I had thought about writing about what in the beforetime (i.e., before COVID) a rather standard SBM topic involving “integrative medicine” and cancer, but then over the weekend I got an email announcing a MAHA Institute event taking place today in Washington DC, MEVI Round Table: Massive Epidemic of Vaccine Injury. (How I love made-up propaganda terms!) Upon seeing that, plus the agenda for the most recent meeting of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), I knew that, once again, just when I thought I was out (for a week) they pull me back in. Onward, then, to part 8 of my ongoing series about how US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines.
Yes, this roundtable includes a veritable who’s who of some of the most bonkers antivaxxers associated with the “make America healthy again” (MAHA) movement. Well, not quite. One name in particular stuck out to me. Regular readers of this blog will probably recognize which name that is very quickly: Wafik El-Deiry, MD, PhD, FACP. Dr. El-Deiry seems not to be antivax but also appears all too willing to lend his scientific gravitas to antivax cranks and increasingly does appear to be at least anti-COVID vaccine.
What do I mean by that? You might recall that Dr. El-Deiry is Associate Dean for Oncologic Sciences at the Warren Alpert Medical School and Director of the Legorreta Cancer Center, as well as Director of the Joint Program in Cancer Biology at Brown University. Unfortunately, he is also an oncologist who, although he should most definitely have known better, became enamored three years ago of the then-new (although not-so-new) antivax idea that COVID-19 vaccines were causing an epidemic of “turbo cancers.” I note that “turbo cancer” is a meaningless term scientifically. It’s also a term that didn’t exist before around 2021-22, having been coined by antivaxxers and, in particular, popularized by cancer quack William Makis, to describe a nonexistent fantasy epidemic of super-duper highly aggressive cancers supposedly caused by mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines. Most recently, two months ago I wrote about El-Deiry again because he had recently published a rather “speculative”—to be kind—review article that did a whole bunch of handwaving about biological mechanisms by which COVID-19 vaccines might cause cancer, without citing any actual reliable or convincing evidence to suggest that the vaccines do cause cancer, much less by the mechanisms proposed in his review, a review article that our current antivaxxer turned Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to like very much. Before that, I wrote about Dr. El-Deiry’s eagerness to embrace a biased study as more evidence that COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer.
The MAHA Institute “MEVI Roundtable” is bad enough, but its timing is not a coincidence. The CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is scheduled to meet next week, on March 18 and 19. Although a full agenda hasn’t been published, the notice in the federal register notes that topics to be considered include:
The agenda will include updates on ACIP Workgroups and discussions on COVID-19 vaccine injuries and Long-COVID and ACIP recommendation methodology. Recommendation votes may be scheduled for COVID-19 vaccine injuries and Long-COVID and ACIP recommendation methodology. Agenda items are subject to change as priorities dictate. For more information on the meeting agenda, visit https://www.cdc.gov/acip/meetings/index.html.
Yes, this time around ACIP will be all about the “vaccine injuries,” at least those perceived to be due to COVID-19 vaccines. Given that, it is difficult to interpret today’s “MEVI Roundtable” being held by the MAHA Institute as anything other than a warm-up to the ACIP meeting designed to seed the idea of “vaccine injury” into the public eye, whether the evidence supports vaccine causation or not. Of course, RFK Jr. has already fired the previous panel and replaced them with a wretched collection of antivax scum and villainy, as I documented when it happened. Despite the incompetence of the resulting reconstituted panel, ACIP nonetheless managed to chip away at vaccine recommendations, before RFK Jr. personally lopped off a bunch of vaccines from the list of CDC-recommended vaccinations in his effort to make America Denmark, not for any scientific or public health reason but mainly because Denmark recommends the fewest vaccines in the European Union. More recently, RFK Jr. has been adding more antivaxxers to the panel, including one who has explicitly stated that she is antivaccine.
Since it’s likely that the MAHA Institute’s “MEVI” Roundtable will drive the ACIP meeting agenda, it’w worth looking at the collection of cranks and quacks with whom Dr. El-Deiry has decided to associate, thus lending them some of his scientific credibility. Yes, I do realize that this is not the first time that he’s done this. For instance, he presented at a previous ACIP meeting as part of the working group on mRNA vaccines, promoting once again the unproven (and, arguably disproven) idea (I refuse to dignify it by calling it a “hypothesis”) that COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer. In his presentation, he included a lot of antivax tropes about COVID-19 vaccines supposedly causing cancer. On another occasion, he happily gave an interview to an antivax “journalist.” However, never before, to my knowledge, has he gone this far.
Wafik El-Deiry among the antivaxxers
I realize that regular readers are probably tired of my saying this, but there was a time when I really did admire Dr. El-Deiry for being what I considered to be the epitome of a physician-scientist. That time was in the 1990s, first when I was in graduate school, during which time El-Deiry published seminal work on p21 (p21WAF1/CIP1), a tumor suppressor activated by p53 (TP53) activity to stop normal cells from proliferating, and then in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when I did my fellowship and then started my first academic job as an assistant professor. Of late, I’ve been struggling to reconcile my former admiration with Dr. El-Deiry’s heel turn with respect to COVID-19 vaccines. This meeting might be the last straw. I realize that Dr. El-Deiry seems to become aware of everything written about him and thus any criticisms, so I’m just going to ask him right here: Do you know just how rabid a bunch of antivaxxers that you’ve decided to associate with at this round table. Let’s take a look at some of them:
- Del Bigtree, CEO, Informed Consent Action Network. I’ve written about Del Bigtree’s antivax activism more times than I can remember, dating back to when I first became aware of him when he worked with the godfather of the 21st century antivax movement, Andrew Wakefield, to produce an antivax propaganda epic disguised as a “documentary,” VAXXED. Let’s just say that Bigtree passionately believes that vaccines are harmful and do not work and that “natural immunity” is The Way, to the point that early in the pandemic he urged his followers to “catch this cold,” while victim blaming those at high risk for severe disease, hospitalization, and death as fat slobs who liked to drink and smoke too much (and thus deserved to be at high risk for complications) and were trying to make him “pharmaceutical-dependent.” Later in the pandemic, he feared the mRNA vaccines so much that he refused transfusions of “unvaccinated blood,” even though his hemoglobin level was dangerously low due to blood loss from hemorrhoids. Instead, he risked his life flying to a quack clinic in Mexico to get a transfusion of “unvaccinated blood.” Just a couple of weeks ago, Bigtree was the subject of a feature article in The Atlantic entitled, ‘I Genuinely Am Upset That Your Kids Are Vaccinated’, with the tagline: “Del Bigtree, a longtime ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., isn’t just anti-vaccine. He’s pro-infection.” (And so he is.) In the article, Bigtree is happily quoted as saying that he wants his children to catch measles and is considering driving to South Carolina, where there is a large outbreak, to achieve this. He also said that he prefers pertussis (whooping cough) to the pertussis vaccine, which he called a “crime against children.” He even said that he would prefer to live in a completely unvaccinated country, where children catch all the common vaccine-preventable infectious diseases (which, he says, aren’t that bad) and thereby get what he calls the “Ferrari of immunity,” compared to vaccine-induced immunity, which he likens to a Ford Pinto. Seriously, Dr. El-Deiry? Do you really want to associate yourself and your cancer center with Del Bigtree? But that’s not all…
- Mary Holland, CEO, Children’s Health Defense. Holland is an attorney who’s been a longtime antivax activist, to the point where she now runs RFK Jr.’s old antivax group. I’ve been documenting her activities for almost two decades, both here at SBM and at my not-so-super-secret other blog. She’s likened vaccine programs to Nazi atrocities, explicitly invoking the Nuremberg Code. (Nuremberg 2.0 is, of course, a favorite antivax talking point, in which trials for public health officials and pro-vaccine activists are called for, complete with prison and even hangings for those “found guilty.”) Dr. El-Deiry swears he’s “not antivax,” but someone who is “not antivax” would be unlikely to knowingly participate in a roundtable with the likes of Bigtree and Holland, but that’s not all…
- Toby Rogers, Brownstone Institute. Toby Rogers is one of the more deranged antivax activists out there; so of course he’s at the Brownstone Institute. Besides being a virulently anti-trans bigot, Rogers is the sort of conspiracy theorist that even fellow conspiracy theorists view askance as to bonkers. For instance, Rogers believes that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, was intentionally engineered by the “elites” in a plot to produce global depopulation, who made sure that it turned the world economy into a “negative sum game,” suppressed all evidence suggesting vaccine harm, and are now plotting to use CRISPR to alter the DNA and RNA of viruses to produce ever more virulent pathogens to kill humans with. The only reason ūber-crank Mike Adams still beats Toby Rogers—barely!—in terms of sheer nonsensical conspiracy theories is because Rogers doesn’t have aliens in his antivax conspiracy theory, while Adams most definitely does feature aliens plotting with the elites.
- Brian Hooker, PhD. Chief Scientific Officer, Children’s Health Defense. Brian Hooker is the antivax activist who birthed in 2014 what I liked to call the “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory. In brief, he betrayed the confidence of a CDC scientists with a grudge named William Thompson, who was unhappy about how a 2004 study was written and had several long phone calls with Hooker, who recorded them and then let Andrew Wakefield hear them. Wakefield, of course, blabbed by producing an inflammatory video, and thus was born the conspiracy theory, which has pretty much zero substance, as Dorit Reiss, René Najera, and I all explained when using the published transcripts of several of the phone calls. Hooker, unsurprisingly, incompetently “reanalyzed” the data from the study in question to “prove” that the MMR vaccine causes autism, producing a paper that was retracted by the original journal that published it and then republished again in one of the crankiest of crank journals. To give you a flavor of Hooker’s incompetence as an epidemiologist and statistician, let me just quote him: “So I reanalyzed the dataset using what is a very, very simple statistical technique. I think that in statistics simplicity is elegance. And I’m not really that smart; so I like to do simple, easy things rather than much more intellectually challenging things.” Yes, adjusting for obvious confounders is too complex for Hooker.
- Nicolas Hulscher, M.P.H., Epidemiologist & Administrator, McCullough Foundation. I haven’t written about Hulscher except mainly in passing. However, Peter McCullough is a cardiologist who went COVID contrarian and then later antivax during the pandemic. Lately, he’s been the chief scientific officer for The Wellness Company, where he shills for supplements to treat COVID-19 “vaccine injury” through “detoxification.” Let’s just say that that’s not a good sign regarding the scientific reliability of anyone associated with his foundation, nor is his having co-authored a McCullough Foundation “report” full of antivax tropes with not just Peter McCullough but…wait for it…Andrew Wakefield! When you allow your name to appear in the same author list as the fraudster Andrew Wakefield, you are antivaccine, wouldn’t you agree, Dr. El-Deiry? I’m also aware that Hulscher has apparently co-authored another “study” that’s been making the rounds, but I haven’t had a chance to read it. Somehow, I doubt that it will impress me.
- Kevin McKernan, Ph.D, CSO & Founder, Medical Genomics. Kevin McKernan is a scientist who, perhaps more than anyone else, has flogged the idea that there is massive contamination of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines with plasmid DNA from the manufacturing process, complete with “SV40.” (Funny how he, like many antivaxxers, implies that sequences from the SV40 promoter cause cancer when in reality it is the SV40 virus from which these promoter sequences were originally isolated that could cause cancer. Obviously, I can’t relitigate all of this here. I suggest these posts (1, 2) for my explanation why McKernan is an antivax crank publishing bad science to fear monger about COVID-19 vaccines. Unfortunately, Dr. El-Deiry seems to view McKernan as a straight-shooting scientist and has not applied adequate skepticism to his work, having cited McKernan’s work in his confabulation of a “review” article on COVID-19 vaccines and cancer a couple of months ago.
- Larry Palevsky, MD. Holistic Pediatrician. Larry Palevsky is a longtime antivax activist whose activity and quackery I’ve been documenting since years before the pandemic. I first “met” him when he appeared in the 2011 antivax “documentary” The Greater Good, in which he spewed forth some of the most brain-dead of antivax tropes. Basically, Palevsky is an endless font of antivaccine misinformation and someone who, in my not-so-humble opinion, should have lost his medical license a long time ago. Let’s just say that he is in favor of letting children suffer by not relieving their symptoms because, well, I’ll just quote him, “It’s hard for us to watch them ‘suffer,’ so we reflexively give them something to bring immediate relief. This reflexive response to suppress their symptoms, however, weakens them and delays their healing process,” because, “Acute symptoms, such as fever, vomiting, diarrhea, rash, cough, runny nose, mucus production and wheezing, are all important ways in which children discharge stored accumulations of wastes or toxins from their bodies” and, “Children, therefore, must be allowed to be sick, in order for them to get well.” Yes, he’s a monster.
- Elizabeth Mumper, M.D., President & CEO, Rimland Center for Integrative Medicine. Liz Mumper is another longtime antivax activist. About a year ago, when a child died of measles in the west Texas outbreak, she tried to imply that it must have been because the child was not healthy before and recommended unproven and disproven treatments like vitamin A, vitamin D, and vitamin C. Back in 2013, she was claiming to be able to prevent autism by not vaccinating or using antibiotics or acetaminophen, while citing a panoply of bad antivax studies, for instance, the one claiming that the number of vaccines in the schedule correlates with infant and childhood mortality. Unsurprisingly, she was casting doubt on COVID-19 vaccines only three months after they had first started rolling out. I could go on and on about Mumper. Suffice to say for now that she is antivax and, in my opinion, a quack.
- John Leake, Vice President, McCullough Foundation. I haven’t written about Leake much. However, I can say that he is quite the antivax conspiracy theorist himself, having asserted that the “greatest trick that powerful interest groups ever pulled was convincing the world that everyone who detects and reports their activities is a conspiracy theorist.” (A true sign of a conspiracy theorist.)
As for Dr. Joel Warsh and Maria Gutschi, I’m not going to say much because I’ve never heard of them before. I did briefly look at Warsh’s practice website, and it’s full of “integrative” quackery, such as functional medicine—or, as I like to call it, reams of useless tests in one hand, a huge invoice in the other—and “holistic medicine” that “encompasses the best of Eastern, Western and Functional Medicine.” I also found Gutschi’s Substack, and let me just say that it’s full of fear mongering, distortions, and misinformation about mRNA-based vaccines and the lipid nanoparticles that encompass the mRNA. I might have to add her to the folder of woo for future attention.
One can only imagine what will be discussed at this “roundtable.” Unfortunately, it’s on a Monday after I got back from a meeting in Phoenix Saturday, which means that I almost certainly won’t be able to watch the proceedings, which will likely be streamed. However, since I’ve written about most of the collection of cranks, quacks, and antivaxxers before, in some cases many times, I can pretty much predict a lot of what they will say, just as we can predict a lot of the antivax tropes that will flow at the ACIP meeting in a week and a half. Jake Scott, MD, over at CIDRAP has an excellent roundup, in which he notes that ACIP (to which I would add the MAHA Institute) are looking at an agenda “frozen in 2021” with respect to, at least, myocarditis attributed to the vaccine:
The evidence base on COVID-19 vaccine safety has evolved substantially over the past five years. The vaccines have changed. The virus has changed. The immunologic landscape of the population has changed. The surveillance data reflect all of this.
The March ACIP agenda does not. It is organized around concerns rooted in the early pandemic experience with original monovalent vaccines administered to an immunologically naive population against more pathogenic variants.
Those concerns were legitimate when they arose. They were investigated. They were acted on.
Continuing to focus on them in 2026, when the products in question are no longer on the market and their successors show no detectable safety signal, is not a serious engagement with the current evidence. It is a fixation on a historical grievance at the expense of present-day public health priorities.
Funny, but that sounds a lot like all the COVID-19 contrarians and antivaxxers still railing against “lockdowns” and masking, although their concerns were even less rooted in evidence.
Wither Dr. El-Deiry?
It occurs to me that Dr. El-Deiry is at a crossroads. Up until now, he’s been flirting with the antivax movement but trying to maintain his scientific respectability by not associating himself with anything other than a fairly milquetoast variant of the “turbo cancer” myth that he could justify based on his long history as a p53 researcher and early observations suggesting that spike protein could bind to p53 protein. As time has gone on, he’s branched out more, showing credulity to more outlandish antivax “science,” such as claims that DNA contamination left over from the manufacturing process of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines could integrate into genomic DNA in meaningful amounts and thereby cause cancer. Even so, he’s (mostly) kept his distance from the true antivax cranks, preferring instead to serve on a working group for the reconstituted ACIP, which at least allows him to claim a patina of legitimacy because he’s working for the CDC to analyze evidence.
Now he is set to dive head-first into the deep end of antivax crazy. Seriously, it doesn’t get much more antivax than this collection of quacks, cranks, antivaxxers, and conspiracy theorists, and they even made up a bogus name to imply that there is some sort of massive epidemic of “vaccine injury.” (There is not.) I wonder if Dr. El-Deiry at some level knows or senses this, as I’ve been perusing his social media and, as of last night, haven’t seen him mention his forthcoming participation in the MEVI Roundtable. In the past, he hasn’t been reticent about announcing such appearances on X, Facebook, etc.) Be that as it may, if Dr. El-Deiry participates in this roundtable, alongside the likes of Del Bigtree, Toby Rogers, Brian Hooker, and Mary Holland, among others, he will have crossed the Rubicon of antivax. There will be no turning back for him after that. As someone who was influenced by Dr. El-Deiry’s scientific contributions in the 1990s and forward, I really don’t want to see that but fear that he’s now too far in to back out at this late date.
Still, I keep hoping that Dr. El-Deiry will back out now, before it’s too late. As I keep saying, RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines, and the latest MAHA Institute “MEVI Roundtable” is just another part of that effort, as next week’s ACIP meeting will be. Does Dr. El-Deiry really want to be an accomplice in this effort? Again, I keep hoping that he does not, bur fear that he will continue to lend his scientific reputation to the dismantling of the vaccine program.
ADDENDUM: I had a few minutes in my office today near lunchtime; so I checked out the video and happened to land on Del Bigtree’s talk. Holy hell. In just the few minutes I watched, Bigtree was ranting, extrapolating from the false claim that only 1% of adverse events to vaccines are captured in VAERS, and practically yelling how studies by Hooker, Mawson, and Thomas are the bees’ knees but “They” are “suppressing” them. He even showed a trailer for his antivax propaganda “documentary” An Inconvenient Study. (Oh, and I had to sit through a long commercial for the “red root method,” which claims to cure vision loss. I might have to have David Weinberg take a look.)
Dr. El-Deiry, if you see this, let me just say a couple of things. First, I hope Bigtree’s talk made you very uncomfortable at the sheer lunacy he was spewing. Second, if you don’t disavow the conspiracy mongering antivax nonsense he spewed, I have to conclude that either you agree with much of it or that you lack the scientific integrity to speak out against it. Either you’re antivax (or at least antivax-adjacent) or you’re a useful idiot. (I’m not sure which is the case…yet. I’m also even more disappointed in you than I was before.)