The past three weeks have been favorable for the anti-vaxxers. On June 9, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The most important panel of vaccine experts of the nation: all 17 voting members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which sets recommendations for the use of vaccines and determines which must be covered and releases the leadership of children on Medicaid, have been abrupted. The small, Ragtag crew of replacements that Kennedy first appointed two days later met this week for the first time, in the midst of many empty seats in a meeting room in Atlanta. They had started talking about the safety of vaccines: to express concern about the data, to drive hypotheses of damage, to publish findings.
The resulting spectacle was determined against a background of accelerating action by the secretary. On Wednesday, Kennedy ended more than $ 1 billion In American financing for GAVI, an initiative for global health that supports the vaccination of more than 65 million children every year. Lyn Redwood, nurse and the former president of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization that used Kennedy to be chairman, was just hired as a special government officer. (She presented yesterday during the ACIP meeting.) A recently posted scientific document on the ACIP website that underlined the safety of Thimerosal, an ingredient in a small part of the flu vaccines of the country, had been deleted, a committee member said because the document “was not authorized by the secretary’s office.” (A spokesperson for the Ministry of Health and Human Services told me in an e -mail that this document was provided to the ACIP members in their meeting briefs.)
What is clear enough is that, 61 years after the establishment of ACIP, the vaccination policy of America is about to be recovered. Now we have had a look in the kitchen.
The meeting started with complaints. “Some media have been very hard for the new members of this committee,” said Martin Kulldorff, a Rangy Swedish biostatistician and noted that Covid Contrarian is now the chairman of Acip. . hesitation. “
This was in fact the most combative remark of the two -day meeting, which otherwise unfolded in a tone of anxiety. Robert Malone, a doctor and a researcher of infectious diseases who embraced the “Anti-vaccine” label and published a book-loaded book that the government describes against the American people, was infallible in his frequent intimations about the safety of vaccines, often thank CDC staff for their hard work and lucid staff for their hard work and lucid staff. With his thick white beard, calm affect and soldier – Diction – Malone, many of his comments ended by saying ‘about’ in the microphone – he presented less as a fire flesh than if, say, the commander of a submarine.
For example, when Malone felt that Spike proteins of the MRNA-based Covid vaccines are hanging in the body after the injection, he did this in respectful, even respectful, language, suggesting that the public would benefit from a larger study of possible “delayed effects” of immune system activation. The traditional approach of the CDC-it is ‘worldwide, rigorous’, he could be improved by investigating this question. An expert on the subject replied that the CDC has been in realistic safety data about that vaccines for almost five years and has not detected any signs of long -term damage.
Later Malone implied that Covid or his treatments by a non-specific, banking mechanism could have had the American population more susceptible to other diseases. There was a “paradoxical, sudden decrease” in flu cases in 2020 and 2021, he noticed, followed by a trend of deteriorating damage. A CDC employee pointed out that the decrease in flu in those years was in fact not a paradox; Well -documented shifts in people’s health behavior had temporarily reduced the burden on many respiratory diseases in the same period. But Malone insisted: “Some members of the scientific community are worried that they come from the Covid Pandemie to the virus, exposure to different countermeasures of a pattern of widely based, uh, energy,” he said, his eyes are shot while he said the word, “that could contribute to the increased severity of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of the influence of He encouraged the desk to “be sensitive to that hypothesis.”
During these and other questions from the committee members, the experts of the CDC did their best to explain their work and respond to technical and conceptual concerns of Scattershot. “The CDC staff is still trying to work as an evidence-based organization,” Laura Morris, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, who has attended dozens of ACIP meetings in the past and has attended this as a non-voice contact person to the amademy physicians, told me. “There was some tension in terms of the committee’s capacity to ask and understand the correct methodological questions. The CDC tried to hold it.”
That task became more difficult as the meeting progressed. “The new ACIP is an independent body that consists of experienced medical and public health experts who evaluate evidence, ask hard questions and make decisions based on scientific integrity,” said the HHS spokesperson for me. “Bottom line: this process reflects open scientific research and robust debate, no pre -scripted story.” The most vocal questioner among the new recruits and the one who looked the least mandatory on a script-washing the MIT professor of the Business School Retef Levi, appointed a lesser-known committee that was at the table from Malone. A filthy former Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Officer with a ponytail that reached his back halfway, is Levi’s academic background in data modeling, risk management and organizational logistics. He approached the procedure with a wagging disbelief, disputed the efforts of the staff and pointed to the risks of systematic errors in their thinking. (In a fixed mail on his X profile, Levi writes that “the evidence assembly and indisputable is that MRNA -vaccines cause serious damage, including death” -a position that is completely contrary to abundant data presented during the meeting.)
Kort voor de stemming van de commissie om een nieuw, door de FDA goedgekeurd monoklonaal antilichaam aan te bevelen voor het voorkomen van RSV bij zuigelingen, merkte Levi op dat hij enige tijd had besteed aan het beoordelen van de relevante klinisch-trial-gegevens voor het medicijn en een andere zoals het, en vond wat verontrustende patronen in de statistieken rond de sterfgevallen van kinderen. “Should we not worry that there may be some potential safety signals?” he asked. But this high data had already been assessed in several institutions in several institutions: by the FDA, in the course of the approval of the medicines and by the dozens of members of the relevant ACIP working group for RSV, which according to the Commission’s standard practice was staged analysis Of the new treatment before the meeting and the consensus reached that the benefits outweigh the risks. Levi was not chosen by any reference to this earlier work. “I am a scientist, but I am also a father of six children,” he told the group; He said as father, he said, he would be personally worried about the risk of damage to this new antibody for RSV.
Eventually Levi voted against recommending the antibody, just like Vicky Pebsworth, who is on the board of an anti-vaccine organization and a Ph.D. In public health and nursing. The five other members voted yes. Those 5–2 vote aside, the most controversial issue on the diagram of the meeting concerned the flu shots in America that contained Thimerosal, which has been an obsession of the anti-vaccine movement in recent decades. Despite an extensive study, vaccines with Thimerosal is not associated with any known damage to human patients, but a non-specific vote with regard to their use was put into the agenda of the meeting in the absence of a study or presentation of the CDC staff scientists. What facts were there almost exclusively from Redwood, the nurse who led the anti-vaccine organization of Kennedy. Earlier this week, Reuters reported That at least one quote from her posted slides was invented. That reference was removed before she spoke yesterday. (HHS has no request to comment on this problem in her response to me.)
The only one of Kennedy’s arranged who had previously served on the committee – the pediatrician Cody Meissner – seemed perplexed, even tearded, through the procedure. “I’m not sure how to respond to this presentation,” he said when Redwood ended. He continued to summarize his worries: “Acip makes recommendations based on scientific evidence as much as possible. And there is no scientific evidence that Thimerosal has caused a problem.” Unfortunately Meissner’s warnings were for nothing. During the meeting he came as the last remaining, classic ‘expert’ of the committee – a vaccine scientist who clings to the old ways of ACIP – but his frequent protests were often bullied or ignored. In the end he was the only mood against the resolutions about Thimerosal.
During the two -day meeting, Kuldorff continued to return to a favorite sentence: Evidence-based medicine. “Secretary Kennedy has given this committee a clear mandate to use evidence-based medicine,” he said on Wednesday morning. “The aim of this committee is to follow evidence-based medicine,” he said on Wednesday afternoon. “What is important is the use of evidence-based medicine,” he said again when the meeting reached the end. Hear all together, I heard him say evidence-based At least 10 times during the meeting. (To be honest, critics of Kuldorff and his colleagues also love this sentence.) But the committee was irregular in its attitude to the evidence from the start; It has doubted CDC analyzes and substituted lay advice and intuition for the normal methods of ACIP for assessing and producing the consensus of experts. “Decisions were based on feelings and preferences instead of evidence,” Morris told me after the meeting. “That is a dangerous way to make public health policy.”
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