Under RFK Jr., Vaccine Approval Is Getting More Politicized, Not Less
The Health and Human Services secretary appointed several anti-vaxxer-adjacent members to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
"Vaccines have become a divisive issue in American politics," asserted Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his June 9 Wall Street Journal op-ed. "Public confidence is waning." This is true. But the HHS secretary bears responsibility for much of that division and waning confidence. And he's just made it worse.
How? Kennedy has politicized the U.S. vaccine approval process by summarily firing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) earlier this week. Typically appointed to four-year terms, Kennedy has taken the unprecedented step of prematurely sacking the entire panel. Two days later, he announced his selection of eight new members, many of whom are chiefly famous for espousing contrarian views with respect to vaccine safety and efficacy.
So what did Kennedy find wrong with the original ACIP panel? The secretary asserted that it "has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interests" stemming from members' "immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy." At least in his Journal op-ed, the secretary offers no evidence of any unreported or improper conflicts of interest among those he just fired. It is worth noting that the fired ACIP members were vetted before they were appointed and that they each declare any conflicts that later emerge before each of the committee's meetings.
What about RFK Jr.'s vague claims hinting at nefarious "immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms" on the part of committee members? If your automobile keeps stalling out, you take your jalopy to a trained mechanic for diagnosis and repair. If your computer system has been hacked, you seek help from qualified computer engineers. You earnestly hope that your mechanics and computer engineers are fully immersed in their respective systems of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms—that is, you hope they are experts who know what they are doing.
Looking over the pre-firing ACIP membership list, they chiefly appear to be immersed in the fields of immunology, vaccinology, and epidemiology. In other words, they, on the face of it, have the training you would expect them to have in order to expertly diagnose the relative safety and efficacy of vaccines. For the most part, the new appointees are notably lacking in such professional expertise.
The HHS secretary gives his game away when he characterizes his wholesale firing as being "above any pro- or antivaccine agenda." With respect to his new ACIP appointees, Kennedy promised that "none of these individuals will be ideological anti-vaxxers." That's great. After all, an anti-vaccine agenda makes as much sense as anti–automobile repair or anti–computer debugging agendas. The agendas we want are pro–making cars run, pro–computers correctly ciphering, and pro–vaccines that protect against diseases.
However, in looking over the backgrounds of the new ACIP members, several of them can be fairly characterized as being at least anti-vaxxer-adjacent.
First, there is physician researcher Robert Malone, who has made exaggerated claims about being the inventor of the mRNA technologies that led to the development of the successful mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Eventually, Malone became a COVID-19 vaccine skeptic, asserting that "they are not working." In 2023, he credulously cited a bogus analysis that claimed COVID-19 vaccines were responsible for 17 million excess deaths worldwide. Later epidemiological research suggests that the vaccines averted around 4 million deaths globally. A 2024 Brookings Institution report suggests "the delivery of vaccines to a substantial majority of the American population by mid-2021 saved close to 800,000 American lives relative to what would have occurred had vaccines not been developed."
Then there is public health nurse Vicky Pebsworth. She is a board member of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). NVIC continues to peddle the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism, as does our HHS secretary.
Next up is Massachusetts Institute of Technology management professor Retsef Levi. In 2023, Levi called for the immediate suspension of all COVID-19 vaccination programs. His chief concern was the reported detection of heart inflammation (myocarditis) cases in young males who had been vaccinated. Subsequent research has shown that post-vaccination myocarditis is considerably less harmful than post–COVID infection myocarditis and conventional myocarditis.
In his announcement of the new ACIP members, Kennedy declared, "All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense." Maybe so, but the backgrounds of several of these appointees provide good reasons for skepticism.
