A task force formed by an influential advisory committee to review the safety of Covid vaccines will be led by a panel member who has described the shots as “the most failing medical product in the history of medical products.”
That member, Retsef Levi, is a management and health analytics expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was appointed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve on the larger advisory committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On the social media site X, Dr. Levi pinned a video from 2023 in which he called for the Covid vaccines to be removed from the market.
The task force was announced by Dr. Robert Malone, an advisory committee member, vaccinologist and outspoken vaccine skeptic. He pointed to the mandate outlined on the C.D.C. website indicating the review team would look into questions about immunization injury reports and other concerns related to the shots. Some of those issues have long been debunked by experts.
The creation of the review team, a subgroup of the C.D.C. Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, is the latest twist in an escalating series of changes in vaccine policy by Mr. Kennedy.
The announcement caps a week when hundreds of C.D.C. employees called on him in an open letter to stop spreading misinformation, which they believe contributed to the attack on their Atlanta headquarters by a gunman earlier this month. The gunman had repeatedly aired concerns about the Covid vaccine before the assault, in which he killed a 33-year-old police officer.
Still, the new vaccine task force plans included a warning that its members should not work too closely with C.D.C. experts, to avoid the appearance of “undue influence.”
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The post Covid Vaccine Opponent Tapped to Lead Federal Review Team appeared first on New York Times.
