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xocetaceans

(4,342 posts)
Mon Jun 9, 2025, 05:12 PM Jun 2025

RFK Jr. Removes All Members of CDC Vaccine Advisory Panel



Was Senator Cassidy involved agreeing with this? According to the Bloomberg report, Cassidy had purportedly had an agreement with RFK, Jr. that major changes not be made without Cassidy's involvement.

RFK, Jr. is a useless anti-vaxer whose biases and irrational positions far outweigh anything beneficial that he might accidentally enact through his boundless incompetence and grifting. He should be removed immediately from his position as HHS Secretary.
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xocetaceans

(4,342 posts)
2. That is quite true, but I wonder if Cassidy was ever actually serious in his opposition. My guess is that he never...
Mon Jun 9, 2025, 05:25 PM
Jun 2025

...seriously opposed RFK, Jr. (His consideration of the matter was more like Senator Susan Collins being concerned about something.)

No self-respecting scientist or doctor (I would think) would even consider voting for Kennedy: he is that obviously a grifter, etc. Cassidy will likely have hurt more people with that vote of his for Kennedy than he has ever helped as a physician. On the basis of his assenting to allowing Kennedy to become HHS Secretary and all of the attendant harm that it will cause, he should lose his medical license: clearly, the Hippocratic Oath means nothing to him.

LetMyPeopleVote

(174,739 posts)
4. Maddow Blog-RFK Jr. breaks promise to senators, guts CDC vaccine panel of independent experts
Tue Jun 10, 2025, 10:25 AM
Jun 2025

Before his confirmation, the HHS secretary said he’d leave the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices alone. Now he’s doing the opposite.

That an unqualified, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is behaving like an unqualified, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is painfully predictable.

But the fact remains that 52 Senate Republicans were given an opportunity to protect Americans from RFK Jr. — and they failed spectacularly.

Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2025-06-10T13:46:55.481Z

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/cdc-vaccine-panel-acip-rfk-jr-kennedy-rcna212007

In early February, when there was still some question as to whether or not the Senate would confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Sen. Bill Cassidy delivered a closely watched speech on the Senate floor. The Louisiana Republican, a physician by trade, not only endorsed the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist during his remarks, he offered assurances about the future.

“If confirmed, [Kennedy] will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — without changes,” Cassidy declared with confidence, pointing to assurances he’d received directly from RFK Jr.

Four months later, as NBC News reported, Cassidy has been proven wrong.

The 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent vaccine advisory committee are being removed from their posts, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Monday afternoon.


.....Complicating matters is the degree to which these new developments add to a radical and dangerous pattern. Indeed, Kennedy’s announcement came just days after pediatric infectious disease expert Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos resigned from her position as the co-leader of a CDC working group that advises outside experts on Covid vaccines.

In an email to colleagues, Panagiotakopoulos said, “My career in public health and vaccinology started with a deep-seated desire to help the most vulnerable members of our population, and that is not something I am able to continue doing in this role.”

Around the same time, The Associated Press reported that there’s some ambiguity as to who, exactly, is currently leading the CDC.

A New York Times report added:

Under Mr. Kennedy’s leadership, the F.D.A. has narrowed availability of Covid vaccines to adults 65 and older and Americans with certain underlying conditions. Mr. Kennedy later announced that the C.D.C. would no longer recommend the vaccines for healthy children or pregnant women, a decision that normally would have come from the agency’s A.C.I.P. ... He also oversees the National Institutes of Health, which halted funding for researchers who study vaccine hesitancy and canceled programs intended to discover new vaccines to prevent future pandemics. The department has also ended work crucial to developing an H.I.V. vaccine and a contract for a vaccine against bird flu.


As unsettling as the news has been, none of it is surprising. RFK Jr.’s anti-science reputation was well established long before Trump nominated him. That an unqualified, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is behaving like an unqualified, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist is painfully predictable.

womanofthehills

(10,704 posts)
5. Has anyone looked into the previous members of the committee?
Tue Jun 10, 2025, 10:29 AM
Jun 2025

Many reports out there on social media say many were connected to big pharma & they their meetings were closed meetings. Just asking?

xocetaceans

(4,342 posts)
6. That is a very general statement. Is there one of "these reports" which you would care explicitly to mention? Shy of...
Tue Jun 10, 2025, 04:18 PM
Jun 2025

...that, what you are saying seems way too vague. RFK, Jr. himself has been on social media and in the media and has said many such things:

June 22, 2023

Just Another RFK Jr. Lie. I Know, Because It’s About Me.
I edited Kennedy’s error-ridden piece on a vaccine-autism link, which Salon later retracted. We caved to the truth, not Big Pharma.

Joan Walsh

...

But I’ve come to believe I have a responsibility to write about Kennedy because of my own shameful role in sending his toxic vaccine views into public discourse: I was the Salon editor, in partnership with Rolling Stone, who 18 years ago published his mendacious, error-ridden piece on how thimerosal in childhood vaccines supposedly led to a rise in autism, and how public health officials covered it up. From the day “Deadly Immunity” went up on Salon.com, we were besieged by scientists and advocates showing how Kennedy had misunderstood, incorrectly cited, and perhaps even falsified data. Some of his sources turned out to be known crackpots.

...

Now, Kennedy insists, as the The New York Times paraphrases him, that “Salon caved to pressure from government regulators and the pharmaceutical industry.” He repeated the false claim in his three-hour podcast conversation with Joe Rogan, another conspiracy loon, rehashing the debunked claims of “Deadly Immunity” and claiming that Salon pulled the piece after “pressure from the pharmaceutical industry.”

...

Mnookin showed, among other things, how Kennedy misrepresented what went on at a 2000 meeting on vaccine safety convened by the Centers for Disease Control, at the Simpsonwood conference center outside Atlanta, where the claims of a link between Thimerosol and autism were discussed. Mnookin wrote, “Kennedy relied on the 286-page transcript of the Simpsonwood meeting to corroborate his allegations—and wherever the transcript diverged from the story he wanted to tell, he simply cut and pasted until things came out right.”

He did that to make the assembled medical experts look like they were pulling off an enormous hoax, at times editing their statements to sound like the very opposite of what they believed. Out of all his mistakes and misrepresentations, I feel worst about that, because it slimed real live people. Good fact-checking would have caught those distortions, but the piece didn’t have that. I didn’t read the 286-page Simpsonwood transcript, which I had a printout of. I could have, but in fairness to myself (sigh), that was not my job. I was the big picture person. Even if I had, would I have caught the distortions and cutting and pasting that now seem to be willful?

...

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/rfk-jr-vaccine-disinformation/


He has been consistently wrong in his views, statements, and positions: based on that extensive track record, RFK, Jr. merits the wholesale dismissal of anything he says. Further, his online acolytes and their ilk are similarly ignorant and misinformed people who are prone to similar "Big Pharma" statements.

So, vague statements that are similar in spirit to Glenn Beck's "just asking" strategy are not credible attempts to discuss this important issue which endangers public health.

However, if you can adduce credible statements that examine the subject of your post, please do so.

xocetaceans

(4,342 posts)
7. I suspected that you would not have anything to say. The Glenn Beck "just asking" strategy is wholly disingenuous. n/t
Wed Jun 11, 2025, 10:52 AM
Jun 2025
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