Two articles: Bobby Jr. sends "junk science" and appoints loonies to replace serious doctors and scientists on vaccine board
Kennedy’s HHS Sent Congress ‘Junk Science’ To Defend Vaccine Changes
One health expert called the document “willful medical disinformation” about the safety of covid vaccines for children and pregnant women.
“It is so far out of left field that I find it insulting to our members of Congress that they would actually give them something like this. Congress members are relying on these agencies to provide them with valid information, and it’s just not there,” said Mark Turrentine, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Baylor College of Medicine.
Kennedy, who was an anti-vaccine activist before taking a role in the Trump administration, announced May 27 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would no longer recommend covid vaccines for pregnant women or healthy children, bypassing the agency’s formal process for adjusting its vaccine schedules for adults and kids. The announcement, made on the social platform X, has been met with outrage by many pediatricians and scientists.
The HHS document meant to support Kennedy’s decision, obtained by KFF Health News, was sent to members of Congress who questioned the science and process behind his move, according to one federal official who asked not to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
The document has not been posted on the HHS website, though it is the first detailed explanation of Kennedy’s announcement from the agency.
Titled “Covid Recommendation FAQ,” the document distorts some legitimate studies and cites others that are disputed and unpublished, medical experts say.
HHS director of communications Andrew Nixon told KFF Health News, “There is no distortion of the studies in this document. The underlying data speaks for itself, and it raises legitimate safety concerns. HHS will not ignore that evidence or downplay it. We will follow the data and the science.”
HHS did not respond to a request to name the author of the document.
One of the studies the HHS document cites is under investigation by its publisher regarding “potential issues with the research methodology and conclusions and author conflicts of interest,” according to a link on the study’s webpage.
“This is RFK Jr.’s playbook,” said Sean O’Leary, chair of the Committee on Infectious Diseases for the American Academy of Pediatrics and an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “Either cherry-pick from good science or take junk science to support his premise — this has been his playbook for 20 years.”
Another study cited in the document is a preprint that has not been peer-reviewed. Under the study’s title is an alert that “it reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.” Though the preprint was made available a year ago, it has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
The FAQ supporting Kennedy’s decision claims that “post-marketing studies” of covid vaccines have identified “serious adverse effects, such as an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis” — conditions in which the heart’s muscle or its covering, the pericardium, suffer inflammation.
False claims that the 2024 preprint showed myocarditis and pericarditis only in people who received a covid vaccine, and not in people infected with covid, circulated on social media. One of the study’s co-authors publicly rejected that idea, because the study did not compare outcomes between people who were vaccinated and those infected with the covid virus. The study also focused only on children and adolescents. The HHS document omitted numerous other peer-reviewed studies that have shown that the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis is greater after contracting covid for both vaccinated and non-vaccinated people than the risk of the same complications after vaccination alone.
O’Leary said that while some cases of myocarditis were reported in vaccinated adolescent boys and young men early in the covid pandemic, the rates declined after the two initial doses of covid vaccines were spaced further apart.
Now, adolescents and adults who have not been previously vaccinated receive only one shot, and myocarditis no longer shows up in the data, O’Leary said, referring to the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink. “There is no increased risk at this point that we can identify,” he said.
In two instances, the HHS memo makes claims that are actively refuted by the papers it cites to back them up. Both papers support the safety and effectiveness of covid vaccines for pregnant women.
The HHS document says that another paper it cites found “an increase in placental blood clotting in pregnant mothers who took the vaccine.” But the paper doesn’t contain any reference to placental blood clots or to pregnant women.
“I’ve now read it three times. And I cannot find that anywhere,” said Turrentine, the OB-GYN professor.
If he were grading the HHS document, “I would give this an ‘F,’” Turrentine said. “This is not supported by anything and it’s not using medical evidence.”
While members of Congress who are physicians should know to check references in the paper, they may not take the time to do so, said Neil Silverman, a professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology who directs the Infectious Diseases in Pregnancy Program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “They’re going to assume this is coming from a scientific agency. So they are being hoodwinked along with everyone else who has had access to this document,” Silverman said.
The offices of three Republicans in Congress who are medical doctors serving on House and Senate committees focused on health, including Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), did not respond to requests for comment about whether they received the memo. Emily Druckman, communications director for Rep. Kim Schrier (D-Wash.), a physician serving on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, confirmed that Schrier’s office did receive a copy of the document.
“The problem is a lot of legislators and even their staffers, they don’t have the expertise to be able to pick those references apart,” O’Leary said. “But this one — I’ve seen much better anti-vaccine propaganda than this, frankly.”
C.J. Young, deputy communications director for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, confirmed that Democratic staff members of the committee received the document from HHS. In the past, he said, similar documents would help clarify the justification and scope of an administration’s policy change and could be assumed to be scientifically accurate, Young said.
“This feels like it’s breaking new ground. I don’t think that we saw this level of sloppiness or inattention to detail or lack of consideration for scientific merit under the first Trump administration,” Young said.
On June 4, Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) and Schrier introduced a bill that would require Kennedy to adopt official vaccine decisions from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP. Young said the motivation behind the bill was Kennedy’s decision to change the covid vaccine schedule without the input of ACIP’s vaccine experts, who play a key role in setting CDC policies around vaccine schedules and access.
Kennedy announced June 9 on X that he would remove all 17 members of ACIP, citing alleged conflicts of interest he did not detail, and replace them. He announced eight replacements June 11, including people who had criticized vaccine mandates during the covid pandemic.
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This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
RFK announces new ACIP members, including vaccine critics
On X, he said the appointments were
designed to restore public trust in vaccines, and the eight members will attend
the next scheduled meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices
on June 25.
According to the Federal Register, the group is slated to discuss several vaccine topics during the 3-day meeting, with recommendation votes scheduled for COVID-19 vaccines, human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine, influenza vaccines, meningococcal vaccine, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccines for adults, and RSV vaccine for maternal and pediatric populations. The group is also slated to vote on Vaccines for Children (VFC) program vaccines for COVID-19, HPV, influenza, and RSV.
The CDC has always had a rigorous vetting process for ACIP
members who apply to the committee as seats become vacant when members rotate
off the committee. The application process known to take as long as 2
years. “These positions are held by technically qualified people trained
in a clinical medical field and possessing in-depth knowledge of vaccines and
immunization,” CDC background information says.
Members are also required to declare potential conflicts of
interest. Applications are typically done by the CDC’s ACIP steering committee,
with final selection by the HHS secretary.
It’s not clear how the eight members were vetted and if the
ACIP steering committee was involved. CBS News reported
that career CDC employees who oversee ACIP have been removed from their roles.
The team was led by Melinda Wharton, MD, MPH, the CDC’s associate director for
vaccine policy.
Eight members include some vaccine critics
Though Kennedy had said earlier this week that none of
the new ACIP picks would be “ideological anti-vaxxers,” the group includes
multiple vaccine skeptics. The eight ACIP appointees are:
Joseph
Hibbeln, MD, is a psychiatrist and nutritional neuroscientist at
Barton Health in South Lake Tahoe, California. He earned his medical degree at
the University of Illinois College of Medicine in 1988, did his psychiatry
residency at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), and completed a
fellowship at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) at
the National Institutes of Health, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Hibbeln has held posts at the NIAAA (chief of the outpatient
clinic and acting chief of the section on nutritional neurosciences), the US
Public Health Service, and as a visiting professor at the University of Bristol
in England.
Known for his work on the role of omega-3 fatty acids in
depressive and aggressive disorders and fish consumption during pregnancy in
promoting higher intelligence and better social behaviors in children, he
serves on the advisory council for the Seafood Nutrition Partnership, a
nonprofit US organization focused on "building awareness of the health and
nutritional benefits of seafood."
A PubMed search for studies Hibbeln coauthored turned up
research on topics such as the link between nutrition and behavioral disorders,
the potential correlation of omega-3 fatty acid deficiencies and increased risk
of homicide and suicide, and vegetarian diets and depression in men but only
one vaccine-related study concluding that pregnant women's mercury levels
weren't tied to increased autism cases in those who ate fish.
Martin
Kulldorff, PhD, is a Swedish biostatistician who earned his
doctorate in operations research from Cornell University in 1989. A professor
of medicine at Harvard Medical School from 2003 until he was fired in 2024 for what
he says was refusing the COVID-19 vaccine. H e was a member of the US Food and
Drug Administration's Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and
the ACIP's Vaccine Safety Subgroup.
Today, Reuters reported that
Kulldorff served as an expert witness against Merck's Gardasil human
papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. CDC rules prohibit vaccine advisors working in
this role.
In 2020, he cowrote the Great Barrington Declaration, which
pushed for relaxing COVID-19 restrictions for low-risk groups to promote herd
immunity until vaccines became available, a notion that public health officials
dismissed as unethical and unfeasible. Kulldorff vocally opposed
virus-mitigation measures such as vaccination of children, school closures,
lockdowns, contact tracing, and masks.
He has been a leader at the Brownstone Institute, which
opposes COVID-19 restricts and publishes literature on the dangers of the
COVID-19 and other vaccines. Kulldorff published an article in the journal he
co-founded, the Journal of the Academy of Public Health, in March
urging NIH reforms, including the creation of a commission to investigate the
agency's pandemic response. He also declared his support for Kennedy's call for
randomized, placebo-controlled vaccine trials, which public health experts have
said may be unethical.
"His expertise includes statistical methods for public
health surveillance, immunization safety, and infectious disease
epidemiology," Kennedy said on X.
Retsef Levi,
PhD, a professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of
Management, earned his doctorate in operations research at Cornell University
in 2005, according to his MIT faculty profile. His research has focused on
healthcare management and supply chain and logistics.
His stance on COVID-19 vaccines is clear. During the
pandemic, Levi and colleagues published studies suggesting increased rates
of cardiac events and myocarditis associated with the
vaccine rollout in Israel. In January 2023, Levi wrote on X, "The evidence is mounting
and indisputable that MRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death,
especially among young people. We have to stop giving them immediately!"
In an interview on a blog published
today, Levi said that mRNA vaccines have caused the deaths of young people and
children and that "mRNA vaccines should not be given to anybody young or
healthy. It is also not at all clear to me that they should be given to
anybody, based on the evidence," including elderly adults.
In a 2023 podcast, Levi said he had little
vaccine expertise but had studied safety and quality issues in drug production
and had expertise in advanced analytics and data. "His expertise spans
healthcare systems optimization, epidemiologic modeling, and the application of
AI [artificial intelligence] and data science in public health," Kennedy
wrote.
Robert W.
Malone, MD, is a physician and infectious-disease researcher who
earned his medical degree at Northwestern University in 1991. He takes
partial credit for
inventing mRNA vaccine technology (he did some early research) yet has
incorrectly suggested that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines could
worsen infections. He is known for his podcast appearances in which he
criticized the pandemic response and questioned COVID-19 vaccine safety,
including a 2021 appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast in which he spread
misinformation on the vaccines.
On X, Kennedy said that Malone has held
academic positions at the University of California Davis and the University of
Maryland and has held advisory roles for HHS and the Department of Defense.
"His expertise spans molecular biology, immunology, and vaccine
development," Kennedy wrote.
H. Cody
Meissner, MD, a professor of pediatrics and
medicine at the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, earned his medical degree
from Tufts University in 1973, completing a residency at New England Medical
Center. According to his CV, he is a vaccine subject matter expert and has
served the Advanced Strategic Planning and Research (ASPR), the Biomedical
Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), and HHS.
He was an ACIP member of ACIP from 2008 to 2012 and has
served on the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biologic Products Advisory Committee
(VRBPAC) and as chair of the HHS's Vaccine
Injury Compensation Program. During the pandemic, Meissner cowrote an editorial
with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary arguing against masks for children.
While he has credited vaccines for saving millions of lives
and praised COVID-19 vaccines, he recently told Reuters that he supports
Kennedy's decision to not recommend COVID-19 vaccination for healthy children
and pregnant women. He also has characterized the US vaccine-event reporting
system as "pretty good"
and praised Peter Marks, the FDA vaccine regulator ousted by Kennedy.
In previous conflict-of-interest disclosures, Meisser
reported having received money from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Roche, and other
pharmaceutical companies for clinical trials.
"His expertise spans vaccine development, immunization
safety, and pediatric infectious disease epidemiology," Kennedy wrote on
X.
James
Pagano, MD, a retired emergency medicine physician and emergency
room medical director at Emergent Medical Associates in Santa Monica,
California, earned his medical degree at Rush University in 1978, his
LinkedIn profile states.
On X, Kennedy said Pagano completed a residency at UCLA, has more than 40 years
of clinical experience, and has served on "multiple hospital committees,
including utilization review, critical care, and medical executive boards. He
is strong advocate for evidence-based medicine." Little other information
on Pagano is available.
Vicky Pebsworth, PhD, RN, a regional director for the
National Association of Catholic Nurses, received her doctorate from the
University of Michigan in 1999.
She is a board member of the Virginia-based National
Vaccine Information Center (NVIC; formerly known as Dissatisified
Parents Together), which repeatedly asked for the HHS to be relieved of its
role as legal respondent and administrator of the Vaccine Injury Compensation
Program. The NVIC also worked with Congress on the National Childhood Vaccine
Injury Act of 1986, which allows a registry of vaccine injury reports and
compensation.
The NVIC's website says is "dedicated to preventing
vaccine injuries and deaths through public education and advocating for
informed consent protections in medical policies and public health laws. NVIC
defends the human right to freedom of thought and conscience and supports the
inclusion of flexible medical, religious and conscientious belief exemptions in
vaccine policies and laws."
According to the Chiropractic Society of Wisconsin website,
Pebsworth has worked as an intensive care unit (ICU) nurse, healthcare
administrator, health policy analyst, and researcher focused on public health
policy, pediatrics, and patient safety.
She has served as a consumer representative of the Food and
Drug Administration’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory
Committee (VRBPAC), has worked for the National Vaccine Advisory Committee's
Vaccine Safety Working Group, and was the consumer representative to the H1N1
Vaccine Safety Risk Assessment Working Group.
Pebsworth coauthored a 2006 analysis of adverse events after
human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination that were reported on the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention's Vaccine Adverse Event System (VAERS). Although
the study didn't prove any reactions were linked to the Gardasil vaccine,
Pebsworth (then known as Vicky Debold), was quoted in a 2007 NVIC news release titled,
"HPV Vaccine Mandates Risky and Expensive: Vaccine Safety Group Finds
Serious Reactions, High Costs."
Her Chiropractic Society profile says, "Her son—her
only child—experienced serious, long-term health problems following receipt of
seven live virus and killed bacterial vaccines administered during his 15-month
well-baby visit which sparked her interest in vaccine safety research and
policymaking and chronic illness and disability in children."
Michael A.
Ross, MD, a physician in Virginia and a former professor of
obstetrics and gynecology at Virginia Commonwealth University and a pediatrics
professor at George Washington University (GWU), earned his medical degree at
GWU. EDITOR'S NOTE: GWU says he does not work there.
He has been a board member, advisor, and executive at a
broad array of private healthcare and life-science firms and health groups,
mostly recently as chief medical officer at the Maryland startup Manta Pharma.
An operating partner at the healthcare investment company Havencrest for the
past 7 years, he was a presidential appointee on the CDC's Committee for
Prevention of Breast and Cervical Cancer, according to his company profile.
Ross has also advised LarreaRX, a supplement manufacturer,
and worked for India-based Cadila Pharmaceuticals, his LinkedIn profile
says. He lists his specialties as contact lenses, international business,
healthcare and pharmaceutical executive management, and pharmaceutical
consulting.
His only publication in a scientific journal was a
coauthored open letter to JAMA flagging a study
published in the journal that found that the drug ivermectin didn't speed time
to symptom resolution in patients with mild COVID-19 as "fatally
flawed."
The letter reads, in part, "We oppose this fixation on
randomized controlled trials at the expense of other clinical and scientific
evidence and urge medical policymakers to restore balance to the practice of
medicine."
Concerns about reliable information, vaccine access
Rep Kim Schrier, MD, (D-Wash.), said on X yesterday that some of the
newly appointed ACIP replacements are anti-vaccine activists, including one who
serves on the board of an organization that has widely been criticized as a
source of vaccine misinformation.
“In Congress, I will keep fighting against dangerous and
ideological anti-vaccine actions like these that will disproportionally hurt
children, expectant mothers, and other vulnerable members of communities across
our country,” she wrote.
Former CDC director Tom Frieden, MD, MPH, said on X today that given recent ACIP
changes, he worries about what advice doctors will get from the federal
government to share with their patients. “We’re all less safe if we can’t get fact-based information about
vaccines,” said Frieden, who is currently president and chief executive officer
of Resolve to Save Lives, a global health group centered on battling chronic
diseases and infectious disease epidemics.
Following Kennedy’s announcement yesterday, Lawrence Gostin,
JD, who codirects Georgetown University's O'Neill Institute National and Global
Health Law, said on X that the inclusion of vaccine
skeptics and political agendas put lives at risk. “Vaccine access will be
significantly reduced and lives will be lost. I don’t know how it’ll be
possible to trust CDC’s vaccine recommendations.”