A Rupert Murdoch-owned paper ripped into Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Tuesday for gutting the nation’s top vaccine advisory panel.
The Wall Street Journal published a scathing op-ed a day after Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic, announced the firing spree at the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in the paper itself. The ACIP reports to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on vaccine efficacy.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services said he was “retiring” all 17 members of the advisory committee on vaccines in a “bold step” to help restore “public trust.”
The move raised alarm bells at a time when health experts fear vaccine skepticism is fueling the nation’s largest measles outbreak in around 25 years.
“Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines,” Kennedy wrote, hinting at a plot to push vaccines on Americans.
Murdoch’s editorial board hit back: “Mr. Kennedy’s beef seems to be that the committee’s members know something about vaccines and may have been involved in their research and development.”
“How does he define ‘substantial’?” the board asked.
The board noted that trial doctors get small payments, typically less than their salaries, from vaccine makers to assist with clinical trials.
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But “these trials are double-blinded, meaning doctors don’t know which volunteers receive the vaccine or placebo so there’s no financial incentive to tilt the data in favor of manufacturers,” the board said.
Any conflicts of interest among the committee were also “honestly handled,” the board said.
Kennedy said in a separate announcement that “a clean sweep is necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science.”
“ACIP new members will prioritize public health and evidence-based medicine. The Committee will no longer function as a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas,” he added.
Since joining the Trump administration in January, Kennedy, who is leading the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative has doubled down on conspiracy theories around shots, including that the measles jab contain “aborted fetus debris.”
“The MMR vaccine contains millions of particles that are derived from fetal tissue, millions of fragments of human DNA from aborted fetuses,” Kennedy told NBC News’ Tom Llamas last month.
Kennedy was referring to the combined Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine.
Vaccines do not contain aborted fetuses, fetal cells, fetal DNA, or fetal debris, according to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
The rubella component of the vaccine is developed from a fetal cell line known as WI-38 that originally came from the lung tissue of an elective abortion performed more than five decades ago. No new fetal issue has been used since, and cells used today are thousands of times removed from the original source.
Health experts are alarmed by Kennedy’s suggestions that the measles jab is unsafe, a claim which contradicts decades of research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The World Health Organization declared measles eliminated from the United States in 2000 due to the success of vaccination efforts. International travel and growing vaccine hesitancy are thought to be behind its resurgence.
The American Medical Association has said Kennedy’s decision to gut ACIP undermines “trust and upends a transparent process that has saved countless lives.”
Kennedy wrote in his op-ed for the Journal that ACIP’s new members “won’t directly work for the vaccine industry.”
“They will exercise independent judgment, refuse to serve as a rubber stamp, and foster a culture of critical inquiry—unafraid to ask hard questions.”
ACIP is set to hold its next meeting on June 25 at the CDC’s headquarters.
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