The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is hiring Lyn Redwood, a nurse and the former head of a group critics have denounced as anti-vaccine, to work in its vaccine safety office, multiple CDC officials tell CBS News.
Redwood was the president of the group now called Children’s Health Defense, which lists as its founder Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who now oversees the CDC as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Children’s Health Defense has sued to curb vaccine requirements, petitioned federal agencies to revoke vaccine authorizations and spread misinformation about vaccines. Kennedy was listed as the group’s founder and chairman before becoming the nation’s top health official in the second Trump administration.
She is joining the CDC office responsible for overseeing most of the agency’s work and data to probe potential safety risks from vaccines, including databases used by health officials to collect and analyze reports from the public and health care systems.
Redwood is expected to be hired as a special government employee, the CDC officials said, a status often afforded to advisers and other temporary experts brought on for specific projects or committees.
The CDC and Redwood did not respond to CBS News’ requests for comment.
Redwood is also scheduled to present Thursday to the agency’s new roster of outside vaccine advisers, who were replaced earlier this month by Kennedy with his own picks, about her concerns about the vaccine preservative thimerosal causing autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.
The CDC and outside groups have debunked fears about thimerosal causing autism in the past. In a report briefly published on the CDC’s website before this week’s vaccines meeting, the agency cited several studies turning up no evidence of thimerosal causing neurodevelopmental disorders, and warned of significant methodological issues with a handful of studies that did.
“Considering the breadth of evidence and consistency in results from multiple population-based studies conducted in several countries with various study designs, the evidence does not support an association between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism spectrum disorder or other neurodevelopmental disorders,” the CDC said in its now-deleted report.
Children’s Health Defense in the past has criticized the CDC Immunization Safety Office for its efforts to debunk concerns about thimerosal, accusing the office in 2018 of attempting “to pull the wool over the public’s eyes” about the preservative. Kennedy echoed some of those claims in a post late Tuesday on X.
“Removing a known neurotoxin from being injected into our most vulnerable populations is a good place to start with Making America Healthy Again,” Redwood said in prepared slides released by the agency ahead of the Thursday meeting.
Redwood’s addition to the agenda sparked a renewed round of criticism for Kennedy, who medical groups worry is dismantling a key component of how the U.S. develops influential vaccine recommendations tied to insurance coverage and federal policies.
“Even though the prevalence of thimerosal in flu vaccines is low and it hasn’t been linked to developmental issues, the public confusion and over ethylmercury remains — confusion that anti-vaccine activists, such as Lyn Redwood, have sought to stoke,” the University of Minnesota’s Vaccine Integrity Project wrote Monday.
Beyond thimerosal, which the CDC says data suggests is used in less than 0.3% of flu vaccines given to moms during pregnancy, Redwood has raised concerns about other vaccine ingredients.
In an interview with Kennedy published in October last year, Redwood said aluminum had been found in the brains of children with autism at “some of the highest levels ever documented.”
The FDA has said aluminum added to some vaccines has “a demonstrated safety profile of over many decades of use,” and that aluminum exposure is most commonly from eating food or drinking water.
Redwood said she had worked with one of the heads of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office in the past over her concerns about mercury in vaccines.
“I was so naive. I really thought that they would take immediate action, and that they would stop these exposures,” she said.
Alexander Tin is a digital reporter for CBS News based in the Washington, D.C. bureau. He covers federal public health agencies.
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