ATLANTA — For decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has fought attempts by the anti-vaccine movement to sow doubts in the safety and efficacy of the shots that marked a triumph of public health. This week, the agency instead provided a powerful platform for the cause.
Common anti-vaccine talking points were on display in presentations and discussions during a two-day meeting of federal immunization advisers at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. It culminated Friday with the end of a long-standing recommendation for every newborn to receive a hepatitis B vaccine and President Donald Trump directing a broader probe into whether American children receive too many shots.
One panel member likened taking vaccines to flying on an airplane that hadn’t been sufficiently safety tested. One speaker incorrectly cited a study about the level of protection afforded by the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine. Multiple panelists questioned whether immigrants were to blame for the spread of vaccine-preventable illnesses, with one calling it “the elephant in the room.”
An outspoken attorney for the anti-vaccine movement — whose law firm has filed numerous vaccine-related lawsuits — delivered a jargon-laden presentation for more than 90 minutes about the history of childhood immunization and accused the CDC of recommending shots with insufficient research on potential harms.
Such moments at the two-day meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) prompted incredulity from some vaccine experts, medical associations and Democratic elected officials. They argued that the panel, which for decades has guided access to immunizations, has lost all credibility under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic who has appointed a raft of anti-vaccine activists or critics of immunization policy to federal health positions. After telling senators during a confirmation hearing that he supports the childhood immunization schedule, Kennedy has since taken steps to begin overhauling the series of vaccinations that he has long blamed as a potential cause of childhood illness.
Medical experts who watched the presentations during Thursday’s and Friday’s sessions said they were often incoherent, relying on technical language and data taken out of context or overblown.
“The most dangerous misinformation is the kind that’s wrapped in the appearance of scientific authority,” said David Higgins, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “It makes it incredibly difficult for parents, who are simply trying to do the right thing, to tell fact from fiction.”
Panel member Retsef Levi told reporters after the meeting that the panel is doing its best to share different perspectives with the public. But he said the safety of vaccines must be scrutinized. “We believe, like any medical product, it has risks, and these risks are currently not well understood,” said Levi, a professor of operations management at MIT and a critic of mRNA vaccines.
The committee’s vote Friday to adopt a more restrictive approach to vaccinating children for hepatitis B marked the most significant change to the schedule under Kennedy. The vote followed presentations critical of vaccinating newborns for the virus that were delivered by people who were affiliated with anti-vaccine groups and now work with the CDC.
Neither of them have backgrounds in vaccine science or infectious diseases, as senior CDC career scientists who typically deliver such presentations do. Mark Blaxill is a former businessman with an MBA who has a long history promoting a debunked link between vaccines and autism. Cynthia Nevison, an autism and climate researcher, cited a study to imply that those who receive the birth dose of hepatitis B had lower levels of protection than those who receive their first dose later. The findings were “misinterpreted,” the study’s author Amy Middleman told The Washington Post.
Nevison and Blaxill are two of the three authors of a retracted paper about autism. The third author spoke during a public comment period at the meeting without mentioning his affiliation with Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group Kennedy founded.
Anti-vaccine organizations cheered on the committee’s actions. “Today is a victory for all of us who have been championing informed consent rights,” the National Vaccine Information Center, the nation’s oldest anti-vaccine group that employs the committee member who spearheaded the hepatitis B revision, posted on the social media site X.
During the meetings, committee members and presenters made at least 60 false, misleading or unsupported claims about vaccine safety, disease spread and rationale for childhood vaccination, according to the Evidence Collective, a coalition of science and medicine researchers.
Demetre Daskalakis, a former top CDC respiratory illness immunization official, said the ACIP meeting was “full of distortions given a cloak of legitimacy by being presented as official U.S. government data and opinion.”
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said it is “totally unfair” to say the CDC is allowing anti-vaccine activists to use the agency’s platform. “We are using evidence-based science to make these recommendations,” he said.
He said it was inaccurate to describe the elimination of the universal hepatitis B birth dose recommendation as anti-vaccine. The panel’s action applies only to infants born to women who test negative for hepatitis B and “simply shifts to individual, shared decision-making so parents and providers can consider vaccine benefits, risks and specific infection-risk factors,” Nixon said.
Nixon and Robert Malone, a vaccine critic and vice chair of the panel, said the committee also invited pediatricians Paul Offit and Peter Hotez, two of the nation’s most prominent vaccine advocates and fierce critics of the new committee, to present during the meetings. “This shows that the ACIP committee is willing to hear every perspective and evaluate the data to make evidence-based decisions rooted in gold-standard science,” Nixon said.
Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said he was invited in October to speak to the CDC but not specifically to ACIP. Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, said he declined to attend because the committee “appears to have shifted its mission away from science and evidence-based medicine.”
“I’m always happy to discuss the science of vaccines with individuals or groups who are committed to truth and genuine intellectual inquiry,” Hotez wrote in a text message.
Even some members of the committee criticized how the panel was making some of its vaccine decisions, which they said were grounded in little data with potentially grave consequences.
“This has a great potential to cause harm. I simply hope that the committee will accept its responsibility when this harm is caused,” Joseph Hibbeln, a psychiatrist with a background in seafood research, said of the hepatitis B vote.
Many CDC staff were watching the ACIP meetings and sharing comments in encrypted Signal chats, according to three staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Many of the discussions were around how data was being misrepresented, one scientist said.
The constant reference by members and presenters to vaccine mandates, which the CDC does not issue, prompted some to scream at watch parties, “WE DON’T HAVE VACCINE MANDATES,” the scientist said.
In one hallway conversation at the CDC and in a watch party, staff members compared heated exchanges between representatives of liaison medical groups and Malone, who was chairing the meetings, during the Thursday session to a “Real Housewives of Atlanta” episode.
“It feels so frustrating and disheartening to watch science, public health and decades of a well-respected institution be dismantled,” the scientist said.
The two-day meeting was the latest example that under Kennedy, broader skepticism about vaccines has become entrenched in the mainstream.
The CDC, at Kennedy’s direction, last month revised its website to walk back its longtime assertion backed by extensive research that vaccines do not cause autism. Kennedy has also hired a longtime proponent of the claim that vaccines can cause autism to review CDC data on the issue. He has also canceled funding for research into mRNA vaccines, revived a vaccine safety task force sought by anti-vaccine groups and targeted states that do not grant religious exemptions to school vaccine mandates.
Kennedy in June fired all members of the vaccine panel and replaced them with allies, many of whom have publicly railed against vaccine mandates or coronavirus shots. The former CDC director fired in August said she lost her job after she refused Kennedy’s demands to approve the overhauled committee’s recommendations.
The tensions over what constitutes “gold-standard” science that Kennedy says he prioritizes — and who delivers it to the public — have been on display during the most recent ACIP meetings, which have aired common anti-vaccine themes such as vaccines not undergoing enough safety testing and the United States recommending too many shots compared with other developed countries.
Public health advocates were especially shocked at the CDC giving a platform to Aaron Siri, a Kennedy ally and lawyer for the anti-vaccine movement. He has been a fierce critic of the agency and petitioned the government in 2022 on behalf of the anti-vaccine group to reconsider its approval of Sanofi’s stand-alone polio vaccine.
During his presentation, Siri asserted that vaccine clinical trials have not been properly performed, efficacy has been overstated and informed consent has not been respected. He cast doubt on the entire immunization schedule, suggesting that previous ACIP recommendations be revisited.
“My own personal view is that when the government makes a decision to recommend something to tell the public to do something, it is often very hesitant to admit they’re wrong or go backward,” Siri said.
The unusual scene of an attorney with no medical degree making a scientific presentation drew condemnation from health organizations and lawmakers — including Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), a physician who voted to confirm Kennedy despite concerns about his vaccine views — and two members of the panel.
Committee member Cody Meissner, a pediatrician who voted against revamping the hepatitis B recommendation for newborns, appeared aghast at Siri’s presentation, calling it a “terrible distortion of the facts.”
“I don’t think you should have been invited” to speak, said Meissner, who became prominent for his critique of childhood coronavirus vaccination but has emerged as the biggest champion for routine immunization on the panel.
Another prominent critic of vaccine policy, Tracy Beth Hoeg, briefed the committee on Friday on the differences between U.S. and Danish vaccine schedules, emphasizing fewer recommended shots on the latter. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary hired Hoeg, who came to prominence as a critic of school closures and childhood coronavirus vaccination. This week, he tapped her to serve as the agency’s acting top drug regulator.
Critics of U.S. vaccine policy often cite European countries to argue that Americans get too many shots, but public health experts counter that those countries are smaller and have better health care systems to test for and treat disease.
“Let’s talk apples to apples, not apples to oranges,” Adam Langer, the CDC’s representative for the hepatitis B discussions, told the committee on Friday.
His was one of the few public remarks by a career scientist.
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