RFK Jr. Conducts His Vaccine Purge - WSJ editorial
We’d like to conclude we were wrong to oppose Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Health and Human Services Department, but alas, no. The latest evidence is his purge of a vaccine advisory panel. Mr. Kennedy announced his not-so-clean sweep of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in these pages on Tuesday. The panel of outside experts advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine schedules. Its recommendations determine which vaccines insurers must cover without patient cost-sharing.
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But Mr. Kennedy’s beef seems to be that the committee’s members know something about vaccines and may have been involved in their research and development. “Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines,” he writes. How does he define “substantial”?
Some members have been paid by vaccine makers—typically sums less than their salaries—to assist with clinical trials in which they help evaluate the vaccines for safety and efficacy. These trials are double-blinded, meaning doctors don’t know which volunteers receive the vaccine or placebo so there’s no financial incentive to tilt the data in favor of manufacturers.
Mr. Kennedy this year posted members’ self-identified perceived or potential conflicts on the CDC website. They show that the members have properly recused themselves from decisions that involve products for which they served as trial investigators, as well as those of their competitors, or if they held stock in companies. In other words, the conflicts of interest were honestly handled.
The secretary says the new members “will refuse to serve as a rubber stamp,” but ACIP doesn’t automatically approve what industry wants. The committee has often recommended narrower applications for vaccines, including for RSV, HPV and Covid booster shots. Mr. Kennedy says “the problem isn’t necessarily that ACIP members are corrupt,” though he implies it. “The problem is their immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy.” Ah, yes. His goal is to eliminate incentives to develop vaccines.
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