RFK Jr. has a new vaccine panel and who is on it?

Vaccines, Lockdowns and the HHS: What ACIP’s New Members Have Losed during the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Several of Kennedy’s new selections for the panel rose to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, when they criticized government policies on school closures and lockdowns, and the mRNA vaccines. One, Vicky Pebsworth, has served on the board of the National Vaccine Information Center — an advocacy group that warns against vaccine risks.

At least three times a year, the members of ACIP sift through the scientific data and determine which vaccines to recommend for different age groups. The vaccine can become part of the official immunization schedule if the CDC gives the green light to ACIP’s recommendations.

Adam Ratner is an infectious diseases physician in New York City. “It has the potential to set us back decades.” The HHS did not reply to the query before publication.

Even those who can pay for vaccines out of pocket might find them harder to get without an ACIP recommendation, says Arthur Reingold, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, because overall demand for the shots will decrease. That could lead to some pharmacy stopping stocking them.

Offit says several independent groups have reviewed previous ACIP members and found no conflicts of interest. The conflict of interest is real because these people owe RFK Jr a lot, he says.

Researchers are also concerned about the loss of expertise. Nancy Bennett is a public-health specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, and she says that the new lineup is disturbing.

In the past, members were nominated and then vetted by staff at the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) before being sent to the head of the CDC and, finally, the head of the HHS for approval. Bennett says the vetting process sometimes took years. “The ACIP was meant to be composed of people with deep expertise in the area,” Ratner says. That is what we have lost.

COVID-19 Lockdowns, Vaccines, and Mental Health in the US, Revealed by Dr. A. Kulldorff

He worked at the US National Institutes of Health and is a psychiatrist. His recent papers1 have focused on the connection between nutrition and various disorders, including mental-health conditions, and his LinkedIn profile states that twenty-first-century diets are contributing to “inadequate brain nutrients and are likely contributing to the high burden of mental illnesses worldwide”. He didn’t find any papers he had written about vaccines or infectious disease in the PubMed database. He did not respond to a request for comment.

The Brownstone Institute formed to provide an independent voice for personal liberty and to oppose a number of policies instituted by the government during the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with Jayanta Bhattacharya, the current head of the US National Institutes of Health, Kulldorff wrote the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, which advocated against COVID-19 lockdowns except for vulnerable populations, and drew much pushback from the medical community.

Last year, Kulldorff wrote in City Journal that he was fired from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for refusing a COVID-19 vaccine even though he already had immunity from being infected. He suggested that the trials for the COVID-19 vaccines early in the Pandemic were not properly designed, but that immunizations are a vital medical invention, allowing people to obtain immunity without the risk of getting sick. Kulldorff did not respond to Nature’s request for comment.

Levi is a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. One2 has raised concerns about side effects of the vaccines in one of the papers he has published. The evidence is mounting that MRNA vaccines cause serious harm, especially among young people, according to Levi. We have to stop giving them immediately!” Levi did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s very difficult for a lot of family medicine physicians in rural areas to stock vaccines because it’s very hard to make ends meet.

That designation can also make it less likely that a medical provider will keep a vaccine in stock, he says. Many doctors and other health care providers in the US are required to stock Vaccines for Children and participate in the program. That is not the case if a vaccine is recommended.

I’ve heard anecdotally from children’s doctors that families will say you are the experts. How can you expect us to do something when we can’t figure out what the right thing to do is? O’Leary says.

It makes it harder to have a conversation with a family that’s clear, said O’Leary, who also teaches at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

The Vaccines for Children Committee in the U.S.: Dr. Orenstein, director of the CDC vaccinology program, says he is frustrated with the current vaccine schedule

He helped launch the Vaccines for Children program in the aftermath of a massive Measles resurgence, which caused tens of thousands of cases and over 120 deaths. Many of the kids who got sick had not been vaccinated because their families couldn’t afford it.

The Vaccines for Children program, which is funded by a federal government, provides free access to low-income and underinsured children by means of recommendations made by the ACIP. According to Orenstein, around half of children in the U.S. are eligible for free vaccines.

The statement said that they will demand definitive safety and efficacy data for any new vaccine recommendations, and they will review the current vaccine schedule.

“If you just fired all the air traffic controllers and replaced them with people who didn’t know how to fly, you would have a problem,” he says.

“I’m very worried about it,” says Dr. Walter Orenstein, professor of infectious diseases at Atlanta University School of Medicine, who was director of the US immunization program at the CDC from 1988 to 2004. “I have spent a career of more than 50 years in vaccinology, and I have never seen the names of most of those people.”

The health secretary dismissed the 17 members of the panel on Monday. Two days later, he announced the names of eight of the people he has chosen to replace them.

Some experts worry that the committee will vote to diminish importance of some shots in order to make it more difficult for families to get them, and thus reduce the availability of immunizations for families.