'Talk show': RFK Jr. slammed for turning vital health panel into circus

Donald Trump’s Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., reduced a key government immunizations committee to a “talk show” by inviting a presentation from a leading anti-vaccine campaigner, a former senior government physician said.

Dr. Fiona Havers also said her prediction on resigning last month as a senior adviser on vaccine policy at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), that Americans would die as a result of Kennedy’s actions, was coming true.

In June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP. Last week, the new members held a public meeting.

Speaking to the former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal on his podcast, The Court of History, Havers said: “Watching the ACIP meeting … was wild because it was so different than how these meetings should be conducted.

“Lyn Redwood was invited to present at ACIP, and she gave a really poorly put-together summary of thimerosal and flu vaccines and safety, which is a settled issue.”

Thimerosal is a preservative used in vaccines. Redwood is a nurse turned anti-vaccine campaigner, president emerita of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group Kennedy founded and chaired.

Redwood has long advanced the claim that mercury in thimerosal is harmful to pregnant women and children — a claim the New York Times says has been “contradicted by dozens of rigorous studies and … largely … rejected by vaccine scientists.”

Regardless, only one voting ACIP member rejected Redwood’s recommendations.

Havers said: “They moved to a vote immediately. That is not the way this process works.

“First of all, ACIP is not a talk show. You don't invite like random outside people that have no expertise. Second, planning for an official vote to change CDC recommendations takes months — like, there is a whole process for that.

“…There's a work group and they would review the evidence. There's a formal process called the Evidence to Recommendations Framework that the work group leads go into. They put together evidence about the specific policy question. They go through seven different domains [including] risks, benefits, costs, feasibility.

“The work group then votes on that, and then the CDC staffer, the official who's an expert in that work group, takes that and formally presents it to the ACIP voting members at the public meetings … so the evidence is literally graded.

“… And then after the ACIP voting members have seen the Evidence to Recommendations Framework and the recommendations from the work group, then and only then do they vote.

“What they did [in the most recent meeting] was adding a vote on a proposal that has never been discussed by the influenza work group, which would have been the appropriate work group.

“CDC officials and [Food and Drug Administration] experts on safety were never given an opportunity to collate and present the data … the work group … never saw this policy question in front of them, so they completely violated all norms for ACIP procedures by holding a vote without the proper review.”

Havers said she had “never seen an outside person with no qualifications present at ACIP … sometimes they'll get academics and put on a cost-effectiveness analysis, but usually CDC officials that have the slides go through a very rigorous clearance process. All the references are correct, and it's done in a very systematic way.

“And they just like, put a vote on a schedule, invited this woman who nobody at CDC knew was on the schedule like a week ago, and then had her present and moved forward based on her presentation.”

Redwood, Havers said, “introduced herself as a private citizen” but “is a well-known charlatan who’s spread misinformation about vaccines for decades … and she has been closely tied to RFK Jr for many years.

“And the fact that she was invited to present at ACIP was … a travesty to be honest.”

Havers, who played a prominent role in efforts to combat Zika, Ebola and COVID-19, resigned from the CDC on Monday 16 June, in protest, after Kennedy fired the ACIP members.

Havers told the Times then: “If it isn’t stopped, and some of this isn’t reversed, like, immediately, a lot of Americans are going to die as a result of vaccine-preventable diseases.”

Speaking to Blumenthal, Havers said people “already are” dying as a result of Kennedy’s actions, for example from a measles outbreak in southwestern states.

“Two children have died of measles since RFK Jr became secretary,” Havers said. “And keep in mind that is a disease that was officially eliminated from the US decades ago.

“… I think RFK Jr. [with] his megaphone was spreading misinformation before he was HHS Secretary [and] contributed to a decrease in vaccine confidence and increasing rates of unvaccinated children and adults, so I think that that has led directly to increased deaths.

“But what I think is more concerning now is that he is pulling the levers of government regulatory power to restrict access. And there's the FDA approval and licensure side, which I think they're having an impact on. And then there's the CDC recommendation side, which is tied to insurance coverage.

“So he now actually, literally has the access to stop Americans from getting safe and effective vaccines that have been vetted, previously approved by ACIP, and he will be tampering … potentially with insurance access and with the ability of providers to give vaccines to their patients if they want to.”

Kennedy’s firing of the whole ACIP committee left “people at CDC … crushed,” Havers said, because he “had blown up the process by which we contribute the data and the evidence.

“And everyone was like, ‘Can it get any worse?' And then when we saw that Lyn Redwood was going to be on the schedule and they were going to act, they added a vote on thimerosal. I mean, it blew my mind.”