Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies at the Department of Health and Human Services have quieted their efforts to restrict access to immunizations after realizing they were politically disastrous. But that doesn’t mean they stopped trying to undermine these lifesaving tools.
In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention halted the publication of a study showing that last year’s covid-19 shot cut the risk of emergency department visits and hospitalizations in half among healthy adults, even though the findings cleared the agency’s scientific review process. That’s because Jay Bhattacharya, the agency’s interim director, objected to the study’s methodology, which he called “crap” and “logistically ridiculous.”
One of the nation’s top medical journals disagrees with his assessment. This week, JAMA Network Open published the rejected study, which was peer-reviewed. The journal also published commentary by Natalie Dean, a public health professor at Emory University, who explained that the study’s design, which involved comparing the test results of vaccinated and unvaccinated people who seek medical care at hospitals, had been used for decades to measure the effectiveness of shots.
The point here is not that the methodology is flawless; Dean and other vaccine researchers readily admit that it’s imperfect. The problem is that the administration tried to bury scientific evidence that contradicted Kennedy’s criticisms of covid vaccines.
The drama is playing out just as Kennedy is actively defending anti-vaccine research that was retracted in April over concerns of “serious methodological flaws.” The paper, published in Toxicology Reports, purported to find that 75 percent of sudden infant death syndrome cases occurred within seven days of vaccination, but critics found potential research errors and argued that its author misused data to suggest causality, leading its publisher to take it down.
Last week, Kennedy sent a letter to the journal’s editor in chief, demanding a “full explanation” for that retraction. This, Kennedy claimed in a social media post, would help “restore trust in public health by insisting on transparency, accountability, and open scientific inquiry — not by asking the public to accept decisions behind closed doors.”
That’s ironic, given that Kennedy and his underlings are attempting to reshape federal vaccine guidelines behind the scenes. The Post’s Rachel Roubein and Lena H. Sun report that researchers at the National Institutes of Health are being pushed to conduct research on vaccine injuries and alternative vaccine schedules, as well as toying with a plan to create a new science office at the CDC that would report to political staff.
Despite these efforts, most Americans remain solidly in favor of vaccines. But the growing case numbers of vaccine-preventable diseases show it doesn’t take many skeptics to weaken their effectiveness.
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