Three of the new advisers appointed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to guide the government on immunization policy took part in lawsuits casting doubt on the safety or efficacy of vaccines, public records show.
In dismissing all 17 members of an influential Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory panel on Monday, Mr. Kennedy cited what he said was a history of conflicts of interest that he claimed made those experts a “rubber stamp” on approving vaccines. But adding members who assisted in legal cases that were either against vaccine makers or that suggested widespread vaccine-caused harm raises questions about a different form of potential bias.
While the legal involvement of the three new panelists does not appear to violate the rules, critics of Mr. Kennedy said it created the appearance of a conflict.
“He’s invoking the language of ethics and integrity to get rid of these experts and now is installing people who may have their own biases — that he apparently does not want to recognize,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor and ethics expert at Washington University in St. Louis.
One of Mr. Kennedy’s appointees, Vicky Pebsworth, is a nurse who serves on the board of a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness about vaccine injuries. She certified to a court that, in her professional opinion, a survey of families of unvaccinated children supported the hypothesis that a rise in the number of recommended childhood vaccines explained an epidemic of chronic disease. Mr. Kennedy has espoused the same theory.
Another, Dr. Robert Malone, a physician and biochemist whose criticism of mRNA Covid-19 vaccines catapulted him into the spotlight during the pandemic, was a paid expert witness on behalf of company whistle-blowers who claimed that Merck, one of the nation’s largest vaccine manufacturers, had covered up evidence casting doubt on the effectiveness of the mumps vaccine.
A third, the biostatistician Martin Kulldorff, also became caught up in pandemic politics after writing an anti-lockdown treatise. He too served as an expert witness, asserting that Merck’s Gardasil shot, which protects against human papillomavirus, was not tested adequately, as Reuters first reported. It’s an area of vaccine-related litigation that Mr. Kennedy himself was deeply involved in before he was confirmed as health secretary.
The panel on which these members will serve, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, holds enormous sway over which vaccines are administered, who gets them, and whether insurance companies pay for them. It also determines which shots are free through the Vaccines for Children Program, which covers half the children in the United States.
The committee has typically been composed of vaccine experts in academia whose work brings them into direct contact with industry as consultants, through their participation in clinical trials or on safety monitoring committees.
Under the panel’s ethical guidelines, members must resign any advisory consulting roles, whether paid or unpaid. They may participate in clinical trials, but must recuse themselves from voting on any product in which they have a conflict. The rules also bar A.C.I.P. members from serving as a paid consultant or expert witness in litigation involving a vaccine manufacturer.
“If the H.H.S. secretary had an issue with the former board members’ activities before their time on A.C.I.P, then his handpicked appointees seem to fail the secretary’s own litmus test,” said Representative Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. Mr. Lynch wrote to Mr. Kennedy this week, demanding more information on the dismissals.
In a social media post on Friday, Mr. Kennedy complained about inquiries from The New York Times and other media outlets, and said the new members of the panel were “public health experts of impeccable integrity who will vote to promote public health.”
He also said the department would “institute bias policies recommending that A.C.I.P. panelists recuse themselves from decisions in which their current or former clients have a financial interest.”
Richard Painter, a former White House ethics counsel who is now a law professor at the University of Minnesota, said Drs. Malone and Kulldorff, given their public comments and recent testimony about specific vaccines, should recuse themselves if those products came up before the committee.
“If there is someone who is clearly biased against a particular vaccine for whatever reason, there’s an issue,” he said, noting that is particularly true if they issued criticism in a paid engagement.
The most prominent of Mr. Kennedy’s new picks is perhaps Dr. Malone. He performed early experiments using mRNA as a graduate student and gene therapy researcher in the 1980s. He has been sharply critical of mRNA-based Covid shots, which he has called “experimental gene therapy” treatments, and has been embraced by conservative pundits.
“The most recent data demonstrates that you are more likely to be infected or have disease or even death if you’ve been vaccinated, compared to the unvaccinated people,” Dr. Malone said at a conference in 2022. He reposted the video of his comments on social media this week. (The claim contradicts volumes of studies that have found that Covid vaccines saved millions of lives worldwide.)
He told The New York Times in 2022 that about 8,000 of his Substack subscribers paid $5 a month, which would amount to about $31,200 in monthly revenue. In a text message on Friday, Dr. Malone said he now has more than 358,000 subscribers, most with free subscriptions, and that the number of paid subscribers is confidential.
Dr. Malone has also earned income as an expert witness on a whistle-blower lawsuit. The case accused Merck of covering up information about the mumps component of its measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in information sent to the Food and Drug Administration, which authorizes vaccines. The case “opened my eyes to the corruption in industrial vaccine development,” Dr. Malone wrote in a blog post.
According to a declaration filed in 2018, Dr. Malone earned $350 per hour for his expert testimony concluding that Merck had failed to accurately report the efficacy of the mumps component of the vaccine. The case was dismissed by a judge who concluded that the case did not prove fraud since the F.D.A. had relied on an independent data source to make its decisions.
In a text message, Dr. Malone said he had disclosed the work to government officials during a three-month vetting and conflict of interest process, and said the work did not violate any rules. He also posted his testimony on the social media platform X.
Mr. Kennedy recently talked about the whistle-blower’s allegations in an interview with Dr. Phil, saying his administration was looking into them.
Mr. Kennedy participated in legal cases against Merck in the past, a potential conflict that Democrats pressed during his confirmation hearings. He said he had ultimately agreed to sign his financial interest in the litigation over the Gardasil vaccine to an adult son who is also a lawyer.
Dr. Malone was also an expert witness in lawsuits fighting Covid vaccine mandates in 2021 and in 2022. He said the mRNA formulations should not be required of members of the military while under emergency use authorization. In a text message on Friday, he said one case had been settled. He said his testimony in another case had been disqualified “on hearsay grounds” because he had been accused of spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
Dr. Kulldorff, a former Harvard University biostatistician, rose to prominence as a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto that in October 2020 called for young people to resume normal activities and to wall older people off from the virus.
He has previously advised the C.D.C. on vaccine safety. In a recent commentary in Real Clear Politics, he said Mr. Kennedy was the right person to restore faith in vaccines, precisely because he is a skeptic. “I am confident that most vaccines will continue to be found safe and effective,” Dr. Kulldorff wrote. However, he added, “there are real, unanswered vaccine safety questions.”
Dr. Kulldorff has also worked as an expert witness on vaccine lawsuits, including the Gardasil litigation by Wisner Baum, the law firm Mr. Kennedy worked with. Dr. Kulldorff testified in a deposition that he earned $400 per hour for his work, and had drawn a $4,000 retainer and $33,000 in payments in October of last year.
Dr. Kulldorff concluded in an expert report that Merck had failed to urgently investigate reports of POTS, or postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, after a safety signal emerged in a clinical trial.
In March, a U.S. District Court judge in North Carolina dismissed the case, concluding: “Simply put, no scientist could reasonably conclude there is a causal association between POTS” and Gardasil, based on the evidence presented in court.
Dr. Pebsworth, the third new member of the committee who participated in a vaccine-related court case, has a Ph.D. in public health. She signed a legal declaration on behalf of a group that was attempting to prove that unvaccinated people are healthier than vaccinated ones. It is not clear if she was compensated.
The Control Group, as it called itself, and Joy Garner, a self-described “patriotic grandmother,” sued President Trump in 2020 claiming that vaccines were the “obvious culprit” in the nation’s increase in chronic diseases, and that only Mr. Trump could remedy the problem.
The group conducted a survey of nearly 1,500 “holistic” and “vaccine awareness” families and queried them about the health status of fully unvaccinated people. Their comparison to vaccinated people “provides profound proof that vaccine exposure is in fact the primary cause of this nation’s current public health crisis,” the petition said.
Dr. Pebsworth signed a declaration that said the survey supported a “defensible working hypothesis” that vaccines are the driver of chronic disease.
Christina Jewett covers the Food and Drug Administration, which means keeping a close eye on drugs, medical devices, food safety and tobacco policy.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg covers health policy for The Times from Washington. A former congressional and White House correspondent, she focuses on the intersection of health policy and politics.
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