HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s actions in recent months have raised concerns that he is taking a heavy-handed and unilateral approach to vaccine policy in the U.S.
A senior official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention involved in the surveillance of respiratory infections resigned her post Monday, just days after HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cleaned out the agency’s vaccines advisory panel.
Fiona Havers, senior scientist at the CDC’s Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Viruses Division, wrote in an email to her colleagues that “I no longer have confidence that these data will be used objectively or evaluated with appropriate scientific rigor to make evidence-based vaccine policy decisions,” according to reporting from CBS News.
Since 2020, data that Havers and her team on the Respiratory Virus Hospitalization Surveillance Network (RESP-NET) produced have been presented at meetings of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and have helped guide vaccination recommendations across the country, the scientist said in her Monday email.
Recent actions by Kennedy, however, have raised concerns that the secretary appears to be applying a unilateral approach to U.S. vaccine policy.
Last month, for instance, he removed COVID-19 jabs from routine vaccine recommendations for healthy children and healthy pregnant women. “There’s no evidence healthy kids need [repeat COVID-19 vaccination] today, and most countries have stopped recommending it for children,” FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said at the time, appearing in a social media video alongside Kennedy and NIH chief Jay Bhattacharya.
Then, last week, Kennedy forcibly retired all 17 members of the ACIP in a “clean sweep” that he said “is necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science” amid what he claimed were conflicts of interest with the old members. He named eight new members soon after, at least four of whom have documented histories of vaccine criticism. Two have potential conflicts of interest with Merck, having been paid expert witnesses in vaccine lawsuits against the company.
On Monday, all 17 of the dismissed ACIP members published an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association arguing that panelists “have always been selected through a rigorous process based on their expertise in immunology, epidemiology, pediatrics, obstetrics, internal and family medicine, geriatrics, infectious diseases, and public health.”
“Despite recent suggestions to the contrary, health care providers and the US public trust ACIP,” the former committee members contended. They called Kennedy’s recent actions “destabilizing decisions,” ones that were “made without clear rationale.”
As a result, the U.S. vaccine program has been left “critically weakened,” the former members said.
In a statement to CBS News following Havers’ resignation on Monday, an HHS spokesperson said that the department “is committed to following the gold standard of scientific integrity. Vaccine policy decisions will be based on objective data, transparent analysis, and evidence – not conflicts of interest or industry influence.”
