When health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Earlier this summer, all members of an influential vaccine panel fired, he said The committee was “plagued by persistent conflicts of interest.”
But New researchPublished on Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, finds that the two most important vaccine advice committees already have record-bearing conflicts conflicts almost over the past decade.
Kennedy has long ruled that members of the vaccine advisory panels on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration maintain close ties with the pharmaceutical industry. During his first confirmation hearing in January, Kennedy claimed that 97% of the CDC advisers had conflicts of interest.
“When he started quoting these great statistics such as 97%, I thought:” Wow, that’s really great, “said head study -author Genevieve Kanter, university teacher Public Policy at the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy.” When I started watching the vaccing data, I saw that kind of figures. “
The study has looked at how many occurring conflicts of interest were over the past two decades for members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the vaccines of the FDA and the related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC).
During that period the vaccine panels each met about four times a year, with the most frequent meetings from 2016 to 2024.
The study showed that since 2016 only 6.2% of ACIP members and 1.9% of VRBPAC members have reported a conflict of interest during a certain meeting.
Moreover, the type of conflict that was generally the most worrying – income of vaccine makers – was virtually eliminated between the two committees.
Of those with reported conflicts, fewer than 1% personal income from vaccine companies, such as consultancy costs, royalties, shares or property, the investigation showed.
Kanter said that in the early 2000s conflicts of interest in the committees were much higher – a peak at 43% for ACIP in 2000 and 27% for VRBPAC in 2007.
At the time, it was generally the accepted standard for members of the advisory committee to have conflicts of interest, she added.
But starting around 2007 and 2012, members of the VRBPAC of the FDA began to undergo a stricter control process, including requirements to announce and remedy interest conflicts to vote for vaccines for which there are conflicts, Kanter said. It is less clear when Acip started to insist on a more rigorous thinning process, she said.
For ACIP, the reported conflicts fell to 5%in 2024. For VRBPAC, it has been reported that conflicts have remained below 4% since 2010, including 10 years where there were no conflicts at all.
“They are relatively low,” said Kanter. “Although there are certainly some who argue for zero conflicts or financial interests.”
It is difficult to create a advice panel from experts without conflicts of interest, she added.
The panels usually consist of top experts in the field of infectious diseases, pediatrics, immunology and public health. Vaccin makers often reach these experts to supervise their clinical tests or to play an advisory role in developing a new product.
“It’s a balance,” said Kanter. “You want people who have done clinical research into safety and efficacy.” She added that her earlier research has shown that people who have financial links with the competitor of a certain product that is discussed often do not vote anything else than people who have no financial ties.
In a statement, Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said: “Secretary Kennedy strives to eliminate both real and observed conflicts to strengthen confidence in decisions about public health.”
Dorit Reiss, an expert in vaccine policy at the University of California, San Francisco, said it is important for advice panels to maintain low conflicts of interest because it helps to prevent ‘skewed decision -making’.
After Kennedy fired all 17 members of Acip, he replaced them with eight new people, including various well -known vaccincritics. (One person stopped before the first meeting of the committee and left the group with seven.)
“Anti-vaccin activists define conflicts of interest than the rest of us,” said Reiss. “They believe in a large conspiracy where pharmaceutical control controls the media and the government, so for them, for example, a NIH subsidy would be a conflict of interest, or work in an organization in health care.”
Several of the new arranged by Kennedy, however, have ties with anti-vaccination groups or have served as expert witnesses in vaccine-related lawsuits, which witnesses on behalf of the claimants who sue vaccine makers.
Lawrence Gostin, a professor at the University of Georgetown, who specializes in public health, said that he was not surprised by the findings of the new study and noted that it is usual practice for committee members to be voted for when a conflict arises.
Gostin said he believes that Kennedy’s reason for replacing ACIP members was a “mere smoking screen for his real reason”, that was to replace renowned vaccine scientists with anti-vaccinactivists.
“Many, if not the most current members of ACIP, are closely associated with anti-vaccine interest groups, including those who previously led by Kennedy,” he said.
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