Will the Last Expert to Leave ACIP Please Turn Off the Lights

If you've got expertise, better get the hell out of voluntarily advising the US government

No pro-vaxxers allowed! Credit: Reuters

I have to hand it to US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The man is really good at finding bureaucratic vulnerabilities and areas of uncertainty that he can exploit to undermine American vaccination programs. One of his favorite tactics has been eliminating expert advisory panels and restocking them with anti-vax quacks.

Kennedy did this back in June with the Advisory Committee of Immunization Practices (ACIP). He sent the 17 independent expert ACIP members out to pasture, repopulating the panel with an all-star lineup of anti-vax luminaries, with Great Barrington Declaration author Martin Kulldorff at the helm. Since ACIP recommendations are used by insurance companies to inform vaccine reimbursements, their recommendations determine vaccine access for people. They wasted no time getting to work on Kennedy’s agenda.

Kennedy appears set to give the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) the same type of pseudoscientific makeover that ACIP got. And Kennedy is not done purging ACIP of anyone with the slightest amount of actual expertise. Now liaison members representing medical and scientific professional societies have been banned from ACIP work groups, as well.

ACIP work groups are composed of voting members of the panel, as well as liaison members who don’t vote on recommendations but do ask questions and contribute to discussion at ACIP meetings. Between ACIP meetings, work groups conduct research, analyze data, and draft proposed recommendations under consideration. Banning liaison members from such groups as the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Pharmacists Association, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America depletes critical expertise from the process of crafting recommendations in a rigorous, evidence-based way. This does not bode well for the future.

At the first meeting of the new all-villain ACIP in June, the panel voted to recommend against using vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal, based in part on a presentation from a former president of Children’s Health Defense (the anti-vax organization that Kennedy founded) that was riddled with inaccuracies and contained AI-hallucinated references.

Even worse, Kulldorff gave a presentation on the safety record of the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV) vaccine (there is a tiny risk of febrile seizures after the first dose) and floated a proposed recommendation. At the time, I wrote about how this signaled intent to strip access from the MMRV. This news about kicking professional societies off the work groups affirms that.

Regular MMR: you’re next

In order to vote on MMRV and kill it by ACIP recommendation, a work group will be convened to evaluate data on the vaccine. Expert contributions to the work group from liaison members are essential to informing ACIP recommendations with a comprehensive evidence base. The MMRV was recommended by ACIP nearly 20 years ago, so there is ample data about it. These liaison members were booted because they would point that out. They would not be fooled by cherry-picked, misinterpreted, or made up data about it. And since they would serve as an obstacle to “gold standard science”—AKA shamelessly manufacturing evidence, lying about vaccines, and directing people to alternative treatments for profit—they must go.

Even worse, I suspect that this will not end with the MMRV. Kennedy’s modus operandi is to find a crack and turn it into a crevasse gradually by normalizing it and expanding on it. If he can get thimerosal out of a few vaccines, then he can get aluminum salt adjuvants out of a lot more. If he can get ACIP to recommend the MMRV vaccine not be used, he can get them to go after MMR, polio, HPV, and HBV next.

There’s always a ton of talk about how public health and science have lost trust. A lot of people like to tell me that it’s our fault. Scientists didn’t show enough humility or acknowledge uncertainty during the COVID pandemic. We were wrong about masks or vaccines or variants or whatever. We didn’t communicate clearly. We overclaimed and underdelivered. I reject these arguments.

The public didn’t lose trust in science because experts are wrong sometimes, and are imperfect human beings who make mistakes. They lost trust because people like Kennedy constantly lied about science. He is constantly lying still. He’s eliminating experts so that he and his functionaries on ACIP will be able to continue lying without any inconvenient pushback. We need to recognize this and push back hard.