Robert F Kennedy Jr’s team of vaccine advisors will look at the schedules for immunizing children and youths that have long been accepted. The seven members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (Acip) held their first meeting on Wednesday, after Kennedy replaced all seventeen of their predecessors. The Acip submits its recommendations for whom to vaccinate and when to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Public health experts and politicians have questioned the qualifications of the new members prior to the meeting, as several of them are vaccine skeptics.
When Kennedy fired all seventeen Acip members on June 9, it sparked a furor. Then he personally selected eight new members to serve on the panel, one of whom resigned just before the first meeting. Dr Martin Kulldorff, the new chair, informed the panel that he was fired from his position at Harvard University as a professor because he refused to receive a Covid-19 vaccine at the meeting’s opening. Dr. Kulldorff also stated that the panel would start new working groups to examine child vaccination schedules and vaccines that were authorized seven or more years ago.
He claimed that it would be evaluated whether administering the hepatitis B vaccine to newborns was sensible, despite its proven effectiveness in preventing liver cancer caused by the infection. He also stated that the measles vaccine schedules would be reviewed. Bill Hanage, an epidemiology professor at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, expressed concerns that revisiting vaccines licensed seven or more years ago suggests that their approval process was flawed. He couldn’t think of any rational reason to believe that this might be the case.
Initially, the panel was scheduled to vote on recommendations for RSV vaccination, a respiratory virus that can be harmful to infants, but this has been postponed. On Thursday, the group is scheduled to hear a presentation on the use of thimerosal in vaccines given by Lyn Redwood, a former leader of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group that Kennedy used to run. Ms. Redwood has been hired by the CDC to work in its vaccine safety office, according to the BBC’s US partner CBS News. Dr. Hanage found the panel’s decision to discuss thimerosal perplexing, a mercury-based preservative that has not been used in most vaccines for decades.
In the past, Acip’s members had a wide range of vaccine expertise and would scrutinize vaccine recommendations for months, he said. This time, Kennedy chose people for the panel “who are like him – people in the past who have shown an anti-vaccine prejudice,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a former Acip member and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. Michael Ross, one of the new Acip members, withdrew this week ahead of a review of members’ financial holdings, the Department of Health and Human Services said.
Kennedy’s panel choices have also drawn criticism from Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician who was skeptical of voting to confirm Kennedy as health secretary due to his vaccine stances. On X, Cassidy asserted that the panel should not proceed with their meeting due to the group’s small size and the absence of a CDC director to approve their recommendations. He further stated that while the appointees to ACIP have scientific credentials, many lack extensive experience studying microbiology, epidemiology, or immunology. Additionally, some may have preconceived negative views towards new technologies such as mRNA vaccines.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4en5wjr2vo
