Some tactics of antivax disinformation are eternal, or at least they seem that way. Once again, I had been hoping not to write about the antivax activist who is now our Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., yet again. (No, seriously, I really need to get my not-so-super-secret other blog up and running again, so that I’m not restricted to once-a-week posts.) Then, as all too frequently seems to happen between Mondays, news from the hellscape that is now US public health, medicine, and biomedical research compelled me:
As I said, some techniques of antivax disinformation remain seemingly eternal, or at least as “eternal” as the two decades that I’ve been writing about RFK Jr.’s antivax crusade now seems. Moreover, I keep seeing people who should know better, like Prof. Wafik El-Deiry, a scientist whose pioneering work in the 1990s on tumor suppressor genes was one of the influences on my early scientific development when I was a graduate student and who is now the director of a cancer center and about whose tendency to be receptive to COVID-19 misinformation I’ve discussed before. In particular, he seems far too receptive (for a cancer expert) to the utter nonsense that is William Makis‘ claim that COVID-19 vaccines cause “turbo cancers.” I’m not going to relitigate that piece of antivax misinformation other than to say that the claims that vaccines cause cancer or contain DNA contamination that can “integrate” into your DNA to cause all sorts of other complications are not new either. They long predate mRNA vaccines, in particular for HPV vaccines. (Indeed, we had a mocking term for antivax claims that “fetal DNA” from the cells used to make the HPV used to make the vaccine, homologous recombinaltion tiniker.
Instead, let’s talk about VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System) yet again, as regular readers will no doubt recognize this technique. Still, I think it’s worth discussing yet again, with a history of antivax weaponization of VAERS reports and an update on how RFK Jr. and antivaxxers appear to be ready to use this old technique to sow doubt about vaccines and justify restricting or eliminating them, given that it’s been nearly four years since I last wrote a more general treatment of this technique and the disinformation ecosystem has changed since then in that now antivaxxers are in charge of HHS and all non-military federal medical, public health, and biomedical research programs.
At this point, it also seems prudent to me to remind you yet again that RFK Jr. is definitely working hard to take away as many of your vaccines as he possibly can during his tenure as HHS Secretary. I’ve even described in detail how he will do it starting in February, and, damn, if it isn’t depressing how accurate my predictions have been so far, hence my deciding to write a followup to the last time I posted that RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines a couple of weeks ago. I realize that there are a depressing number of doctors out there who don’t believe me when I say this, even though I base my conclusion on having observed and written about RFK Jr. since 2005. Indeed, the esteemed Prof. El-Deiry didn’t believe me:
As I said before, it is frustrating how oblivious some of my colleagues, even highly respected ones, are to RFK Jr.’s history over the last two decades and how much he lies—and has always lied. I would also refer Prof. El-Deiry to what antivaxxers like RFK Jr. really mean when they say “informed consent.”
Onward to the current story, after which I’ll contextualize it by discussing the history of antivax use, misuse, and abuse of VAERS as a propaganda tool to falsely attribute specific injuries to vaccines.
With RFK Jr. in charge of VAERS, everything old is new again
Let’s start out by looking at the NYT article cited by Prof. El-Deiry, F.D.A. Reviews Reports of Covid Vaccine Deaths, where it notes that the FDA plans to “highlight possible links between the shots and accounts of deaths involving children and birth defects to an influential C.D.C. panel meeting next week.” Regular readers will immediately recognize that the “influential CDC panel” that’s going to meet this week is the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). You might also remember that, before the very first ACIP meeting of the Trump administration, RFK Jr. carried out an unprecedented purge of all 17 members, replacing them with antivaxxers like Dr. Robert “Inventor of mRNA Vaccines” Malone, and laying the groundwork to start shedding vaccines from the CDC recommended childhood and adult vaccine schedules faster than antivaxxers think that those vaccinated with COVID-19 vaccines “shed” spike protein. RFK Jr. has, since the June ACIP meeting, added even more compliant members. I’ll get to that later. In at least two of the articles linked to above, I outlined a six-point plan by which RFK Jr. would undermine trust in vaccines and come up with false rationales based on bad science to restrict or eliminate specific vaccines, starting with COVID-19 vaccines, likely moving on to HPV and the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccines, and then moving on to the rest of the childhood schedule. Obviously there we’re talking about one of the six strategies, misusing and weaponizing VAERS and other adverse events reporting systems.
With that brief background, let’s look at the story about “vaccine deaths” as a prelude to discussing VAERS in more depth:
The Food and Drug Administration is examining rare cases involving the deaths of young people after they received Covid vaccines, under pressure from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and his allies for public disclosure of more information.
The agency is also seeking undisclosed details about the safety of the shots for pregnant women.
The F.D.A.’s review follows years of exhaustive work by government officials and academic researchers worldwide who have validated the safety of the vaccines.
Many public health experts view the new focus as a political exercise at the bidding of Mr. Kennedy, who has repeatedly suggested that the inoculations are deadly. And some of Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine allies have been pressuring the government for years to delve deeper into the databases that include reports of harmful effects from the Covid shots.
It’s definitely an ideological exercise that flows from the belief among antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists that the CDC is “covering up” deaths and adverse events due to vaccines. Never mind that VAERS is a publicly accessible and searchable database and always has been and that the CDC has always investigated reports of death after vaccination submitted to VAERS. Let’s see who’s behind this:
At the meeting, Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, an F.D.A. official who previously advised Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general and vaccine critic, is expected to present details about roughly two dozen deaths in children that were attributed to the shots.
Dr. Marty Makary, the commissioner of the F.D.A., said on CNN on Sept. 10 that “nobody really has good data” that could answer some specific questions, including whether there had been cases last year in which pregnant women died from Covid. (Hundreds of pregnant women died of Covid during the early years of the pandemic.)
“We are getting the data that was never made available before, including adverse event data — that is, young people who have died from the Covid vaccine,” Dr. Makary said. “And we’re going to make that available to the medical community in full transparency, because this is the question that Americans are asking.”
Now, in fairness, it’s not 100% clear that all the reports come from VAERS, as vaccine manufacturers (and all drug manufacturers) are required to submit reports of death after the use of their products to the FDA, even if they don’t appear to be related, although the Washington Post reported:
The findings appear to be based on information submitted to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which contains unverified reports of side effects or bad experiences with vaccines submitted by anyone, including patients, doctors, pharmacists or even someone who sees a report on social media. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention emphasizes that the database is not designed to assess whether a shot caused a death, a conclusion that requires thorough investigations by scientists and public health professionals.
Everything old is new again, as I’ve long been saying. Just as antivaxxers tried to mine VAERS before the pandemic to link vaccines to deaths, autism, and various diseases, whether there was a plausible link or not and whether the cases had already been investigated by CDC staff or not, it was entirely expected that RFK Jr., now that he has full access to the VAERS database, would continue this tradition. I’m only surprised that it took him seven months to get around to it. There is one difference, though. The public search engine that allows you to search VAERS does not include protected health information (PHI), such as names, place of residence, or other identifying information. RFK Jr. now has access to the complete database.
Moreover, RFK Jr. is clearly using his lackey Tracy Beth Høeg to find him the “evidence” that he needs to link COVID-19 vaccines to deaths. Høeg, you might recall, is a sports medicine quack who in her pre-COVID practice offered unproven stem cell therapies. Since COVID-19, she quickly aligned with the contrarian views of our current FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, opposing nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as “lockdowns,” business closures, school closures, and masking while also opposing vaccinating children against COVID-19. While not as antivax as RFK Jr. clearly is, she has echoed several common antivax talking points, such as “questioning” the need for certain childhood vaccines; e.g., immunizations against flu, rotavirus and varicella, for children not known to be at high-risk for severe illness.
Before I discuss this story more and move on to the impending ACIP meeting, now seems like a good time to discuss what VAERS is, how it works, what it can and can’t be used for, and a bit of its history.
VAERS: The passive reporting system that antivaxxers have a love-hate relationship with
There’s a reason why antivaxxers love VAERS, even as they sometimes hate it, and that reason is simple. VAERS is a passive reporting system to which anyone—and I do mean anyone—can submit reports. Let’s unpack what that means in practice, starting with why VAERS was set up in the first place. First, though, I feel that it is important to point out that before any of the COVID-19 vaccines started rolling out in the US under an emergency use authorization (EUA) nearly five years ago, those of us with long experience deconstructing antivaccine disinformation had been warning that VAERS would be weaponized to falsely portray COVID-19 vaccines as deadly and causing all sorts of complications, death, and destruction. It was entirely to be expected based on the previous misuse of VAERS by antivax “scientists” to falsely link vaccines to autism, premature ovarian insufficiency and infertility, death (including sudden infant death syndrome), and many other health outcomes that we know not to be related to vaccines.
So why would antivaxxers like RFK Jr. behave any differently with COVID-19 vaccines? Spoiler alert: They didn’t behave any differently, beginning almost immediately after the vaccines rolled out, and aren’t behaving any differently. Indeed, RFK Jr.’s antivax org Children’s Health Defense published an article on January 29, 2021 (only a month and a half after the vaccines had started rolling out) entitled 329 Deaths + 9,516 Other Injuries Reported Following COVID Vaccine, Latest CDC Data Show. Since then, CHD has published dozens, if not hundreds, of articles using VAERS to cast doubt on vaccine safety. Remember, RFK Jr. ran CHD until he decided to run for President, and, even though he stepped down as CEO, we all know that he still interfaces heavily with CHD and that CHD wouldn’t do anything without RFK Jr.’s lack of objection, if not outright endorsement. Let’s also not forget that RFK Jr. has been one of the key lawyers championing litigation against pharmaceutical companies and federal and state health departments for “vaccine injury” dating back easily to 2006. It’s infuriating how often and easily supposedly “provaccine” doctors will accept any income from pharmaceutical companies as irrevocably tainting a doctor with a conflict of interest but accept RFK Jr. as a disinterested party just interested in the truth, even though he has a COI every bit as glaring as the biggest pharma shill and has been antivax as hell since at least 2005 and is a raving conspiracy theorist, to boot.
Those of you who’ve been reading this blog and my not-so-super-secret other blog should be familiar with VAERS, as it’s been discussed many times on both. It is a system that was set up after passage of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Act of 1986. Basically, VAERS is a passive reporting system, in which anyone can report suspected adverse events after any vaccination to be recorded in the database. Given that anyone can report any suspected adverse event after a vaccine, VAERS is intended to be an early warning system, a hypothesis-generating system, rather than a hypothesis testing system. Unfortunately, it is that very open nature of the system that has allowed it to be used and abused by antivaxxers to promote their false claims that vaccines cause so many adverse events and medical conditions.
Indeed, antivaxxers have long loved to portray VAERS as the be-all and end-all of the databases monitoring vaccine safety. The reason, to reiterate, is that VAERS is a passive surveillance system. It relies on healthcare workers, relatives, and patients who think they’ve suffered a vaccine injury to submit reports of adverse reactions to vaccines; it doesn’t actively look for them, as active surveillance systems do. Moreover, anyone can submit a report to VAERS, and they do, including parents of autistic children seeking compensation for their children’s autism as being due to “vaccine injury”. Indeed, I long ago discussed how lawyers have long gamed VAERS to support their litigation, reporting lots of cases of autism as supposedly an “adverse reaction” to vaccines.
It’s not just vaccines and autism, either. The easily-abused nature of VAERS data is one huge reason why those of us who’ve been following the antivaccine movement a long time like to refer to the bad “scientific studies” published by antivaccine physicians and scientists that use VAERS as their data source as “dumpster diving“. Examples abound, including a study claiming to find a link between the H1N1 vaccine and miscarriages or one of the earliest examples that I ever encountered, Mark and David Geier’s epically bad study trying to link thimerosal-containing vaccines to autism. As an amusing aside, when I discuss VAERS, I (and many other science-based vaccine advocates) sometimes like to recount the tale of how in 2006 Jim Laidler infamously reported to VAERS that the flu vaccine had turned him into The Incredible Hulk and VAERS accepted the report. True, someone did contact him to question it. If Laidler hadn’t been honest, he could have insisted that the report remain, and it would still be there today.
You might wonder: Why would anyone set up a system like VAERS, which is co-managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)? First, you must understand that, as I alluded to above, VAERS isn’t intended to give an accurate estimate of the prevalence of various adverse events after vaccination. Rather, it was always intended to serve as an early warning system, a “canary in the coalmine”, so to speak. Consequently, even though antivaxxers like to harp on how passive surveillance systems generally capture only a small fraction of adverse reactions, one thing VAERS does do well is to capture severe reactions, while it misses most mild reactions. After all, practically no one is going to report to VAERS an adverse reaction like a sore arm or transient fever, but you know damned well they’ll report more serious ones, such as a seizure or death. The problem is that the natural human tendency to seek patterns, coupled with the way antivaccine lawyers game VAERS by having their clients report all sorts of spurious “adverse events” to the database after vaccination, means that VAERS is a very noisy, distorted, and unreliable database.
Even VAERS cautions people about how to interpret its data, at least it did in the versions prior to January 20 archived by the almighty Wayback Machine:
When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established. Reports of all possible associations between vaccines and adverse events (possible side effects) are filed in VAERS. Therefore, VAERS collects data on any adverse event following vaccination, be it coincidental or truly caused by a vaccine. The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event.
And:
“Underreporting” is one of the main limitations of passive surveillance systems, including VAERS. The term, underreporting refers to the fact that VAERS receives reports for only a small fraction of actual adverse events. The degree of underreporting varies widely. As an example, a great many of the millions of vaccinations administered each year by injection cause soreness, but relatively few of these episodes lead to a VAERS report. Physicians and patients understand that minor side effects of vaccinations often include this kind of discomfort, as well as low fevers. On the other hand, more serious and unexpected medical events are probably more likely to be reported than minor ones, especially when they occur soon after vaccination, even if they may be coincidental and related to other causes.
A report to VAERS generally does not prove that the identified vaccine(s) caused the adverse event described. It only confirms that the reported event occurred sometime after vaccine was given. No proof that the event was caused by the vaccine is required in order for VAERS to accept the report. VAERS accepts all reports without judging whether the event was caused by the vaccine.
Still, its limitations aside, VAERS has its place if you understand its intended purpose rather than what antivaxxers try to use it for. That purpose, contrary to what antivaxxers would have you believe, is not as the be-all and end-all of vaccine safety surveillance. It is primarily a hypothesis-generating, not hypothesis-testing, system when it comes to questions related to vaccine safety. To test the correlations found in VAERS requires different systems, systems such as the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) or others, which are active safety monitoring databases. The distinction between an active and passive surveillance system is that an active surveillance system periodically actively scans real medical records and insurance claims data to look for increases in frequencies of adverse events after vaccination, look for patterns, and try to determine if there is a real association. As an aside, RFK Jr. is very unhappy about VSD because the data is not housed at the CDC. Rather, it is kept in the medical records of the healthcare organizations that contribute to it, and, unlike the case for VAERS, he can’t get full access. Naturally, since becoming HHS Secretary, RFK Jr. has falsely claimed a conspiracy by the CDC to “scatter” vaccine safety data before he took over.
Putting all the postlicensure monitoring studies together, Salmon et al published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine a little more than a year ago that noted:
Historically, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have led postauthorization vaccine-safety surveillance and research in that they comanage the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) passive-surveillance system, which is used to detect signals that require further investigation. But though VAERS is large and events may be reported to it in a timely fashion, few VAERS reports include the specific laboratory or clinical findings required for determining causality. In most VAERS cases, establishing a causal link would require rate calculations showing that there is a higher rate of AEFIs in vaccinated groups than in unvaccinated control groups, but VAERS reports lack much of the information needed for such calculations. Active surveillance using health care databases such as the Vaccine Safety Datalink and the FDA’s Biologics Effectiveness and Safety (BEST) System managed by the CDC and the FDA has this capacity to ascertain or rule out associations between vaccines and AEFIs. Other government databases (e.g., the Medicare database) have also been used for active surveillance, and the CDC conducts clinical assessment of AEFIs by means of the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Network.
Again, VAERS is the early warning system. Hypotheses generated by VAERS reports need to be tested and either falsified or potentially confirmed using other vaccine-monitoring systems. Reports of serious adverse events in VAERS need to be investigated and vetted by scientists who know what they’re doing, not someone like Tracy Beth Høeg, who has demonstrated a bias against the vaccines in children and for “natural immunity” after infection.
As far as history, I mention again that VAERS is not unreliable just because it’s a passive reporting system. As long ago as 2006, Michael J. Goodman and James Nordin published a study demonstrating a recent (at the time) shift in reports to VAERS as being linked to litigation. Specifcally, they downloaded the public VAERS database containing cases from 1990s to 2003 and and translated into identical SAS data sets for analysis. Next, they searched the database using key words to look for reports associated with litigation, particularly with regards to autism. They searched for records containing “thimerosal,” “mercury,” or “autism” in their fields, especially when coupled with terms like “lawyer,” “legal,” “attorney,” or “litigate,” while excluding records containing “legal” coupled with the term “guardian” that did not relate to litigation. They also excluded cases related to well characterized allergic reactions to thimerosal. Finally, they compared records from nonlitigation cases to those from litigation cases regarding symptomatology reported. Cases that were related to litigation were identified using a word search algorithm, and the authors found:
In recent years, most case reports to VAERS that were related to overdose, neuropathy, and thimerosal were related to litigation. Many cases that were related to autism and mental retardation were as well.
And concluded:
This review shows a previously undisclosed rise in the number of reports to the VAERS related to pending litigation for vaccine injury. The implications of this for understanding longitudinal reporting patterns are discussed.
More quantitatively, beginning in 2001, the authors noted a dramatic increase in the number of non-Lyme disease VAERS reports related to litigation, from only 7 in 2000 to 213 in 2002 and 108 in 2003. (They attributed the decline in 2003 reports to processing delays in creating public use files.) Next, they examined symptom sets related to symptom sets. For autism, they observed a dramatic increase in the percentage of litigation-related reports from 0% of the reports related to litigation in 1999 to over one-third (35%) in 2002. For records mentioning thimerosal that weren’t related to allergic reactions, the rise was even more dramatic, from 0% of these reports related to litigation in 2000 to 87% in 2002.
The authors concluded:
The findings raise an important question about possible misuse of VAERS in the litigation process. When a study is being used to influence important public health decisions, it is important that reviewers and editors fully understand how the data were constructed and their source. Until now, no one has described the magnitude of litigation-related reporting and how these reports might potentially change the results of studies using VAERS data. Longitudinal studies using VAERS data should explicitly take into account changes in reporting sources like the one described in this article.
It is impossible to determine the effect of these reports on existing analyses because the existing literature does not describe carefully inclusion and exclusion criteria. For the conditions reviewed here, it is apparent that a large enough percentage of reports are being made related to litigation that failure to exclude these will seriously skew trends. This is important for vaccines that contain thimerosal, and specifically for the MMR vaccine because of the controversy surrounding its relationship to autism. It therefore is incumbent on the authors who use VAERS data to provide detailed methods sections that describe their inclusion and exclusion criteria. To that end, we are making our SAS code available to interested parties. It is not sufficient simply to reference extraction of the VAERS data set.
There are other factors that make VAERS unreliable. A more recent study by Hause et al, published right around the onset of the pandemic, examined the effect of SB277 on reporting to the VAERS database. SB277, you might recall, is the law passed by the California legislature in 2015 in the wake of the Disneyland measles outbreak that eliminated—or at least tried to eliminate—nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates. This was a retrospective study of Californian children under 18 years of age for whom a VAERS report was submitted between June 1, 2011 and July 31, 2018. The main outcomes were the proportion of VAERS reports submitted by parents (vs. other reporter types), time from immunization to VAERS report (reporting time), and adverse event type, and the authors performed spatial analysis, mapping reports pre- and post-SB277 by county. In brief, the authors identified 6.703 VAERS reports from California during the study period and observed that the proportion of reports received from parents increased from 14% to 23% after implementation of SB277, while the median reporting time increased from nine days in 2013-2014 to 31 days in 2016-2017. They also noted an increase in reports describing behavioral and developmental symptoms in reports submitted more than 6 months after immunization. These findings led the authors to suspect that the “recent changes in reporting patterns coincident with the introduction of SB277 may indicate that more parents are using VAERS to assist in applying for a medical exemption for their child.”
The authors cautioned:
Our analysis demonstrates that VAERS reporting can be impacted by vaccine policy change. Importantly, for our analysis we also could not determine the intent behind filing an individual VAERS report. Although the primary function of VAERS is to serve as a system to detect signals of potential AEs, in the face of changing vaccine policy it is important to consider that a signal can be influenced by reporters themselves.
To me, this totally makes sense. You might remember how much I wrote about the various deceptive means that antivax lawyers and parents used to try to get medical exemptions for their children under false pretenses, with grifters like Dr. Robert “Dr. Bob” Sears offering paid lectures and webinars to instruct them and some quacks basically offering medical exemption letters for a (usually high) fee. Of course, some parents filed VAERS reports that they wouldn’t have filed in order to prevent their children from being required to get more vaccines! That’s one of the less odious things that grifters and lawyers urged them to do.
Finally, there’s one additional wrinkle to VAERS that happened as the mRNA vaccines were rolled out in December 2020: V-SAFE. V-SAFE was, in essence, a supposedly improved system compared to VAERS in which those receiving COVID-19 vaccines could sign up for text message reminders to report reactions to the vaccine, going out several months. Thus, V-SAFE is still a passive monitoring system, but it’s also bolstered by reminders, which could lead to the reporting of less serious adverse events. In other words, V-SAFE is better suited to capture less severe, more common events compared to VAERS. Of course, anyone who got the mRNA vaccines in early 2021 will know that there was also an information sheet about VAERS that told vaccinees how to report adverse events to VAERS, which likely increased reporting. Moreover, VAERS actually worked reasonably well during the pandemic. It caught the initial safety signal for vaccine-induced myocarditis, and multiple analyses of VAERS have supported the safety of the mRNA vaccines.
Of course, antivaxxers gonna do antivax things, and I expect Høeg to do that, treating deaths reported to VAERS after vaccination as though they were definitely caused by the vaccine—or at least insinuating as much. I think it’s worth reiterating that VAERS and V-SAFE were never intended to provide an accurate estimate of the frequency of adverse events related to vaccines, but rather to serve as an early warning system for possible new vaccine-related adverse events. In other words, VAERS and V-SAFE are a hypothesis-generating, not hypothesis testing, systems. The hypotheses generated from the signals in both systems first must be compared to the base rate of conditions in the general population and then tested using better systems and datasets, such as the VSD. In contrast to VAERS and V-SAFE, these systems are much more reliable reporting systems in that electronic health records are actively monitored for adverse events after vaccination in order to identify potential signals; there is a lot less bias that way and a lot less potential for misreporting.
But what about the deaths?
Until we see the actual presentation, I don’t know, but I suspect that I can predict that Høeg will link some of the deaths to the vaccines, even though, according to this NBC News report:
One former FDA official, who requested anonymity to speak freely, pushed back on the findings.
“I can tell you on a stack of Bibles that we looked through all of the autopsy reports and that we didn’t find anything,” the official said in a text message. “Unless someone was hiding them from us I don’t know what they’re referring to.”
Again, I will be quite frank. Going through the data again wouldn’t bother me if it weren’t for the people who are doing it, whom, quite frankly, I don’t trust, and neither should you. They have proven themselves again and again to be wrong when they pushed for mass infection in order to reach “natural herd immunity,” claimed that “natural immunity” after infection is far superior to vaccine-induced immunity, and have spread copious misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines, Moreover, they are led by someone who can only be described as a rabid antivaxxer, an antivax activist since the early 2000s, someone who has falsely said that COVID-19 vaccines are the “deadliest vaccines ever made” based on—you guessed it!—VAERS reports. They are there to cherry pick data to demonize the vaccines, not to come to rational scientific conclusions and policy recommendations for the CDC vaccine schedule based on the data. Again, RFK Jr. wants to take away your vaccines.
What about ACIP?
The draft agenda for the ACIP meeting on September 18 and 19 has finally been published, way later than usual. September 18 is dedicated to the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV) vaccine and the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccines, while September 19 is devoted to COVID-19 vaccines. (One notes that some news reports stated that the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine would also be discussed, but I don’t see it in the current draft agenda.) In the lead up to the meeting, there have been some disturbing reports in the media, such as this one in Ars Technica, RFK Jr.’s CDC may limit COVID shots to 75 and up, claim they killed kids. The plans under consideration apparently include:
The FDA in August approved the latest coronavirus vaccines for people ages 65 and older or who have risk factors for severe disease, but the CDC vaccine panel can recommend the shots more narrowly or broadly. The committee is weighing a plan to recommend the shot for those 75 and older but to instruct people who are younger to speak to a physician before they get the vaccine, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share policy discussions. Another option would not recommend the vaccine to people who don’t have preexisting conditions and who are under the age of 75, the people said.
But limiting access for people ages 65 to 74 has raised concerns about a political backlash, said one federal health official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations. According to CDC estimates, nearly 43 percent of people in that age group, as well as 13 percent of children, received the 2024-2025 version of the coronavirus vaccine.
Why is ACIP important? Here’s why:
Next week’s vaccine advisory panel meeting is critical because the recommendations determine whether insurers must pay for the immunizations, pharmacies can administer them and doctors are willing to offer them. Kennedy purged the membership of the panel earlier this year and appointed his own picks, most of whom have criticized coronavirus vaccination policy. He is considering adding additional critics of covid shots to the committee.
Speaking of the purge, again, in June all the former members of ACIP were purged, to be replaced with antivaxxers and antivax-adjacent or -sympathetic members, including, as mentioned above, antivax luminaries such as Dr. Robert “Inventor of mRNA Vaccines” (he’s not) Malone; Vicky Pebsworth (née DeBold), a longtime leader of Children’s Health Defense and RFK Jr. crony; Martin Kulldorff, one of the signatories of the “let ‘er rip” manifesto advocating a “natural herd immunity” approach to the pandemic, the Great Barrington Declaration; and Retsef Levi, who has no expertise in infectious disease or vaccines and is known for know for having recorded a viral video that urged the “immediate suspension” of mRNA vaccines, citing alleged cardiac death signals later debunked for methodological flaw. There are more, but you get the idea.
Worse, last week there were stories about RFK Jr. considering adding more lackeys to ACIP, including:
- Hillary Blackburn
- Joseph Fraiman
- John Gaitanis
- Evelyn Griffin
- Kirk Milhoan
- Raymond Pollak
- Catherine Stein
I had never heard of most of these people, other than Joseph Fraiman, who has published a number of truly awful studies (e.g., this one) casting doubt on the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines. The Washingon Post looked into these people and found that, for example, Gaitanis has been paid to be an expert witness on behalf of people alleging vaccine injuries and has apparently “declined to serve” because of “prior professional obligations.” Another possible pick, Milhoan, is a pediatric cardiologist:
…affiliated with the Independent Medical Alliance, formerly known as the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, which has promoted ivermectin as a coronavirus treatment, which medical experts and clinical trials have found is not effective. The Hawaii Medical Board filed a petition against him during the pandemic that resulted in no legal action, according to the Maui News. Milhoan told KFF Health News for a March article about mRNA vaccines: “We should stop it and test it more before we move forward.”
In other words, he’s an antivax quack.
Stein, depressingly, is a professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine who teaches epidemiology and is opposed to vaccine mandates, saying “Remember, the Lord Jesus did not fear lepers, and leprosy was (and continues to be) a highly contagious infectious disease.” (I did my surgical residency at Case and got my PhD there.) Griffin is an OB/GYN who is also anti mandate but has also testified testified that she has seen an increase in “bizarre and rare conditions” in her patients and community after the vaccines were introduced, as reported by local outlet Center Square. She’s also antimask, too, because of course she is. And she’s allegedly an epidemiologist?
As for the rest under consideration:
There was little public information about the vaccine views of Hillary Blackburn, who appears to be a pharmacist, and it was unclear which Raymond Pollak the list could be referencing.
“Typically ACIP members would have dozens to hundreds of scientific publications, primarily on vaccines, and be leaders in the field — not people who have little background in the area,” Tara Smith, an epidemiologist who follows anti-vaccine groups, said in a text message to The Post.
Apparently, RFK Jr. wants to add more clowns to the antivax clown car that ACIP has become. There’s a reason that I rushed to get the updated COVID-19 vaccine this weekend, before the ACIP meeting. If reporting so far is any indication, I might have a much harder time getting it after ACIP votes. Even then, I had a last minute kerfuffle with my insurance company about whether they would cover it. Of course, I would have just paid out-of-pocket if I had to, but I’m very sensitive to the fact that many people can’t afford to do so.
Once again, RFK Jr. is coming for your vaccines
I will conclude, as I’ve started to conclude such posts, by reiterating once again that RFK Jr. is coming for your vaccines. (There’s a reason why I’ve started dividing this series into parts and will add new parts as I deem appropriate.) He wants to eliminate as many vaccines as he can in his time as HHS Secretary, all of them if he can accomplish that. I realize that many readers don’t believe me when I say this and think I’m being histrionic, but everything that I’ve observed about RFK Jr. since 2005 tells me that he is antivax and really believes it. He is also willing to lie strategically in order to give those sympathetic to other aspects of his “make America healthy again” (MAHA) agenda plausible deniability to reassure themselves that he’s not antivaccine and won’t take away vaccines. To those who doubt me, I suggest the following. I invite Dr. El-Deiry and others like him to look at the list of strategies and actions that I predicted in February that RFK Jr. would take and compare them to what he has done since then. I’ll wait.
I wish I weren’t so sure that RFK Jr. is trying to take away our vaccines, but every month that goes by, everything that RFK Jr. does, convinces me that I am. Our only hope is that the reported looming backlash to his actions finally reaches a level that will stop him. Even if that happens, though, a lot of damage has already been done to public health and our vaccination programs, and, as long as RFK Jr. stays in place, a lot of damage will continue to be done.