CDC vaccine committee meets despite bipartisan criticism
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the Dirksen Senate office building in Washington, D.C. in May. Photo by Annabelle Gordon/UPI | License Photo
June 25 (UPI) -- A key vaccine-focused committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention met Wednesday despite bipartisan protestations and controversy that surrounds the group's membership.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, began at 10 a.m. EDT to discuss vaccination policy in regard to COVID-19 and RSV before its adjournment at 5:30 p.m. The panel will reconvene Thursday to discuss vaccines and vaccination recommendations for flu, chikungunya, anthrax, MMRV and the use of thimerosal in inoculations.
The panel had consisted of eight members, who replaced the 17 people who were terminated by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this month, but Dr. Michael Ross stepped down Tuesday night as two United States senators recently suggested the ACIP meeting be postponed.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a physician and chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said Monday that the new members of the panel selected by Kennedy "lack experience studying new technologies such as mRNA vaccines, and may even have a preconceived bias against them," and declared that Wednesday's meeting should not happen.
"The meeting should be delayed until the panel is fully staffed with more robust and balanced representation-as required by law-including those with more direct relevant expertise, Cassidy wrote. "Otherwise, ACIP's recommendations could be viewed with skepticism, which will work against the success of this administration's efforts."
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., put out an X post late Tuesday that also took umbrage with the new ACIP panel.
"RFK Jr. fired all of the experts at CDC's vaccine advisory committee," Murray said. "He installed [eight] unvetted people, including anti-vaxxers who should have zero role in deciding which vaccines insurance should cover."
"The committee's next meeting must be postponed," she added.
The American Academy of Pediatrics also spoke against the ACIP meeting in an announcement on its social media platform Wednesday.
"Today's ACIP meeting is usually a time where experts come together to inform the future of vaccines," the post stated. "That is not what today will be. That is not what we can stand behind."
The AAP concluded its post by sharing that it "will continue to recommend its own childhood vaccine schedule."
Wednesday's ACIP meeting, which can be viewed online, opened with a preamble from the ACIP chair Dr. Martin Kulldorff, in which he stated that "Secretary Kennedy has given this committee a clear mandate to use evidence-based medicine when making vaccine recommendations. And that is what we will do."
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Indonesia, which accepted donations from Gavi as recently as 2017, pledged $30 million to the organization this funding cycle. Gavi, by its own estimate, has saved about 19 million lives and vaccinated 1 billion children. At the conference this week, the director of the World Health Organization noted that since 2000, the number of children who die each year before they reach the age of 5 has fallen by more than half, largely due to the power of vaccines. By Gavi's estimates, the U.S. canceling its Biden-era pledge to provide $1.2 billion this donation cycle could lead to the deaths of more than 1 million children who otherwise would have lived. (The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.) In his recorded remarks, Kennedy said America would not send the money until Gavi can 're-earn the public trust' by 'taking vaccine safety seriously.' Cutting off millions of children's only access to routine vaccines is 'the most emphatic globalization of the anti-vaxxer agenda,' Lawrence Gostin, the faculty director of Georgetown's O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, told me. Tom Frieden, the former director of the CDC, told me that after he heard Kennedy's remarks, 'I was literally sick to my stomach,' because 'unscientific, irresponsible statements like this will result in the deaths of children.' (The U.S. has run an international anti-vaccine campaign before: According to an investigation by Reuters, in 2020, the Pentagon unleashed bot accounts on multiple social-media platforms that impersonated Filipinos and discouraged uptake of China's Sinovac vaccine—the first COVID vaccine available in the Philippines—using a hashtag that read, in Tagalog, 'China is the virus.' The goal was not to combat vaccines, but to undermine China's influence.) Kennedy's prerecorded address held back his harshest critiques of Gavi. In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy paints 'Bill Gates's surrogate group Gavi' (the Gates Foundation co-founded Gavi) as nothing more than a profiteering 'cabal' and a facilitator of 'African Genocide.' To hear Kennedy tell it, 'virtually all of Gates's blockbuster African and Asian vaccines—polio, DTP, hepatitis B, malaria, meningitis, HPV, and Hib—cause far more injuries and deaths than they avert.' Decades' worth of safety and efficacy studies have proved him wrong. In his remarks to Gavi this week, Kennedy focused on the DTP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) shot, describing at length a 'landmark' 2017 study that found the vaccine increased all-cause mortality among girls in Guinea-Bissau. But as Frieden pointed out, this was in fact a relatively small observational study. 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The committee has formed a working group to review the 'cumulative effect' of childhood vaccination in the United States. As Kennedy said in his address to Gavi, 'Business as usual is over.'
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The reality is that this program has the potential to save more lives than all those lost in the wars since WWII — and then some. As Trump's secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has chosen to dedicate the rest of his working life to this quest. Why? To save lives that should not be lost in the battle against the unchecked and steadily advancing chronic disease epidemic raging in our nation. Tragically, millions of Americans are lost each year to such preventable disease. Depending upon the study, experts say that approximately 1 million Americans die each year from heart disease; over 1,300 per day, or approximately 500,000 per year, from obesity; 1.5 million Americans are newly diagnosed with diabetes each year, with over 100,000 passing away each year from the disease. Many of these deaths overlap; many are preventable; and many are caused by the foods, beverages and food additives we consume each day. But now Kennedy and his team at HHS have illuminated a bright light at the end of this dark and seemingly endless tunnel. On June 19, Kennedy posted, 'Big food brands are listening. From cereals to spices to fast food, artificial dyes and additives are being removed from America's food supply …' Along with that announcement, he attached a video reporting that General Mills was removing artificial food dyes from U.S. cereals and K-12 school foods by summer 2026 and removing all artificial dyes completely by the end of 2027; Kraft-Heinz just announced that they are removing all artificial dyes by the end of 2027; In-N-Out Burger announced that they removed artificial dyes from strawberry shakes and pink lemonade, using beet juice and turmeric instead. Steak 'N Shake will now be using beef tallow instead of vegetable oil to cook French fries, onion rings and chicken tenders; and McCormick spice company announced it is working to remove artificial food dyes and sodium. 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