A new study in JAMA contradicts a series of statements made by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that paint vaccine advisory committees at the CDC and FDA as hopelessly corrupt.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made conflicts of interest in science a huge talking point and a staple of his Make America Healthy Again platform.
Conflicts of interest (COIs) were, ostensibly, the reason that Kennedy fired all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices this June, declaring in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the “committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.”
The scientific community decried the move, calling allegations of COIs a “red herring.” Researchers have now presented hard figures contradicting the secretary’s assertions. In a new paper published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, three policy analysts crunched the numbers and showed that while ACIP and the FDA’s similar advisory group, the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), had once been plagued by COIs, the issue has over the last 25 years dwindled significantly in scope.
Since the turn of the millennium, “there’s been greater scrutiny of industry influence over all areas of medicine,” Genevieve Kanter, a co-author on the paper and associate professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, told BioSpace.
Using meeting transcripts and a database of declared conflicts by ACIP members recently set up by HHS, the researchers tallied the rates of COIs reported by members of both committees this century. Between 2000 and 2024, reported conflicts of interest among members of ACIP declined from 42.8% in 2000 to 5.0% in 2024. Over the same period, the reported COI prevalence for VRBPAC meetings fell from 11.1% to less than 4.0%. VRBPAC also had a full decade when COIs sat at 0%.
Nevertheless, COIs have been a primary area of focus for Kennedy—and his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. A report released in May by Kennedy’s MAHA Commission took aim at pharma lobbying and conflicts of interest (COIs) on regulatory advisory committees, and a draft copy of an upcoming strategy report by the commission again touches on the issue, with plans for HHS to “establish a public database to disclose financial relationships, mandate recusal requirements consistent with the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) for individuals/organizations with conflicts of interest, and prioritize the use of independent, conflict-free research for federal health guidelines.”
But according to Peter Lurie, co-author of the JAMA paper, COIs at the agency are largely under control. “There have been all these allegations that the FDA is corrupt, in effect, and these officials at CDC are plagued by COIs, and that wasn’t my experience in my time at the FDA,” Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a former associate commissioner at the FDA, told BioSpace.
As Kanter pointed out, some level of COIs are to be expected among vaccine researchers, especially if members of an advisory committee are supposed to have expertise in their field.
“Most of the COIs are related to research, which is not surprising. That’s the kind of expertise that you want on board,” she said. “Usually when people think of COIs they’re thinking of personal enrichment. Research isn’t that. Financial COIs are the small minority of these conflicts.”
Financial COIs, like ownership of stock, consulting fees or royalties, were a tiny fraction of reported COIs for both committees, accounting for less than 1% since 2016.
Lurie additionally noted that Kennedy’s own statistics and sources were skewed to make ACIP look corrupt. During his confirmation hearing in January, Kennedy stated that “97% of people on [ACIP] had conflicts,” citing a U.S. House report from 2000. “Kennedy is using a study done 25 years [ago] that found COIs were very high, but that looked at a single committee,” Lurie said.
The House report in question tallied COIs from a single working group within ACIP focused on rotavirus vaccines that, in 1998, voted to add rotavirus vaccines to infant immunization schedules. The report itself states that several members held patents and grants from pharmaceutical companies related to rotavirus vaccine research. One member, Paul Offit, “also disclosed that he is paid by the pharmaceutical industry to travel around the country and teach doctors that vaccines are safe,” the report read.
Kanter and Lurie reiterated that over the past few decades, pharmaceutical COIs have been taken more and more seriously by both the CDC and FDA, though both agencies have their own approaches to dealing with them. At ACIP, if a member has a conflict with a particular issue being discussed at a meeting, they are expected to recuse themselves from discussion and the vote around that issue, but may still attend the meeting, since ACIP meetings often discuss multiple products.
The FDA is more stringent, as VRBPAC meetings discuss only one or two products at a time. If a committee member’s reported conflicts are deemed too great, the FDA will refuse that member entry to a meeting or grant a waiver, if the member’s expertise is determined to be indispensable. As the JAMA paper pointed out, waivers at the FDA tend to be rare, occurring in only 2% of meetings, while recusals are more common, taking place at 8.1% of meetings.
“For a research study, it’s remarkably clear,” Lurie said. “COIs are going down, which is completely inconsistent with the secretary’s depiction.”
