During the Senate confirmation hearings to be Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presented himself as a vaccine supporter. But in office, he and the agencies he directs have taken long -range steps, sometimes subtle steps to undermine confidence in the efficacy and safety of the vaccine.
The National Health Institutes arrested funds for researchers studying the vaccine vaccine and expected to find ways to overcome it. He also canceled the programs aimed at discovering new vaccines to avoid future pandemics.
The centers for disease control and prevention filed an advertising campaign for the flu vaccine. Mr. Kennedy has said inexorded that scientists who advise CDCs on vaccines have “serious and serious conflicts” in the promotion of products and cannot be trusted.
The Department of Health and Human Services Reduce billions of dollars to state health agencies, including the necessary funds to modernize state programs for child immunization. Mr. Kennedy said in a televised interview on Wednesday that he was not aware of this widely reported development.
The food and medication administration canceled an open meeting on flu vaccines with scientific advisors, and then kept it behind closed doors. A superior officer arrested the revision of the NOVAVAX COVID vaccine. In a televised interview last week, Mr. Kennedy falsely said that vaccines created in a similar way do not work against respiratory viruses.
Some scientists said they saw a pattern: an effort to erode support for routine vaccination, and for scientists who have long kept it as a public health objective.
“This is a simultaneous process of increasing the probability of listening to his voice and decreases the probability of listening to other voices,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, on Mr. Kennedy.
He is “discertifying other voices of authority,” he said.
The HHS did not agree that Mr. Kennedy was working against vaccines.
“Secretary Kennedy is not Anti-Vacuna; it is pro-sex,” said Andrew Nixon, spokesman for the department, in a statement. “Your approach has always been to ensure that vaccines are rigorously proven for efficiency and safety.”
The statement continued: “We are taking measures so that Americans obtain the transparency they deserve and can make informed decisions about their health.”
After attending the funeral of a non -vaccinated child who died of measles in western Texas on Sunday, Mr. Kennedy supported the measles vaccine in X as “the most effective way to avoid the spread of measles.”
But vaccination has also described as a personal choice with little understood risks and suggested that miraculous treatments were easily available. On Sunday, he praised two local doctors on social networks who have promoted doubtful treatments, potentially harmful, for measles.
Although measles cases in the United States have increased 600 by 22 jurisdictions, Mr. Kennedy has stated in a recent interview that the measles vaccine causes deaths every year (false); that causes encephalitis, blindness and “all the diseases that suspect in itself” (false); and that the effect of the vaccine decreases so dramatically that older adults are “essentially not vaccinated” (false).
According to an email obtained by the New York Times, the HHS intends to review its web pages to include statements such as “the decision to vaccinate is personal” and “people must also be informed about possible adverse events associated with vaccines.” (Vaccines are already administered only after patients provide informed consent, as required by law).
Tensions with conventional experts focused last week, when Dr. Peter Marks, the superior vaccine regulator, resigned under the FDA pressure
“It has been clear that the truth and transparency do not want the secretary, but wishes the subordinate confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” said Dr. Marks in his renunciation letter.
The position of Mr. Kennedy in vaccines has lent alarm for decades. But now it has become particularly notable, in a context of elevator of vaccines And worsening measles outbreaks and aviar flu, experts said.
The MMR vaccine, a combined product to prevent measles, papers and rubella that has been available since 1971, has long been a target of anti -vaccinas campaigns due to the refuted theory that it can cause autism. Mr. Kennedy has said that he would like to visit the problem again, partly to calm the fears of the parents that vaccines are not safe.
But he has hired David Geier to re -examine the data. Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, doctor and president of the Senate Health Committee, has abruptly criticized the decision to spend tax dollars testing an discredited hypothesis, even when the administration is reducing billions for other investigations.
“If we are giving money here,” he said last month, “that is less money that we have to pursue the real reason.”
The refusal to accept the scientific consensus is “disturbing, because then we get into a very strange territory where it is the feeling of someone who happens or does not happen, or does not work or does not work,” said Stephen Jameson, president of the American Association of Immunologists.
In interviews, Mr. Kennedy has minimized measles risks and has emphasized what he sees as the benefits of infection.
“Everyone obtained measles and measles gave protection of protected life against measles infection: the vaccine does not do that,” he said in an interview in Fox News.
Two doses of the MMR vaccine provide immunity of decades. And although the immunity of infection can last a lifetime, “people also suffer the consequences of that natural infection,” said Dr. Jameson.
A consequence was discovered only a few years: a measles infection can destroy the memory of the immune system of other invading pathogens, leaving the body vulnerable to them again.
Measles kills approximately 1 in 1,000 infected people, and 11 percent of those infected this year have been hospitalized, many of them children under 5, according to CDC Two girls, 6 and 8, died in western Texas.
On the contrary, side effects after vaccination are unusual. But Mr. Kennedy has suggested that people should appear in the risks before opting for the shot.
The writing implies that “if it is more informed, it could make a different decision,” said Dr. Jamieson, from the Annenberg Center.
Doctors have long waited for health secretaries and the CDC to order the generalized vaccination unequivocally in the middle of an outbreak, and in the past they have done so.
But Mr. Kennedy has talked with enthusiasm about cod liver oil, a steroid and an antibiotic that are not standard therapies. Some of these treatments may be making children more sick.
“The message I am seeing focuses on possible measles treatments,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, president of the Infectious Diseases Committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Closed doors
In his confirmation audience, Mr. Kennedy promised that CDC would not change Children’s vaccination program. Approximately two weeks later, he announced a new commission that would examine it.
The schedule is based on the recommendations of the Immunization Practices Advisory Committee, a panel of medical experts that review safety and effectiveness data, potential interactions with other medications and the ideal time to maximize protection.
In his confirmation hearing, Mr. Kennedy said that 97 percent of Atap members had conflicts of financial interests. For a long time, federal regulators have been compromised and hidden information about vaccines risks.
“It’s frankly false,” said Dr. O’Leary, who serves as a link with the Pediatric Academy Committee.
Mr. Kennedy’s statistics came from a 2009 report that found that 97 percent of the dissemination forms had errors, such as missing dates or information in the incorrect section.
In fact, ACIP members are carefully examined to obtain significant conflicts of interest, and cannot keep inventories or serve in advisory joints or speakers affiliated with vaccine manufacturers.
On the rare occasion that members have conflicts of indirect interests, for example, if an institution in which they work receives money from a medication manufacturer, reveal the conflict and withdraw from related votes.
The votes of the committee were public were already strongly discussed.
“When I was director of the CDC, people flew from Korea and from around the world to observe ACIP meetings, because they were a transparency model,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who directed the agency from 2009 to 2017.
Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly promised greater transparency and responsibility, but has proposed to end public comments on health policies.
His department canceled an ACIP meeting in February in which the members discussed vaccines for meningitis and flu, reprogramming it for April.
The department also canceled a meeting to discuss the seasonal flu vaccine. The officials met later without the agency’s scientific advisors.
“After all that conversation about how they want to be transparent, one of the first things it does is bring things to closed doors and reduce the number of public contributions we are obtaining,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.
In his confirmation hearing, Mr. Kennedy repeated a marginal theory that blacks black should not receive the same vaccines as others because “they have a much stronger reaction.”
Senator Angela Alsobrooks, Maryland’s Democrat, who is black, admonished him for his “dangerous” opinion: “Your voice would be a voice that parents would hear.”
Two weeks later, in a clinic for teenage mothers in Denver, a 19 -year -old woman rejected all vaccines for her and her 1 -year -old son, including measles and chickenpox shots that was supposed to have that day.
He told the pediatrician, Dr. Hana Smith, who described the incident, who had read online that vaccines were bad for people with more melanin on the skin.
There are residence of the opposite. Even so, it quickly became clear to Dr. Smith that nothing was going to change his patient’s opinion.
“No matter how much information can give it to the contrary, the damage is already done,” said Dr. Smith.
The wrong information is particularly difficult to counteract, said Dr. Smith, “when it is someone who has a leadership position, especially within the medical care system.”
