When SBM founder Dr. Steve Novella wrote last week about how our new Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. last week had in essence fired all seventeen members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—the committee that makes recommendations for which vaccines should be included on the CDC immunization schedule, when people should receive them, and how many doses—starting his post noting that he was “sure you are as sick of reading about RFK Jr. as we are of writing about him, but this is the world we live in,” it’s incredibly difficult for me to disagree. I felt that deep in my bones. After all, I’ve been writing about RFK Jr. since he first “came out” as an antivax conspiracy theorist in 2005 with his unfortunately influential article Deadly Immunity, co-published in Salon.com and Rolling Stone, to the eternal shame of both outlets, a shame that they will never live down and that I remind them of nearly every time I write about this topic.
As hard as it is for me to believe, tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of the very first time I ever wrote about RFK Jr.’s antivax conspiracy-mongering. Two decades ago, I could never have imagined that such a fringe antivax conspiracy theorist would be put in charge of the entire non-military health apparatus of the US government. Who could have? Even a year ago, I could not have imagined this outcome, but such are the times that we live in. Unfortunately, we can’t ignore RFK Jr. given how he’s been systematically working to dismantle public health and biomedical research efforts in this country ever since he assumed the office of HHS Secretary four months ago. Moreover, Steve wrote his post before RFK Jr. announced eight picks to replace
I must admit that, although I foresaw that possibility that RFK Jr. might sack every member of ACIP, to replace them with his cronies, I was far too conservative in my estimation. ACIP members are appointed to staggered terms, and I speculated that RFK Jr. would replace each member whose term expired with his own antivax cronies, which would have meant that by 2028 he could replace the entire membership of ACIP. Again, although I envisioned the possibility that RFK Jr. might get rid of all 17 members of ACIP, there was a distinct failure of imagination on my part that he would be this bold. I won’t make that same mistake again, although I do realize that I will have to avoid the opposite mistake of going too far in the other direction.
This post will examine three things. First, I’ll look at the bogus rationale RFK Jr. cited for sacking all seventeen members of ACIP. Then I’ll look at the eight people chosen (so far) to replace them, at least two of which are antivax to the core—holy hell, one of them is Robert “inventor of mRNA vaccines” Malone and another of them is a member of Barbara Loe Fisher‘s antivax group National Vaccine Information Center!—while others are problematic for a number of reasons and could be veritable antivax Trojan horses. Finally, I’ll look at a couple of reactions to RFK Jr.’s picks, which provide a window into how we got here, with a rabid antivax conspiracy theorist and activist in charge of HHS.
A brief word about ACIP. The FDA licenses vaccines for use in the US, and anything that ACIP does will not change the FDA-approved status of existing vaccines. However, ACIP decides which vaccines are on the CDC-recommended schedule, and that has a lot of influence, as insurance compare not required to cover vaccines not on the schedule, and the the Vaccines for Children program does not fund vaccines not on the schedule. Thus, ACIP’s recommendations have enormous influence and removing vaccines from the CDC recommended schedule has the potential to make those vaccines much harder to obtain and, in essence, even unavailable for many people.
Destroying ACIP to save it?
It’s rather amusing to note that RFK Jr., got the compliant right wing lackeys running the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal to let him publish his announcement in an editorial, saying that he’s doing it all in the name of “restoring public trust in vaccines” and to “avoid conflicts of interest.” I suppose that it’s fitting that the editorial is behind a paywall, given that he has been claiming that under his leadership HHS and all its component organizations would be subject to “radical transparency.” Fortunately, I have Apple News, which let me read the whole putrid wall of text for your edification. RFK Jr. being RFK Jr., naturally he tried to deflect the blame, justifying his action thusly:
Vaccines have become a divisive issue in American politics, but there is one thing all parties can agree on: The U.S. faces a crisis of public trust. Whether toward health agencies, pharmaceutical companies or vaccines themselves, public confidence is waning.
Some would try to explain this away by blaming misinformation or antiscience attitudes. To do so, however, ignores a history of conflicts of interest, persecution of dissidents, a lack of curiosity, and skewed science that has plagued the vaccine regulatory apparatus for decades.
No, “to do so” is entirely right and proper. Who but RFK Jr. himself has had an outsized role in undermining public confidence in vaccines over the last 20 years in the US? He is, after all, arguably the most famous antivax activist in the word, and he’s a Kennedy! Seriously, he’s a veritable giant in the field of spreading misinformation and antiscience attitudes that undermine public confidence in vaccines. It’s what he does. It’s what he’s done for two decades. So are lying and breaking his promises, as RFK Jr. had had promised Sen. Bill Cassidy that he would not tamper with ACIP:
In early February, when there was still some question as to whether or not the Senate would confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Sen. Bill Cassidy delivered a closely watched speech on the Senate floor. The Louisiana Republican, a physician by trade, not only endorsed the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist during his remarks, he offered assurances about the future.
“If confirmed, [Kennedy] will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — without changes,” Cassidy declared with confidence, pointing to assurances he’d received directly from RFK Jr.
This cartoon comes to mind:
Charlie Brown and which one is Lucy.
When it comes to RFK Jr. and the decline in public confidence in vaccines, I’m reminded of this classic meme (click the link if you are unfamiliar with it):
Having falsely claimed that it was “conflicts of interest,” rather than exaggerations and misinformation about “conflicts of interest” and vaccine science spread by the likes of RFK Jr. that were responsible for the decline in public confidence in vaccines, RFK Jr. proposes his “remedy”:
That is why, under my direction, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is putting the restoration of public trust above any pro- or antivaccine agenda. The public must know that unbiased science guides the recommendations from our health agencies. This will ensure the American people receive the safest vaccines possible.
Today, we are taking a bold step in restoring public trust by totally reconstituting the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP). We are retiring the 17 current members of the committee, some of whom were last-minute appointees of the Biden administration. Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028.
That would have been so sad. Actually, ironically, I was very critical of the Biden administration for having let the membership of ACIP languish after the departure of some members and was actually happy that his HHS Secretary had appointed new members to bring it back up to a full contingent before President Biden left office.
Unsurprisingly, to bolster his false claim that ACIP is rife with COIs, RFK Jr. cites “investigations” dating back to 2000, the most recent of which was 2009:
In 2000 the House issued the results of an investigation of ACIP and another vaccine advisory committee under the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. It found that enforcement of its conflict-of-interest rules was weak to nonexistent. Committee members regularly participated in deliberations and advocated products in which they had a financial stake. The CDC issued conflict-of-interest waivers to every committee member. Four out of eight ACIP members who voted in 1997 on guidelines for the Rotashield vaccine, subsequently withdrawn because of severe adverse events, had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies developing other rotavirus vaccines. A 2009 HHS inspector-general report echoed these findings. Few committee members completed full conflict-of-interest forms—97% of them had omissions. The CDC took no significant action to remedy the omissions.
These conflicts of interest persist. Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines. The problem isn’t necessarily that ACIP members are corrupt. Most likely aim to serve the public interest as they understand it. The problem is their immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry
It’s an old antivax claim that RFK Jr. has been peddling for years and years. That “investigation,” such as it was, was carried out by Mark Benjamin at UPI. Truth be told, it was one that I hadn’t seen before. My only excuse is that the year 2000 was four years before I started blogging regularly about antivaccine propaganda. So I read his “investigation” with the perspective of my more than two decades of having dealt with antivax propaganda, and I found it…typical. Benjamin cited multiple antivax activists; e.g.,Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) and Barbara Loe Fisher, founder of the Orwellian-named National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), whom I like to refer to as the “grande dame of the American antivax movement.” He rehashed the Simpsonwood conspiracy theory that claimed that at a CDC meeting in suburban Atlanta in 2000 the CDC “covered up” data showing that vaccines containing thimerosal (a mercury-containing preservative) were associate with an elevated risk of autism. No such thing happened.
In fact, in my first post that ever went viral, uncoincidentally the first post I ever wrote about RFK Jr.’s antivax conspiracy mongering, I deconstructed all the misinformation and conspiracy mongering shortly after, as did others, who noted that the entire Simpsonwood transcript was not at all consistent with any effort to “cover up” a link between mercury and autism, but rather included a debate about how best to deal with confounders in a study by Verstraeten et al. (Of course, to antivaxxers, any adjustment for confounders that eliminates a link between vaccines and whatever bad health outcome that they attribute to vaccines is always a “coverup,” not science doing what science is supposed to do and being rigorous.) Years later, I referred to this as the Simpsonwood conspiracy theory and, sometimes, part of the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement, in which “They” (the CDC, government, FDA, medical profession, big pharma, and who knows who else—aliens, possibly) “know” that vaccines cause autism but actively work to cover up any incriminating evidence.
Let’s just say that I’m not at all impressed by the Benjamin report. I will give RFK Jr. credit for one thing, though. Notice what he wrote about Rotashield: “Four out of eight ACIP members who voted in 1997 on guidelines for the Rotashield vaccine, subsequently withdrawn because of severe adverse events, had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies developing other rotavirus vaccines.” In the past, antivaxxers would claim that Dr. Paul Offit, for instance, had a direct financial COI and had developed Rotashield. Personally, if anything, hearing this story I’d wonder if those with financial ties to pharmaceutical companies developing other rotavirus vaccines might have been biased against Rotashield. After all, their companies were making competing vaccines, and the first to market a vaccine for a disease for which no vaccine exists usually has a huge advantage over competitors. Seriously, RFK Jr. can’t even make sense in his insinuations of financial COIs from 28 years ago. Nor, apparently, can he back up his claims that ACIP members today are hopelessly compromised by their financial ties with pharmaceutical companies manufacturing vaccines, because of course he can’t.
Also, ACIP, as I’ve discussed before, has strict rules about conflicts of interest, and potential members are rigorously screened for such conflicts, and stringent measures are taken not only to assure technical compliance with ethics statutes and regulations regarding financial conflicts but also to address more general concerns regarding any potential appearance of conflict of interest:
People with specific vaccine-related interests at the time of application are not considered for appointment by the committee. Examples of such interests include direct employment of the can- didate or an immediate family member by a vaccine manufacturer or someone holding a patent on a vaccine or related product. In addition, before their names are submitted for final consideration, potential members are asked to resign for their term of member- ship from any activities that are, or could be construed as, conflicts of interest. These activities include provision of advisory or consult- ing services to a vaccine manufacturer or acceptance of honoraria or travel reimbursement from a vaccine manufacturer.
Members are required to file confidential financial reports every year with the Office of Government Ethics and to disclose publicly all vaccine-related interests and work, including participation in clinical trials, at each meeting. They must also declare conflicts at each meeting of a WG. Any single conflict, real or apparent, may serve to disqualify a participant from participating in a WG. WG members may receive confidential and proprietary information from the FDA or others to assist them in their discussions. When appropriate, they are therefore required to fulfill confidentiality requirements and, when required, sign non-disclosure forms prior to receiving such information.
If, despite all these safeguards, a conflict exists, limited waivers allow members to participate in committee discussions on con- dition that they are prohibited from voting on matters involving the specific or competing vaccine manufacturers. A member who develops an important conflict of interest during the 4-year term is required to resign from the ACIP.
It’s basically an antivaccine myth that the ACIP is totally corrupt and controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. I do suspect, though, that that will soon change given how many potential members favored by RFK Jr. have very real COIs through their financial connections to antivax organizations and the sale of supplements and various “treatments” for “vaccine injury.”
Unfortunately, in the intervening two decades since RFK Jr. took the Simpsonwood conspiracy theory, which had previously only been seen in the deepest, darkest recesses of the antivax movement, and popularized it in mainstream press, RFK Jr. has evolved from not just an antivax conspiracy theorist but to an all-purpose conspiracy theorist, embracing (of course) lab leak conspiracy theories, including one claiming that Ashkenazi Jews were immune to COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease, because it was an “ethnically targeted bioweapon.” As for being “not antivaccine,” I like to point out how since at least 2014 he was likening vaccination to the Holocaust, trying to persuade Samoan officials that the MMR vaccine was dangerous (in the middle of a deadly measles outbreak!), and claiming that today’s generation of children is the “sickest generation” (due to vaccines, of course!). Indeed, a few years ago his own family even called him out for his antivaccine activism, while, predictably, RFK Jr. has, as so many antivaxxers have done, gone all-in on COVID-19 pseudoscience and conspiracy theories and become anti-mask, “anti-lockdown,” and pro-quack treatments for COVID-19.
And now he’s HHS Secretary and gets to pick the members of ACIP.
Antivaxxers, Trojan horses, and the unqualified: RFK Jr.’s new ACIP thus far
Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for RFK Jr. to announce who the new members of ACIP would be, at least some of them. Specifically, he took to X, the hellsite formerly known as Twitter, to make the announcement:
Given that some of you probably don’t want to actually go to X to see his list, I’ll simply quote it here, along with how he describes each new member of ACIP, descriptions that are related to reality mainly by coincidence:
Joseph R. Hibbeln, MD, is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist with a career in clinical research, public health policy, and federal service. As former Acting Chief of the Section on Nutritional Neurosciences at the National Institutes of Health, he led research on immune regulation, neurodevelopment, and mental health. His work has informed U.S. public health guidelines, particularly in maternal and child health. With more than 120 peer-reviewed publications and extensive experience in federal advisory roles, Dr. Hibbeln brings expertise in immune-related outcomes, psychiatric conditions, and evidence-based public health strategies.
Martin Kulldorff, MD, PhD, is a biostatistician and epidemiologist formerly at Harvard Medical School and a leading expert in vaccine safety and infectious disease surveillance. He has served on the Food and Drug Administration’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Subgroup of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, where he contributed to national vaccine safety monitoring systems. Dr. Kulldorff developed widely used tools such as SaTScan and TreeScan for detecting disease outbreaks and vaccine adverse events. His expertise includes statistical methods for public health surveillance, immunization safety, and infectious disease epidemiology. He has also been an influential voice in public health policy, advocating for evidence-based approaches to pandemic response.
Retsef Levi, PhD, is the Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a leading expert in healthcare analytics, risk management, and vaccine safety. He has served as Faculty Director of MIT Sloan’s Food Supply Chain Analytics and Sensing Initiative and co-led the Leaders for Global Operations Program. Dr. Levi has collaborated with public health agencies to evaluate vaccine safety, including co-authoring studies on mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and their association with cardiovascular risks. His research has contributed to discussions on vaccine manufacturing processes, safety surveillance, and public health policy. Dr. Levi has also served on advisory committees and engaged in policy discussions concerning vaccine safety and efficacy. His expertise spans healthcare systems optimization, epidemiologic modeling, and the application of AI and data science in public health. Dr. Levi’s work continues to inform national and international debates on immunization safety and health system resilience.
Robert W. Malone, MD, is a physician-scientist and biochemist known for his early contributions to mRNA vaccine technology. He conducted foundational research in the late 1980s on lipid-mediated mRNA delivery, which laid the groundwork for later developments in mRNA-based therapeutics. Dr. Malone has held academic positions at institutions including the University of California, Davis, and the University of Maryland, and has served in advisory roles for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense. His expertise spans molecular biology, immunology, and vaccine development.
Cody Meissner, MD, is a Professor of Pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and a nationally recognized expert in pediatric infectious diseases and vaccine policy. He has served as Section Chief of Pediatric Infectious Disease at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and has held advisory roles with both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Dr. Meissner has been a voting member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, where he has contributed to national immunization guidelines and regulatory decisions. His expertise spans vaccine development, immunization safety, and pediatric infectious disease epidemiology. Dr. Meissner has also been a contributing author to American Academy of Pediatrics policy statements and immunization schedules, helping shape national standards for pediatric care.
James Pagano, MD, is a board-certified Emergency Medicine physician with over 40 years of clinical experience following his residency at UCLA. He has worked in diverse emergency settings, from Level 1 trauma centers to small community hospitals, caring for patients across all age groups, including infants, pregnant women, and the elderly. Dr. Pagono served on multiple hospital committees, including utilization review, critical care, and medical executive boards. He is strong advocate for evidence-based medicine.
Vicky Pebsworth, OP, PhD, RN, earned a doctorate in public health and nursing from the University of Michigan. She has worked in the healthcare field for more than 45 years, serving in various capacities, including critical care nurse, healthcare administrator, health policy analyst, and research scientist with a focus on public health policy, bioethics, and vaccine safety. She is the Pacific Region Director of the National Association of Catholic Nurses. She is a former member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee and the National Vaccine Advisory Committee’s 2009 H1N1 Vaccine Safety Risk Assessment Working Group and Vaccine Safety Working Group (Epidemiology and Implementation Subcommittees).
Michael A. Ross, MD, is a Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University, with a career spanning clinical medicine, research, and public health policy. He has served on the CDC’s Advisory Committee for the Prevention of Breast and Cervical Cancer, where he contributed to national strategies for cancer prevention and early detection, including those involving HPV immunization. With research experience in hormone therapies, antibiotic trials, and immune-related conditions such as breast cancer prevention, Dr. Ross has engaged in clinical investigations with immunologic relevance. He has advised major professional organizations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and contributed to federal advocacy efforts around women’s health and preventive care. His continued service on biotech and healthcare boards reflects his commitment to advancing innovation in immunology, reproductive medicine, and public health.
Regular readers will immediately recognize some names; so I’ll start with them and then work my way down the list to the less “famous.” Before I do that, however, let me just note that only one of them has what one could accurately characterize as in-depth subject-level expertise about vaccines and infectious disease. Unfortunately, as you will see, despite that background he nonetheless associated himself with the right wing “free market” think tank, the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) and ultimately co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration. The GBD was an October 2020 declaration that Kulldorff co-authored with another of RFK Jr.’s picks that advocated a “let ‘er rip” approach to the pandemic among the “young” and “healthy,” with a bogus “focused protection” of the elderly and those with chronic health problems that put them at high risk of complications and death from COVID-19. Unfortunately, there was no concrete plan for “focused protection,” and the GBD would never have worked. It did, however, do serious damage to public health in many ways. I referred to the plan from the beginning as profoundly social Darwinist/eugenicist, and I stand by that. Another “tell” is that four of these members are given acknowledgments in RFK Jr.’s conspiracy-fest of a book, The Real Anthony Fauci.
In any event, let’s start with Dr. Robert Malone:
Robert Malone MD. As I mentioned, Dr. Robert “inventor of mRNA vaccines” Malone is a scientist who has parlayed his apparent involvement 35 years ago in early attempts to use liposomal vectors to introduce mRNA constructs into muscle and induce muscle cells to make gene product into a career in the COVID-19 contrarian and later COVID-19 antivax crowd. I like to note that at around the same time Dr. Malone was doing these experiments (late 1980s and early 1990s), one of the graduate students in the lab where I did my PhD work was doing similar experiments, but with DNA vectors. Since 2020 Dr. Malone has become a rabidly antivax conspiracy theorist whose bruised ego over not getting the credit that he thinks he deserves led him to claim that Wikipedia had “censored” attempts to give him his due (including someone who turned out to be his wife) and to become rabidly anti-COVID-19 vaccination, leading him to claim repeatedly that COVID vaccines have killed far more people than than COVID. Later, Malone became more generally antivax, saying at an antivax conference three years ago:
…I was not in any way endorsing our current vaccine schedule. For me as a vaccinologist who has often assumed—has integrated—a belief system that I was brought up in about the efficacy and utility of childhood vaccines, I had a moment of epiphany when I sat down with Candace Owens and we talked about what the temporal relationship has been with many of these classic pediatric diseases and their quenching in the population, which was more concurrent with implementation of modern public health and sanitation practices than it was with implementation of vaccines. And yet the industry has taught me and many of us that there was a causal relationship when in fact it was correlation, which is one of the big flaws we’ve seen again and again, conflating correlation with causation.
If you’re interested in just how far down the antivax conspiracy rabbit hole Malone has gone, simply peruse his Substack, which is chock full of right wing conspiracy theories about more than just vaccines and COVID-19. Just Saturday, he published a post by Sofia Karstens entitled The Apex Predator of Captured Science. Yes, it’s all about Malone and how, great hero that he is, didn’t want to take a position in the government but had to be persuaded, oh-so-reluctantly, to join ACIP:
He didn’t seek a federal appointment, but when Kennedy asked him – with the moral urgency of a country in collapse – Malone chose service over safety. He strapped back into his armor not for ambition, but out of obligation. And that’s precisely what makes him so dangerous to the institutional elite. He doesn’t need them. He can’t be bought. And he knows how to beat them.
Dr. Malone’s appointment triggered a predictable media offensive, laced with insinuation and omission. Major outlets, operating in lockstep, flooded the digital landscape with headlines crafted to imply fraud without making refutable claims. Phrases like “played an early role in mRNA development…” and “claims to have invented…” flooded search results. They planted seeds of doubt without offering substance – classic psyop strategy.
Let’s make this plain: the establishment isn’t reacting this way because Dr. Malone lacks credibility. They’re reacting this way because he threatens everything upon which they rely to maintain control.
No, as I’ve discussed a number of times both here and at my not-so-secret other blog, Malone is a full-fledged antivax conspiracy theorist with a grudge. Indeed, I didn’t predict him because I thought he had become toxic due to a feud he’s been having with a number of prominent antivaxxers over the last couple of years, but clearly I erred there too, as RFK Jr. seems to have picked a side. After all, Malone was one of the “brave maverick doctors” who got a shout-out in the acknowledgments of his Fauci book.
Martin Kulldorff, PhD. Martin Kulldorff is a biostatistician and epidemiologist who is also, of course, one of the three authors, of the Great Barrington Declaration, along with new NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. Since I’ve already discussed the GBD above, I’ll just add that Kulldorff has also become anti-COVID-19 vaccine and has parroted antivax tropes about “natural immunity” being superior to any vaccine-induced immunity. He has also posted images like this demanding a “Nuremberg 2.0” against “lockdowners” and those who promoted masking and vaccination:
He also likened efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation to the Salem witch trials:
I suspect we know which way these guys will vote on COVID-19 vaccines and lots of other vaccines. Malone, too, was one of the “brave maverick doctors” who got a shout-out in the acknowledgments of his Fauci book, and the next ACIP member is a nurse who also got one.
Vicky Pebsworth, RN. I didn’t recognize Vicky Pebsworth at first, until I realized that she was formally known as Vicky DeBold. She is a longtime member of the NVIC, arguably the oldest antivax organization that’s been continuously in existence, having been formed in 1982, currently serving on its board of directors and in the role of Director of Research and Patient Safety. Pebsworth has likely been antivax longer than RFK Jr. Embarrassingly, she comes from my alma matter, the University of Michigan, having received her doctoral degree there in 1999 from the School of Public Health (Health Services Organization and Policy) and School of Nursing (Health Systems Administration). Her antivax origin story is described thusly:
Her son — her only child — experienced serious, long-term health problems following receipt of seven live virus and killed bacterial vaccines administered during his 15-month well-baby visit which sparked her interest in vaccine safety research and policymaking and chronic illness and disability in children.
She very much believes that her son was made autistic by vaccines. Pebsworth was a “pioneer,” if you will, in fearmongering about “DNA contamination” in vaccines. This quote, for instance, is from 2012:
Well, I think there’s a lot of danger, because we don’t know what portion of the DNA can be incorporated into our own genome. We don’t know what portion could be heritable to our children. We also don’t know what happens when the immune system is exposed to DNA that has been recombined in lots of ways that the human body, through the course of time, has never had any exposure to, and what diseases – diseases of the immune system – may occur because of these exposures.
And:
I think the use of foreign DNA in various forms has a potential to cause a great deal of trouble. Not only because there is the potential for it to recombine with our own DNA, but there is the potential for it to turn the DNA’s switches, the epigenetic parts of the DNA, on and off. I think that we’re still in a place where there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to figure out what the short and long-term effects of this type of DNA are on people who have lots of different genetic makeups.
Sound familiar?
Yes, DeBold was protecting her child’s “essence” from contamination by those evil genetically modified vaccines and organisms, a decade before the COVID-19 era antivaxxers were declaring the unvaccinated to be Purebloods. Naturally, she’s been all-in on antivax tropes about “autoimmunity” and autism as well:
We ask that the government begin to fund research that evaluates the effect of vaccination, against no vaccines at all, on biomarkers of immunity, biomarkers for metabolic dysfunction, neuro-developmental outcomes, including autism, immune-mediated illnesses of all sorts, autoimmunity, allergies, asthma, epilepsy, intellectual and learning disabilities, all the things that we know are epidemic in our children. We ask for all of that
Of course she does. I think we know which way she’ll vote on pretty much any vaccine recommendation.
Cody Meissner, MD. At first, I was puzzled—and even somewhat relieved—by this choice, as on the surface he is the only member in RFK Jr.’s initial slate who has the necessary subject-level expertise to serve on ACIP. Indeed, he’s previously served on ACIP and the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), which advises the FDA Commissioner regarding which vaccines and biologics should receive FDA approval and licensure. So why is he on ACIP again? One big hint should be that he, too, is listed among the brave maverick docs who got shout-outs in RFK Jr.’s book, a strong indication that he’s changed. But how?
One way that he’s made himself acceptable to RFK Jr. is that he’s argued against vaccinating children against COVID-19 and, of course, he’s antimask:
He was an ACIP member of ACIP from 2008 to 2012 and has served on the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biologic Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) and as chair of the HHS’s Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. During the pandemic, Meissner cowrote an editorial with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary arguing against masks for children.
While he has credited vaccines for saving millions of lives and praised COVID-19 vaccines, he recently told Reuters that he supports Kennedy’s decision to not recommend COVID-19 vaccination for healthy children and pregnant women. He also has characterized the US vaccine-event reporting system as “pretty good” and praised Peter Marks, the FDA vaccine regulator ousted by Kennedy.
He is also against vaccinating the pregnant.
To me, Meissner looks like one of the “Trojan horses.” He seems reasonable on the surface, but has clearly started to dip his toe into the ocean of COVID misinformation about masking, vaccines, and the like. Also, as our very own Dr. Jonathan Howard pointed out, Meissner signed the GBD and was invited to the White House in August 2020 by Dr. Scott Atlas to meet with President Trump about the pandemic, along with GBD authors Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, antivax crank and quack Joseph Ladapo,
Look for Meissner to be one of the “reasonable” voices on ACIP who is still nonetheless supportive of the less radical antivax positions that children and pregnant people shouldn’t receive COVID-19 vaccines, as well as GBD-related positions like being anti-mask and anti-“lockdown.”
Retsef Levi, MD. Dr. Levi is an MIT risk-analytics professor, know for having recorded a viral video that urged the “immediate suspension” of mRNA vaccines, citing alleged cardiac death signals later debunked for methodological flaws. Levi lacks formal training in immunology and faces an expression-of-concern on one of his vaccine-mortality pre-prints. He has written several studies casting doubt on COVID-19 vaccines that were criticized by others. He’s known for having published a bogus “study” full of methodological flaws based on Israeli data that claimed to have detected a “death signal,” saying things like this on X:
Levi is definitely antivax:
His science is also pretty poor.
Now we get into the more obscure proposed members. I’ll start with one of the most obscure.
James Pagano, MD. I had never heard of Dr. Pagano before, and, unlike many of the other ACIP appointees, he has minimal online references and social media presence. He is a retired emergency medicine physician, and his website is http://jamesvpagano.com. His blog there has been fallow since 2017, and these days he seems to be promoting music that he writes and thrillers that he has authored, such as The Bleed and The Drain. The latter is about “money, medicine, miracles, and a doctor’s pursuit of happiness in spite of all that.” His X/Twitter account has some hot takes like:
And:
And:
Nice guy, right? Still, that’s not much information to go on. Nowhere could I find any evidence of deep expertise in the topics regarding vaccines that ACIP normally debates and decides. I have heard from others that he promoted ivermectin to treat COVID-19, which, if true, would fit with his being chosen by RFK Jr., but I haven’t been able to find evidence myself to verify this. If you know of any, please post it in the comments!
Michael A. Ross, MD. I hadn’t heard of Dr. Ross, either; so I’ll quote a bit about him:
…a physician in Virginia and a former professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Virginia Commonwealth University and a pediatrics professor at George Washington University (GWU), earned his medical degree at GWU.
He has been a board member, advisor, and executive at a broad array of private healthcare and life-science firms and health groups, mostly recently as chief medical officer at the Maryland startup Manta Pharma. An operating partner at the healthcare investment company Havencrest for the past 7 years, he was a presidential appointee on the CDC’s Committee for Prevention of Breast and Cervical Cancer, according to his company profile.
Ross has also advised LarreaRX, a supplement manufacturer, and worked for India-based Cadila Pharmaceuticals, his LinkedIn profile says. He lists his specialties as contact lenses, international business, healthcare and pharmaceutical executive management, and pharmaceutical consulting.
His only publication in a scientific journal was a coauthored open letter to JAMA flagging a study published in the journal that found that the drug ivermectin didn’t speed time to symptom resolution in patients with mild COVID-19 as “fatally flawed.”
The letter reads, in part, “We oppose this fixation on randomized controlled trials at the expense of other clinical and scientific evidence and urge medical policymakers to restore balance to the practice of medicine.”
Given the RFK Jr’s emphasis on a more “fluid concept of evidence,” selectively applied to support conclusions that he agrees with, it sounds as though Dr. Ross will fit right in. One does note that RFK Jr. is also rather selective in his attacks on “conflicts of interest.” Apparently any COI involving big pharma is bad, but COIs involving supplement companies and suing vaccine manufactures, such as serving as expert witnesses for the plaintiffs in such lawsuits, is just ducky. In any event, I’ve thus far failed to find any evidence that Dr. Ross has any relevant qualifications to be on ACIP.
Also, per CBS News:
Ross is described by Kennedy as an obstetrics and gynecology professor at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University, though his name does not appear on directories for either university.
“Dr. Michael Ross has not held a faculty appointment at the George Washington University since 2017,” Katelyn Deckelbaum, a spokesperson for the university, told CBS News in an email.
Deckelbaum said that Ross was previously a clinical professor, but stopped teaching medical students or residents at the university.
It’s not that hard to be named a clinical professor at a medical school, as any medical school full time faculty member will know. Usually, all it requires is being a licensed MD with a clean record with the state medical board and being willing to have medical students rotate at your practice.
Joseph R. Hibbeln, MD. This is another appointee whom I hadn’t heard of before. On his LinkedIn, he describes himself as a psychiatrist and a “nutritional neuroscientist.” He appears to be a career omega-3 researcher with zero peer-reviewed publications related to vaccines that I can find. He also sits on the Seafood Nutrition Partnership’s advisory council, announced in this Instagram post a couple of years ago:
Although I can’t say for sure, that bit about him practicing as a psychiatrist could be innocent, or it could be a bit woo-ful. I’ll have to look into it more. He did recently co-author a commentary arguing that current federal warnings about mercury in fish are depriving children of neurolipids necessary for brain and eye development as well as a paper arguing that eating more fish did more good than methylmercury in fish did harm, which, I admit, could be amusing with respect to RFK Jr.’s belief that mercury in vaccines pre-2001 was responsible for an “autism epidemic.” Indeed, one wonders if RFK Jr. is even aware that his recent publication volume seems to argue that methylmercury is less dangerous to children than it’s traditionally been viewed.
My impression is that Dr. Hibbeln is probably not antivaccine. Rather, he strikes me as a “MAHA appointee” in that he seems to be big into nutrition as a treatment for neurological conditions. For example, he has co-authored a study testing omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids as a preventative for bipolar disorder. Ironically, it was a negative study. In any event, he has no relevant qualifications to be on ACIP that I can find, given that ACIP requires “scientific knowledge of vaccines, immunization, and/or immunization programs.”
Come to think of it, the way to look at this new panel is that four (Pebsworth, Malone, Levi, and Kulldorff) are antivax, one is qualified but a COVID-19 contrarian (Meissner) who opposes vaccinating children and pregnant people against COVID-19, and the remaining three (Ross, Hibbeln, and Pagano) are utterly unqualified to be on ACIP.
Do any of these new ACIP members deserve the benefit of the doubt?
If there’s one thing that’s irritated me since the list of new ACIP members was announced last Wednesday, it’s bene the reaction of some usually science-based scientists and doctors to the announcement. All of them acknowledge that Dr. Malone and Ms. DeBold are antivax, but then they do mental contortions to tell themselves that it could be alright. Indeed, I was shocked to see a longtime hero of mine, Dr. Paul Offit, a man who’s championed vaccines since long before I was even aware that there was a large antivax movement, was quoted thusly in a MedPage Today article about the new ACIP:
Paul Offit, MD, a vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, was most concerned about Pebsworth and Malone, who, he said, “is a clear anti-vaccine activist.” As for the rest, “they seem reasonable — what they lack, it seems to me, is the kind of expertise or experience in vaccines that was on that committee. I think we lost experience, expertise, and institutional memory, and so I think we’ve taken a giant step backward in terms of the kind of advice that we’re going to be getting. And I wonder whether the medical and scientific community will look at this committee now and not trust their advice.”
Seriously, Dr. Offit, I admire you to death for your vaccine advocacy, but how can you be unaware of what Kulldorff’s been saying and doing since the GBD was published and how he was for a time the scientific advisor for the COVID-19 contrarian and antivax right wing think tank the Brownstone Institute, formed by the now rabidly antivax (and neo-Confederate hack) Jeffrey Tucker? How could you not be aware of Dr. Levi’s awful studies and his numerous postings on social media fear mongering about COVID-19 vaccines as being more dangerous than COVID-19? I realize that Dr. Meissner was once a respectable legitimate vaccine scientists, but how could Dr. Offit be unaware of Dr. Meissner’s heel turn during the pandemioc into COVID-19 contrarianism, GBD “natural herd immunity” approaches, and anti-masking? Dr. Offit is, of course, correct that, aside from Meissner, all of RFK Jr.’s picks are unqualified and will degrade the expertise and institutional memory of the CDC and ACIP, but his statement comes across as whistling past the graveyard, especially if he’s relying on gauzy memories of the way things were a decade ago.
Even worse is Dr. Michael Mina’s post on LinkedIn:
His assessment on some of these people is so wrong that it’s not even wrong. While, like Dr. Offit, he does realize that Malone and Pebsworth are antivax to the core, how the hell does he think that having them on ACIP might “force ACIP to sharpen and clarify its reasoning publicly” or “force open conversations about hesitancy”? Has he not been paying attention to ACIP the last 20 years? Vaccine hesitancy comes up frequently, particularly in the public comments. His post comes across like that of someone who superficially paid attention to the antivax movement, but didn’t really pay attention.
As for the rest, Kulldorff “unfairly treated”? A “critical thinker”? “A bit of a wild card but not unscientific”? Holy hell, has Mina read the sorts of things Kulldorff has been writing and saying over the last four and a half years? If Dr. Mina happens to read this post, I urge him to read my section above on Kulldorff. I can provide many more examples. If anything, he was not treated harshly enough, he is definitely not a “critical thinker” anymore, and he has definitely become unscientific. In case anyone needs to be reminded, Martin Kulldorff was every bit the driving force behind the GBD as Jeffrey Tucker and the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), the right-wing think tank with which he was affiliated at the time before founding the Brownstone Institute. Meanwhile, Levi was one of the first to promote fear mongering about vaccine-induced myocarditis from the vaccines through badly designed scientific studies that promoted the antivax “died suddenly” narrative. The rest, as Mina himself notes, are utterly unqualified. They will not be “probably fine.” They will likely be too ignorant of the relevant issues to push back against the antivax fear mongering of the majority of the panel.
Even Atul Gawande fell for it, posting this after Dr. Mina had posted a version of his LinkedIn post to X:
Not really, Dr. Gawande. Still, in fairness, faced with massive criticism of his take, Dr. Mina did back down, but only a little bit. He gets part right, but a lot wrong:
Yes, he does. RFK Jr. most certainly does plan to use the remaining three and a half years of the second Trump administration to do his utmost as HHS Secretary to undermine vaccines. In fact, I will go further than that. (See below.) At least, Mina is correct that RFK Jr. is only getting started. After all, he could name up to 11 more members to the panel, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he named antivaxxers like Brian Hooker, James Lyons-Weiler, William Thompson, Paul Thomas, or Peter Doshi in the next round. (Hell, I wouldn’t even exclude the possibility that he might name Andrew Wakefield.) Hopefully, though, Dr. Mina come around; at least he’s appears to have started the process, but he clearly has a ways to go, if this comment he made on LinkedIn in response to criticism of his being way too easy on Levi is any indication:
But I’m trying to look beyond Covid. A lot happened w Covid and a lot of behaviors were out of the ordinary and wrt Covid remain out of the ordinary. I’m getting a bit tired of the “establishment” judging many people’s entire careers on their response to Covid. Especially since this is happening in a lopsided way. If you had a view that didn’t fit everyone else’s view you are essentially damned. Outside if Covid, disagreements, even serious ones, have been celebrated or at least encouraged. But god forbid someone has an idea that is outside the routine commentary for Covid… they must not be able to think and their entire value as a critical thinker is thrown out the window.
I saw this happen to me and I was on the verge of everyone in my lab medicine discipline thinking I was insane for driving forward forward rapid tests because they were “bad”tests. Thankfully for me people came around to what I was saying. But it didn’t have to be that way. And there group think of academics could have swept me away.
I’m going to start speaking out against this type of group think. It’s dangerous. Whether Retsef or others can take on the position should be viewed through the arc of their career.
To a point. Only to a point. When becoming COVID-19 “contrarian” and antivax has taken over a scientist’s entire career and identity, as it has with Levi, then I really don’t give a rodent’s posterior if they had been awesome scientists for many decades before they went quack. I’ve said it of Nobel Laureates like Luc Montagnier, who went antivax several years before his passing, and of Linus Pauling, who fell into the quackery claiming that vitamin C can cure cancer and the common cold. Let’s just say that Kulldorff, Meissner, and Levi are no Montagnier or Pauling. It’s not “groupthink” to call out bad science, pseudoscience, and nonsense when you see it, and I refuse to accept Mina’s framing.
What does this mean?
I wrote at the beginning of this post that I would try not to make the opposite mistake from the one that I made when I failed to predict that Malone would be chosen or that RFK Jr. would be bold enough to fire every ACIP member and replace them with his own sycophants, toadies, and lackeys, With that in mind, I still think that this new ACIP is yet another tool that RFK Jr. will use to eliminate every vaccine he can, and, if he can, all vaccines currently on the CDC schedule. Half the panel is definitely antivax, and one has become COVID-19 antivax-adjacent at least, while the remaining three are utterly unqualified and therefore likely to be swayed by antivax arguments because they lack the deep subject-level knowledge about vaccines, infectious disease, and epidemiology to recognize misinformation when they see it, all while likely being sympathetic—or at least receptive—to the sorts of antivax arguments the antivax members of the panel will make. Moreover, we do not know whom else RFK Jr. will appoint, as the panel previously had 17 members and, if I remember correctly, can have up to 19 members.
I don’t think that I am making that opposite mistake when I leave you with this warning: Do not underestimate RFK Jr.’s determination to eliminate access to all vaccines—yes, all vaccines. He is antivax to the core and has been so since at least 2005, no matter how much his stans try to latch onto what they like about his “make America healthy again” (MAHA) agenda, like the emphasis on tackling obesity and unhealthy diets (never mind that it doesn’t really do even that) and assiduously whistling past the graveyard when it comes to RFK Jr.’s two decade history of rabid antivax activism. Being antivax to the core, RFK Jr.’s endgame is to eliminate access to all vaccines or, failing that, to make access to them as difficult as possible and to stoke as much fear, uncertainty, and doubt about them as he can, the goal being that people will fear vaccines more than they fear the diseases that vaccines prevent, at least until these diseases come roaring back as vaccine uptake plummets.
I hope everyone is up-to-date on their vaccines. I am now, having gone to my primary care doctor on Friday and urged him to hit me up with any vaccine for that I was eligible for or behind on. I urge our readers to do the same now, while you still can, for yourself and your children. In the meantime, being fortunate enough to live in the Detroit area and work at a hospital a mere two miles from the Detroit River, where I can literally see Canada behind my panoramic view of downtown Detroit, I am plotting ways to cross the border into Canada and pay to get the vaccines I need. The thing that depresses the hell out of me is that I know my privilege. Most people do not have the advantages of proximity to an international border and well above-average financial wherewithal that I do. I know that, and I feel it.
And, no, I do not think that I am exaggerating. I’ve been predicting this ever since RFK Jr. was appointed HHS Secretary, and he’s moving even faster and more boldly than I thought he would to implement his endgame of eliminating vaccines, starting with COVID vaccines. He’s long claimed that vaccines do more harm than good. Unfortunately, I fear that we are about to find out how wrong he is the hard way.