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Gulf Today
04-07-2025
- Health
- Gulf Today
Vaccine panel is turning misinformation into policy
Lisa Jarvis, Tribune news Service Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy's dismantling of Americans' trust in — and ultimately, access to — vaccines isn't happening with one sweeping policy that grabs the public's attention. It's unfolding quickly and quietly, in bland conference rooms where hand-picked appointees make decisions that will have far-reaching consequences for our health. Inside one of those nondescript rooms last week, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), an independent panel that makes vaccine recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, offered a glimpse of what's to come. The group, few of whom have any expertise in vaccines, infectious diseases or epidemiology, at times cast aside evidence-based science and sowed doubt in some of our most valuable public health tools. This panel of seven replaced the 17 ACIP members Kennedy fired last month in order to stack the committee with members who share his anti-vaccine agenda. Their lack of expertise and, for some, even basic knowledge of epidemiology, were evident throughout the two-day meeting. Some were unfamiliar with the Vaccines for Children Program, which provides free shots to those eligible. (The program has provided some 71.5 billion doses to kids since 1994.) At least one member appeared to struggle to understand the distinction between a vaccine's efficacy and its effectiveness. It's a wonky, but important distinction referring to how well a vaccine works in a trial versus the real world. Some seemed not to take seriously the risk that infections like RSV and the flu can pose to even healthy children. One member suggested that the 250 children who died from the flu last season — a recent high — was a 'modest' number. But this group isn't just unqualified — it's dangerous. Its decisions directly influence insurance coverage and access to vaccines, affecting health outcomes for all Americans. The stakes are particularly high when it comes to protecting children against preventable diseases. Yet the tone of the panel's first formal meeting suggested many members are more intent on sowing doubt about routine immunisations. Even worse, their actions could impede access to these important medicines. 'That whole meeting was a travesty,' says Fiona Havers, a physician and epidemiologist. After the ACIP firings, Havers resigned from the CDC, where she was considered one of its leading experts on vaccine policy. Kennedy's oft-repeated claim is that the COVID-19 response caused vaccine hesitancy in the US and that his drastic changes at the CDC are a necessary step in rebuilding the public's trust. Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard epidemiologist and chair of the panel, echoed that sentiment during the meeting's opening, emphasizing the importance of 'rebuilding trust in sound science,' and again at the end, when he commended participants for discussing vaccines in an 'unbiased, open and transparent way.' It's a convenient — and inaccurate — framing. It elides the role Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again movement played in spreading vaccine misinformation during the pandemic. It provides cover for their 'just asking questions' approach to evaluating vaccine policy. The problem, of course, is when people given the CDC's imprimatur are asking questions that are purposely crafted to sow doubt. That became clear from the outset when Kuldorff announced that the committee would evaluate the cumulative effects of the childhood vaccine schedule, as well as any immunizations that had not been considered in the last seven years, including the hepatitis B shot given to newborns. The implication is that the CDC has been ignoring some unknown dangers of shots that have been safely used for years. Kuldorff, who was fired from Harvard, was a vocal critic of COVID vaccine mandates during the pandemic and refused the shot. 'The claims that were framed as efforts to increase vaccine confidence actually do the opposite — they undermine vaccine confidence,' says Sean O'Leary, the American Academy of Pediatrics' liaison to ACIP. He called the meeting 'a really long couple of days for science.' A discussion of flu vaccines was a disturbing preview of what 'rebuilding trust' might look like under Kennedy's CDC — and how that mantra could be used to disrupt access to vaccines. After a thankfully routine vote to recommend that Americans get their fall flu shots, the panel stated that those vaccines should not contain thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative that decades ago came under scrutiny for a now-disproven link to autism. It was a disturbing development that upended the panel's normally measured process for evaluating vaccines. The discussion was added to ACIP's agenda at the last minute, but more alarming was that thimerosal was being discussed at all. The preservative's safety has been thoroughly studied, but was removed from all childhood vaccines in 2001 to try to address parents' hesitancy. Today, it is used sparingly— the single-dose flu vaccines that the majority of Americans receive don't contain it, but it's still used as a preservative in multi-dose vials, which just 4-5% of patients in the US receive. Most troubling was that the 'evidence' against thimerosal was presented by Lyn Redwood, a nurse and former head of the Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy. She used her time to make a series of false claims about the preservative's risks. Her original presentation cited a fake study on the risks of thimerosal — a reference removed after the media raised concerns. Pediatrician Cody Meissner, one of two rational members, questioned the purpose of her presentation and its contents. (Meissner was often the lone voice of reason and expertise on the panel during the two-day meeting.) Ultimately, when it came time to vote on recommending the preservative be removed from flu shots, Meissner was also the only member to vote against it. The vote has real consequences. It means some Americans will lose out on their shots. The vaccine is more commonly used outside the U.S., and there's concern about how ACIP's decisions could ripple into global health. And vaccine hesitancy experts worry that re-litigating a settled topic could undermine broader confidence in immunisations. And perhaps most alarming is the precedent set by the committee bypassing the CDC's normal review process to push through what seemed like a preordained decision. Typically, a CDC working group comprised of internal staff and subject matter experts would spend months developing recommendations that are presented to ACIP in a public forum. They would examine hard data on a vaccine within the broader context of its real-world use, considering, for example, the magnitude of the public health problem it addresses, challenges to implementing a rollout, and its impact on health equity, Havers explains. Before considering removing a shot like the thimerosal-containing flu vaccine, the working group would first study the public health consequences of the decision. 'None of that happened, which is why this was a complete farce,' Havers says. That's the antithesis of transparency. And it's a sign for what we can expect from this group. After watching the panel railroad a vote on settled science, it's fair to worry about their future plans. The next effort to 'rebuild trust' could have far-reaching health consequences — and, without a doubt, will cost lives.
Irish Post
27-06-2025
- Politics
- Irish Post
When the blame game turns deadly
RACISTS who burned migrants out of their homes this month in Ballymena, County Antrim, have found it strangely difficult to explain what they were up to. There had been a clear trigger moment in the charging of two Roma boys with an alleged sexual assault on a local girl. Many had gathered one evening for a vigil in support of the girl. And that might have been a good thing to do and one would be slow to attribute racism to any who joined that gathering. But would they have gathered in the same numbers if the alleged assailants had been Ballymena-born white boys? The fact of the accused being migrants in the town played such a strong part in local outrage that, after the expressions of sympathies for the girl, mobs turned on migrant families in the area, stormed their homes, set some of them alight, rampaged through others while mothers and children crouched for safety in dark and dusty attic spaces. Whole families might have been incinerated. But not this time. A loyalist mural in Bellymena (Pic: Lisa Jarvis) As with many things in Northern Ireland we got a spectrum of response to this violence, from the callously racist to the liberal, inclusive and secular. And, as often, this spectrum mapped onto the sectarian spectrum too that describes our historically divided society. The hard racism was coming from working class Protestants, justifying the violence in defence of a community that had been invaded. This attitude associated migrants with rape, much as Donald Trump does. Trump's toxic verbiage makes it easier for people to spew the same unreasoning bilge. The problem is that 'they' get everything. 'They' are illegal. 'They' have no right to be here. Except that when officials eventually came out to explain, there were no asylum seekers/illegal migrants in Ballymena. People coming under attack were in jobs, some of them in the health service. Next along the spectrum comes the unionist politician who, naturally, condemns violence but seeks to explain it. For this is a unionist area. This one says that the trouble had been boiling up for months. He or she had seen it coming, had warned that tensions were rising and had been ignored. SDLP leader Claire Hanna in 2017 (Photo: Sam Boal/ But why? And why can this reasonable sounding professional politician not be clearer about what drives community discontent? The health minister Mike Nesbitt warned that if health service workers of foreign origin were driven out of Northern Ireland the service would collapse. That's how serious this is. Then further along the spectrum we got the nationalist response, led most vocally by Claire Hanna MP (SDLP). She was calling out the racism of thugs, conceding nothing to the idea that migrants have special privileges or that anything is lost to a community when brown faces start to appear on the streets. There is however a problem of resources but you deal with that by campaigning for the government to provide, not by throwing a petrol bomb through the window of a young mother who pays the same price for bread and milk as you do yourself. Claire took care to say that there is racism in her community too. Catholics and Nationalists can be racist. Indeed some in the Sinn Féin base, the most ardently nationalistic of all, have scoffed at their own leadership for being too sympathetic to migrants. The old slogan, Give Ireland Back to the Irish, is, for some, no longer simply a call for British withdrawal but for migrants to be deported. But this month the racism was coming from Protestant working class communities and that, for some Catholic Nationalists, helps to affirm the perception that they - the prods - are the bigots, that Protestant/ Loyalist bigotry is the chief problem here. The problem was simple racism but for some it was viewed through a sectarian lens which shows that Protestants are more racist than Catholics. And there is comfort in that. That still leaves us without a clear explanation of why some people want to drive migrant neighbours from their homes. A man interviewed on the street in Portadown, after the violence had spread there, said that the town is no longer like it was forty years ago. Maybe he lives such an insular life that he hasn't noticed that nowhere is like it was forty years ago. Yes, there was a time when you didn't have to lock your front door, when you went to a neighbour to use a phone and left a few coppers on the hall table, when milk was a shilling a pint and everybody knew everybody else and everybody was white and spoke English. But that time isn't coming back for anybody. Perhaps such nostalgia does come with a genuinely felt sense of loss, a loss to be pitied and empathised with. But it's not a loss that can be eased by burning the street. Nor is it a loss likely to have been felt by the teenagers who rampaged against 'dirty foreign scum' - a remark picked up from the crowd by a BBC microphone. Nor is it a loss politicians can capitalise on, so they shouldn't try. See More: Ballymena, Northern Ireland, Racism, Riots
Gulf Today
05-06-2025
- Health
- Gulf Today
MAHA report's errors are just start of its problems
Lisa Jarvis and Michael Hiltzik, Tribune News Service Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s new Make America Healthy Again report offers a road to wellness for the nation's children paved not with the gold-standard science he promised, but with pyrite. The report, created by a MAHA commission that includes all of President Donald Trump's cabinet members, mixes nuggets of truth — like the idea that it's important to focus on kids' health — with gross misrepresentations of scientific research. Some of the studies are even made up. The nonprofit news organisation Notus first reported that some of the commission's findings relied on research that doesn't exist. The document, released last week, includes seven fabricated studies related to kids' mental health and the overprescribing of medications for ADHD, depression and asthma. The New York Times later identified several other fake citations. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt attributed the inclusion of phony publications to 'formatting issues' that would be corrected. An updated report that omits those studies and cleans up bizarre errors in several others has since been uploaded to the White House website. That version contained fresh errors, Notus reported. Many suspect that the fake citations are the product of AI. That alone should be disqualifying. Rather than the thoughtful, evidence-based assessment our kids deserve, the first major report on Kennedy's cornerstone initiative was a slapped-together treatise. But there's a bigger problem. If the MAHA team did rely on AI to generate supporting data — and it seems likely it did — it wasn't just cutting corners. It confirms this project was never a good faith effort to begin with. The team was assembling evidence to reinforce conclusions that supported Kennedy's well-known narrative. That pattern is bolstered by the report's interpretation of the real studies it cites. Data is conveniently twisted to fit Kennedy's personal beliefs. A recurring tendency is to exaggerate the size of the current problem by minimising the significance of those in the past. For example, the report points to a fivefold rise in the rates of celiac disease since the 1980s but fails to acknowledge a dramatic increase in diagnosis and awareness of the autoimmune disorder. The same is true for the report's discussions of inflammatory bowel disease, childhood cancer and autism. None of this should be surprising. In nearly every interview he gives, Kennedy repeats the same inflated statistics to drive home the terrible state of our kids' health. His goal seems to be to scare the public into acquiescence. If the problem is this bad, if our kids are this sick, if health agencies have failed them this profoundly, why not blindly follow his ideas for fixing it? Something more insidious is at play with all of the half-baked or made-up statistics. He is using them to undermine the real experts, making it increasingly hard for Americans to understand whose advice to trust. And ultimately, his willfully misleading analysis provides cover while he dismantles longstanding norms for scientific research and health policy. In just a few short months, the secretary has wielded his authority in unprecedented and dangerous ways. For example, amid the largest measles outbreak in 30 years, instead of emphasising vaccines — which can prevent the disease — he asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop guidelines for treatments. There are no proven treatments for measles. At least three people have died, and nearly 1,100 cases of the disease have been reported. In another disturbing move, Kennedy said he would unilaterally change the CDC's COVID vaccine guidelines to preclude pregnant women and children from receiving shots. That upended the longstanding process that relies on outside experts' careful analysis and open debate before making such decisions. Days later, the CDC amended its regulations to incorporate some, but not all of Kennedy's proposed changes, leaving many confused not only about the actual policy but who sets it. We should worry that his approach to measles and COVID is a preview of how he will treat the value of other routine shots. One of the most alarming sections of the report questions the evidence behind and safety of the childhood vaccine schedule and — without evidence — suggests it could be linked to chronic disease. Kennedy has also used his platform to push policy changes on the use of fluoride in drinking water, which he has repeatedly linked to lower IQs (a tenuous claim that experts say is based on fluoride levels not used in the US). Fluoridation is regulated by state and local municipalities, but Kennedy said he would direct the CDC to stop recommending the practice and the Food and Drug Administration — also under his purview — later banned fluoride supplements based on unsubstantiated claims that they harm gut health. His rhetoric on the topic appears to have emboldened the first two state bans on fluoride in public water. The MAHA report's agenda suggests more changes are to come. Meanwhile, new research in JAMA found that removing fluoride from drinking water would result in 25 million more cavities in children at a cost of $9.8 billion to the US healthcare system over five years. Kennedy's next move appears to be wresting control of health and science research altogether. 'We're probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they're all corrupt,' he said on a recent podcast with wellness influencer Gary Brecka. Unless those top-tier journals 'change dramatically,' health agencies will 'create our own journals in-house,' he added. In other words, he'll have a ready-made platform to showcase data that justifies whatever policy he wants to roll out next. In another troubling sign of how data could be warped to fit a political agenda, President Donald Trump signed an executive order after the report was released directing a restoration of 'gold standard science.' The goal sounds reasonable enough: to ensure research is reproducible and reverse a decline in public trust in science and health agencies. But the language of the directive is concerning. It not only challenges the credibility of several agencies — including the CDC — but suggests someone like Kennedy could exploit the language of research integrity to crack down on findings that don't fit his personal agenda. Kennedy has called the MAHA report 'the diagnosis' and says he will 'deliver the prescription' in the next 60 days. Given what we've seen over the last few months, we should worry what form that takes — and the far reaching consequences it could have on both American kids and the health infrastructure designed to protect them. Earlier, serious followers of healthcare policy in the US didn't expect much good to emerge from its takeover by President Donald Trump and his secretary of Health and Human Services, the anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But the agency and its leadership managed to live down to the worst expectations May 27, when HHS released a 73-page 'assessment' of the health of America's children titled 'The MAHA Report' (for 'Make America Healthy Again'). A sloppier, more disingenuous government report would be hard to imagine. Whatever credibility the report might have had as a product of a federal agency was shattered by its obvious errors, misrepresentations and outright fabrications of source materials, some of it plainly the product of the authors' reliance on AI bots. At least seven sources cited in the report do not exist, as Emily Kennard and Margaret Manto of the journalism organisation NOTUS uncovered. HHS hastily reissued the report with some of those citations removed, but without disclosing the changes — an extremely unkosher action in the research community.
