Six weeks after HHS Secretary RFK Jr. cited unexplained conflicts of interest in dismissing all 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, Democrats are asking for details.
Senate Democrats have launched an investigation into Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s move to fire all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in June.
Democrats on the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee are requesting information on the firings from Kennedy by Aug. 12.
“The harm your actions will cause is significant. As your new ACIP makes recommendations based on pseudoscience, fewer and fewer Americans will have access to fewer and fewer vaccines,” the senators wrote in a letter to Kennedy, according to Reuters.
At the time of the firings, Kennedy said that the members of the CDC’s influential ACIP had conflicts of interest, which he did not enumerate. The senators requested details of those alleged conflicts and how the new members of the committee, named several days after the firings, compare to the old members in terms of conflicts.
The senators are also asking for details of all personnel involved in the decision to fire the ACIP committee, both inside and outside the government, as well as the roles played by specific people, including Lyn Redwood. Redwood is the former head of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy.
Redwood made a presentation at the first meeting of the newly reformed ACIP on thimerosal, a largely phased-out vaccine preservative that anti-vaccine activists including Redwood have linked without evidence to patient harm and autism.
According to Reuters, the investigation was launched by Senate Democrats after Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the health committee’s chairman, denied a request from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, for a bipartisan investigation.
Cassidy, a physician by profession, was seen as the wavering vote on Kennedy’s Senate confirmation in February. Cassidy said at the time that Kennedy had promised not to make any changes to key vaccine advisory boards, including ACIP.
After firing all 17 members, Kennedy said he had instead promised that Cassidy could pick a member of the newly reformed ACIP. Cassidy called for the new ACIP to delay its initial meeting, citing concerns over the new members’ relative lack of experience in regulating vaccines. The meeting went on without delay on June 25 and 26.
