Hiltzik: RFK Jr. attacks vaccine experts

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, loves to pose as an avatar of “evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense.”

So it’s proper to ask why his defense of his recent initiatives related to vaccine policy is packed to the gunwales with cherry-picked data, flagrant misrepresentations of scientific findings and absurd, even slanderous, claims about science and scientists.

I last wrote about RFK Jr.’s reign at the agency on June 2, apropos of his release of a 73-page “assessment” of the health of America’s children titled “The MAHA Report” (for “Make America Healthy Again”). I observed that the report was filled with “obvious errors, misrepresentations and outright fabrications of source materials, some of them plainly the product of the authors’ reliance on AI bots.”

Would that the report marked the nadir of Kennedy’s work as secretary of Health and Human Services. Alas, not so. Since then, he has doubled down on his attacks on public health in America, especially when it comes to vaccine policy.

On June 9 he summarily fired the 17 public members of the authoritative Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or ACIP.

Kennedy also sent members of Congress a fact sheet justifying his May 27 lifting of CDC recommendations that pregnant women and healthy children receive COVID vaccinations. The fact sheet was disclosed last week by KFF Health News, which identified numerous distortions and misrepresentations of scientific research in the document.

The most important of Kennedy’s initiatives was his evisceration of ACIP. The committee’s recommendations on vaccines, once accepted by the CDC, dictate which vaccines private insurers will pay for as well as those the U.S. government will provide free of charge to low-income children.

The abrupt firings, wrote Edwin Asturias of the University of Colorado, one of the fired ACIP members, “have stripped the program of the institutional knowledge and continuity that have been essential to its success over decades.” He said Kennedy’s actions “have left the US vaccine program critically weakened.”

The unpaid members of the committee are typically physicians, epidemiologists and vaccine scientists. As Science documented in March, the members are required to divest all vaccine manufacturer stock before they join, as are their family members; quit any service on vaccine company scientific advisory boards; and quit any consulting for vaccine companies.

Kennedy placed his contempt for science and scientists front-and-center in announcing the changes to ACIP and in his subsequent comments. On June 10, he wrote on X: “Yesterday I retired 17 members” of ACIP,” accusing ACIP members of “malevolent malpractice” in their recommendations on childhood vaccinations.

In an appearance on Fox News two days later, Kennedy singled out one of the nation’s leading vaccine experts, Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, for having voted on ACIP to approve a rotavirus vaccine for children and subsequently selling the patent on a vaccine “he owned and developed” for $186 million.

His accusation prompted Offit to post a rebuttal, in which he noted that he had left ACIP in 2003, and the rotavirus vaccine he developed didn’t come up for a vote until 2006. He also noted that he wasn’t the owner of the vaccine, despite Kennedy’s assertion — he developed it as an employee of the Children’s Hospital, and therefore the hospital owned the patent and the vaccine.

On Fox, Kennedy also asserted that a government investigation had reported that “97% of the people on the committee had conflicts of interest.” The report he referred to, however, said nothing of the kind.

Produced by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, the report examined ethics rules at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It didn’t find that 97% of ACIP members had conflicts of interest, but that 97% of the financial disclosures filed by independent advisers to the CDC on 17 committees — a far larger universe than ACIP alone — lacked certain documents. In effect, it focused on paperwork errors.

Most of the omissions, the report stated, involved advisers who were employed by institutions were “potential CDC grant recipients.” It did not say that those advisers had conflicts, only that they hadn’t disclosed that they worked for entities that might be in line for CDC grants in the future.

In his announcement, Kennedy misrepresented the research that had been done on vaccines commonly recommended for children. On Fox, he claimed that among childhood vaccines, only the COVID vaccines had been tested against placebos and found to be safe and effective.

In fact, according to Stanford infectious disease expert Jake Scott, every vaccine has been tested against some form of placebo; some in use today had been tested against earlier versions of the shot, which themselves had been tested against placebo. As I explained earlier, testing every new formulation against saline solutions, which Kennedy advocates, would be unethical because it would require depriving trial subjects of known treatments for a disease.

By no means can Kennedy’s ACIP appointments be interpreted as an upgrade to the committee’s expertise. Among the 17 members Kennedy “retired” were professors of medicine at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Vanderbilt, Stanford, Cornell and the Universities of North Carolina and Iowa; and 10 experts in epidemiology, infectious diseases, public health, pediatrics and gerontology.

Among their replacements are several with established anti-vaccine records.

The worst aspect of Kennedy’s ACIP roster is its almost total absence of expertise in the field the committee is charged with overseeing. “Generally speaking,” observed immunologist and epidemiologist Michael Mina on X, what’s missing are “experts in diseases vaccines prevent, experts in vaccines, infectious disease epidemiology [and] clinical trials.” Mina concluded, “If this was the private sector, no way would this group pass muster.”

As for putative conflicts of interest, Science found that of ACIP members who were appointed by President Biden in 2024, only eight had received any payments from vaccine makers in 2017-2023. The payments averaged about $4,100 a year, mostly as honoraria for talks and reimbursements for travel. Larger amounts comprised grants to institutions where some members were employed, but not to the members themselves.

Curiously, given Kennedy’s expressed horror at supposed conflicts of interest on ACIP, he seems to have overlooked an apparent conflict of Martin Kulldorff, one of his appointees.

Kulldorff is a former Harvard professor who was a drafter of the notorious Great Barrington Declaration, which asserted that if anti-pandemic policies were directed chiefly at vulnerable populations such as seniors and COVID was allowed to run rampant among children, youths and adults without troublesome medical conditions, the U.S. would achieve “herd immunity” against the virus in a matter of months. Never mind that a similar strategy produced a horrific toll in Sweden, where it was eventually reversed.

Kulldorff has been an expert witness for plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the drug company Merck over supposed adverse side effects of Gardasil, collecting tens of thousands of dollars at a rate of $400 an hour. I asked Kulldorff and Kennedy’s agency whether that record should disqualify Kulldorff from serving on ACIP or if he should at least recuse himself from votes on Merck products, but received no reply.

I also asked Kennedy’s agency to respond to criticisms that his assertions were rife with junk science, but also received no reply.

That brings us to the supine response of Congress to Kennedy’s actions.

And by supine, I’m referring specifically to Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician. All eyes were on Cassidy as Kennedy sought Senate confirmation, because he had raised questions about the candidate’s fitness for the office and he was seen as a bellwether on the nomination.

Cassidy fell into line with a speech on the Senate floor Feb. 4, in which he stated that Kennedy had promised him that he would maintain ACIP “without change.”

Quite obviously, Kennedy played Cassidy for a fool. When I sought Cassidy’s reaction to Kennedy’s breach of his promise, a Cassidy spokesman replied that Kennedy’s commitment “was about the ACIP process, not staffing.”

I asked when and where Cassidy first backed off by referring to “process” — whatever that is — but received no reply. After the ACIP bloodletting, Cassidy posted on X: “Of course, now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion. I’ve just spoken with Secretary Kennedy, and I’ll continue to talk with him to ensure this is not the case.”

Then there’s the fact sheet about his ending the CDC recommendation of COVID vaccination for pregnant women and healthy children that Kennedy distributed to members of Congress.

The document describes one study as having found that cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, heart inflammations, “were found exclusively in those that received the COVID-19 vaccine,” especially young males. The study made no such finding, according to one of its co-authors. Indeed, several studies have found that the risk of those conditions was greater among patients who contracted COVID itself than those who received the shot. In any event, the condition is rare among vaccinated people.

The document also misrepresents the conclusions of papers it cited to question COVID vaccinations for pregnant women. None of the cited papers supports that recommendation. Instead, they support COVID vaccinations for pregnant women.

Kennedy’s action not only could increase vaccine hesitancy among people who would benefit from the vaccines. It could also make the shots less accessible, because insurers may deny coverage for vaccines that are taken off the CDC recommended list.

Kennedy asserted that his actions against vaccines are aimed at enhancing the transparency and credibility of government recommendations on immunization. Every step he has taken, however, has undermined his credibility and that of the agencies charged with protecting public health in America. His campaign will be costly indeed, not only in money, but in lives.