This week Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His address for a global vaccine top to dispute global vaccination. The conference was organized by Gavi, the world’s leading immunization program, and in a recorded speech accused the organization of collaboration with social media companies to suppress different opinion about immunization during the Coronavirus Pandemie and said that it “had ignored science” in its work. He criticized GAVI for recommending COVID-19-Schoten to pregnant women, and went deep into a discredit study that claimed to find safety problems with a tetanus vaccine that is often used in developing countries. “In his zeal to promote universal vaccination,” Kennedy claimed, Gavi “neglected the most important issue of vaccine safety.”
Kennedy’s comments confirmed something The New York Times First reported In March: that the United States, the third largest donor of Gavi, would stop promising money to the organization. (Congress, which has always had the last word about GAVI financing, has not yet weighed.) They are also the first indication that the rejection of the US of global vaccincial campaigns comes from the opposition of the Trump government, not only to foreign aid, but also to vaccination itself. For the first time, Kennedy has succeeded in using the anti-vaccine agenda to guide American foreign policy.
Gavi, at the most basic level, is Costco for immunisations and uses his enormous purchasing power to buy cheap vaccines in bulk. National governments and private philanthropias promise financing every five years. The United Kingdom and the Gates Foundation are the biggest donors; The United Nations distributes the shots. The poorest countries pay 20 cents per vaccine and prices rise together with national income. Since the partnership was launched, in January 2000, 19 Landen- Including Ukraine, Congo and Guyana – have left from trusting on Gavi to fully paying for vaccinations. Indonesia, which accepted donations from GAVI in 2017, promised $ 30 million to the organization this financing cycle.
Gavi saved on its own estimate 19 million lives and vaccinated 1 billion children. During the conference this week, the director of the World Health Organization noted that since 2000 the number of children die every year before they reach the age of 5 with more than half has fallen, largely because of the power of vaccines. According to Gavi’s estimates, the US would cancel the promise of the Biden era to provide $ 1.2 billion. This donation cycle could lead to the death of more than 1 million children who would otherwise have lived. (The Ministry of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.) In his recorded comments, Kennedy said that America would not send the money until Gavi “could re -supply public confidence” by “taking vaccine safety”.
Cutting the only access of millions of children to routine vaccines is “the most emphatic globalization of the Anti-Vaxxer agenda,” said Lawrence Gostin, the Faculty of Director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law of Georgetown, me. Tom Frieden, the former director of the CDC, told me that after he had heard Kennedy’s comments: “I was literally sick in my stomach”, because “unscientific, irresponsible statements like this will lead to the death of children.” (The US have previously carried out an international anti-vaccine campaign: according to one research By Reuters in 2020, the Bot accounts of the Pentagon on multiple social media platforms gave Filipinos and the recording of the Chinese Sinovac vaccine discouraged-the first Covid vaccine that is available in the Philippines-with a Hashtag, “in Tagalog.” The goal was not to combat vaccines, but to undermine the influence of China.)
The pre -recorded address of Kennedy stopped his toughest criticism of Gavi. In his book from 2021, The real Anthony FauciKennedy paints “Bill Gates’s Surrogate Group Gavi” (the Gates Foundation co-founder of Gavi) as nothing more than a profitable “Cabal” and a facilitator of “African genocide”. To hear Kennedy say: “Almost all Blockbuster African and Asian vaccines from Gates – Polio, DTP, Hepatitis B, malaria, meningitis, HPV and HIB – have many more injuries and deaths than they do.”
For decades of safety and effectiveness studies, he has proven him wrong. In his comments to GAVI this week, Kennedy concentrated on the DTP (Difterie, Tetanus and Ptussis), and described extensively an “orientation point” 2017 study that discovered that the vaccine increased the death of all causes in Guinea-Bissau. But as Frieden noted, this was in fact a relatively small observational study. In 2022, a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of more than 50,000 newborns that the DTP vaccine considerable decreased Child mortality. Frieden compared the proof: “Hundreds of children versus 50,000 children. Poorly done; well done.”
Kennedy made efforts to take his anti-vaccine interests worldwide before he became the American health secretary. In 2021 he delivered one Webinar About the importance of expanding an “international movement” for the health defense of children, the anti-vaccine organization that he has founded. In 2019, when Samoa Had a large dip in measles -after an incorrectly prepared vaccine killed two children, Kennedy visited the prime minister and, on behalf of the health defense of children, are reportedly offered to build an information system that the country could use to keep track of the health effects of vaccines and other medical interventions. When a deadly outbreak of measles came later that year, Kennedy sent a letter For the prime minister, that widespread vaccination non -vaccinated Samoan children can be more likely to die from measles. (In an interview for a 2023 documentary, Kennedy said that “I had nothing to do with people who are not vaccinating in Samoa” and that his conversations about vaccines with the prime minister were “limited”))
Now it seems that Kennedy has gained the power to realize his ambitions both in his own country and abroad. Earlier this month, Kennedy rejected all 17 members of the CDC’s Vaccine Advisory Committee and then replaced them with a group with different allies who have spread wrong information about the damage of vaccines. This week, while other countries promised their support to Gavi, the brand new, chosen panel of Kennedy was convened for a discussion of the dangers of Thimerosal, a vaccine ingredient that is a frequent target of anti-vaxxxers despite it. The committee has formed a working group to revise the “cumulative effect” of vaccination in children in the United States. As Kennedy said in his speech to Gavi, “the business world is over as usual.”
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