns about its evidence base. Those of us who have been urging caution now know that many of our ostensible opponents had the same concerns. They just smothered them, for political reasons.
