RFK Jr. Calls on Governors to Eliminate Sugary Drinks From SNAP
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called on every state governor to exclude sugary drinks from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) initiative, according to a June 10
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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
West Coast governors condemn Kennedy's removal of CDC vaccine advisors, reaffirm support of science
The governors of California, Oregon, and Washington released a joint statement Thursday condemning U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for dismissing all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, and Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson expressed 'grave concerns' about the abrupt removal of ACIP's members, describing the move as 'deeply troubling for the health of the nation.' The governors emphasized that their states remain committed to following scientific guidance in public health policy, particularly in the area of immunizations. 'Together, our states depend on the best science and knowledge available to protect public health, including scientific information about immunizations,' the governors said in the joint statement. 'We have grave concerns about the integrity and transparency of upcoming federal vaccine recommendations and will continue to collaborate to ensure that science and sound medicine prevail to prevent any loss of life.' Kennedy defended the dismissals by claiming that the ACIP members were contributing to a 'crisis of public trust.' ACIP, however, has served for more than 60 years as the CDC's primary advisory group on vaccine recommendations. Its members include physicians, public health experts, and academics with deep experience in immunization science. Many of the ousted members, current and past, have worked for state public health agencies, including those in California, Oregon, and Washington. Members are vetted for conflicts of interest and selected through a rigorous nomination process. The move comes less than three weeks before ACIP's next scheduled meeting. Health officials in the three states criticized the timing and potential consequences for national vaccine policy. All three states continue to recommend that individuals 6 months and older have access to authorized COVID-19 vaccines, especially those at higher risk, including infants, pregnant individuals, older adults, and people with underlying health conditions. The Western States Scientific Safety Review Workgroup — established during the pandemic by the three states — remains active and will continue evaluating vaccine safety and effectiveness alongside medical experts and professional organizations.
Atlantic
an hour ago
- Atlantic
The True Beginning of America's Anti-Vaccine Era
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accepted his new position as health secretary, he made a big show of distancing himself from his past life. 'News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry,' Kennedy, who has for decades promoted the debunked notion that vaccines cause autism and has baselessly sown doubt over the ability of the U.S. government to vet shots, said at his confirmation hearing in January. 'I am neither. I am pro-safety.' But for all Kennedy's talk, this week he did exactly what a person would do if they were trying to undermine the scientific consensus on vaccination in the United States. He abruptly dismissed the entire expert committee that advises the CDC on its nationwide vaccine recommendations—and began to fill the roster with like-minded people ready to cast doubt on the benefits of vaccination. Like Kennedy, few of these new appointees to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice, or ACIP, have openly embraced the notion that they are anti-vaccine. But among them are individuals who have spoken out against COVID vaccines and policies, claimed vaccine injuries for their own children, and falsely linked COVID shots to deaths—or even baselessly accused those vaccines of ' causing a form of acquired immunity deficiency syndrome.' In January, I wrote that remaking the committee in exactly this way would be an especially harmful blow to Americans' health: Perhaps more than any other body of experts in the U.S., ACIP guides the nation's future preparedness against infectious disease. By appointing a committee that is poised to legitimize more of his own radical views, Kennedy is giving his skewed version of scientific reality the government's imprimatur. Whether he will admit to it or not, he is serving the most core goal of the anti-vaccine movement—eroding access to, and trust in, immunization. In an emailed statement, Health and Human Services Press Secretary Emily G. Hilliard reiterated that 'Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine—he is pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability,' and added that his 'evidence-based approach puts accountability and radical transparency first, which will restore trust in our public health system.' (Kennedy, notably, promised Senator Bill Cassidy during his confirmation process that he would maintain ACIP, as Cassidy put it, 'without changes.') Since the 1960s, ACIP has lent government policy on vaccines the clout of scientific evidence. Its mandate is to convene experts across fields such as infectious disease, immunology, pediatrics, vaccinology, and public health to carefully vet the data on immunizations, weigh their risks and benefits, and vote on recommendations that guide the public on how to use them—who should get vaccines, and when. Those guidelines are then passed to the CDC director, who—with only the rarest of exceptions—accepts that advice wholesale. 'These recommendations are what states look to, what providers look to,' Rupali Limaye, an expert in vaccine behavior at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me. Medicare, for instance, is required to fully cover the vaccines that ACIP recommends; ACIP also determines which vaccines are covered by the Vaccines for Children Program, which provides free vaccines for children whose families cannot afford them. The experts who serve on ACIP have the opportunity, more than just about any of their scientific peers, to translate their vaccine rhetoric into reality. So far, Kennedy has dismissed the 17 people who were serving on ACIP, and filled eight of the newly open slots. Most of the new nominees have an obvious bone to pick with at least some vaccines, especially COVID shots, and have publicly advocated for limiting their use. Among the new members, for instance, is Robert Malone, a controversial physician who has spoken at anti-vaccine events, where he has denounced COVID vaccines and, without evidence, suggested that they can worsen coronavirus infections. Another appointee is Vicky Pebsworth, who serves on the board of the National Vaccine Information Center, an anti-vaccine nonprofit previously known as Dissatisfied Parents Together. A third, Retsef Levi, a health-care-management expert, called for the administration of COVID vaccines to be halted in 2023, and has questioned the shots' safety, despite a large body of evidence from clinical trials supporting their continued use. Overall, 'this is not a list that would increase confidence in vaccine decisions,' Dorit Reiss, a vaccine-policy expert at UC San Francisco, told me. (None of these new ACIP members returned a request for comment.) The next ACIP meeting is scheduled for the end of this month—and the agenda includes discussion about anthrax vaccines, chikungunya vaccines, COVID-19 vaccines, cytomegalovirus vaccine, human-papillomavirus vaccine, influenza vaccines, Lyme-disease vaccine, meningococcal vaccines, pneumococcal vaccines, and RSV vaccines. That's a big slate of topics for a brand-new panel of members, Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert who has previously served on ACIP, told me: Depending on how the meeting is structured, and on the input from CDC scientists, these new committee members could substantially alter the guidelines on several immunizations—perhaps so much so that certain shots could stop being recommended to certain groups of Americans. Based on the composition of the committee so far, Offit predicts that eventually the new ACIP will push the CDC away from full-throated endorsement of many of these vaccines. Even subtle changes in the wording of CDC recommendations—a should swapped for a may —can have big ripple effects, Limaye told me. Insurers, for instance, may be more reluctant to cover vaccines that are not actively endorsed by the CDC; some states—especially those in which vaccines have become a political battleground—may stop mandating those types of shots. If the CDC softens its recommendations, 'we will likely see more partisan divides' in who opts for protection nationwide, Jason Schwartz, a vaccine-policy expert at Yale, told me. Pharmaceutical companies may, in turn, cut down production of vaccines that don't have full CDC backing—perpetuating a cycle of reduced availability and reduced enthusiasm. And primary-care physicians, who look to the CDC's vaccination schedule as an essential reference, may shift the language they use to describe childhood shots, nudging more parents to simply opt out. Historically, medical and public-health associations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, have aligned their vaccine recommendations with ACIP's—because those recommendations were all driven by scientific evidence. Now, though, scientific consensus and government position are beginning to diverge: Multiple groups of physicians, scientists, and public-health scholars have issued statements condemning the vaccine decisions of Kennedy and his allies; a number of prominent scientists have now banded together to form a kind of alt-ACIP, dubbing themselves the Vaccine Integrity Project. As the views of fringe vaccine groups become the government's stance, Americans may soon have to choose between following the science or following what their nation's leaders say. Identifying as 'anti-vaccine' has historically been taboo: In a nation where most people remain largely in favor of shots, the term is pejorative, an open acknowledgement that one's views lie outside of the norm. But the more vaccine resistance infiltrates HHS and its advisers, the more what's considered normal may shift towards Kennedy's own views on vaccines; ACIP's reputation for evidence-backed thinking could even gild those views with scientific legitimacy. Assembling one's own team of friendly experts is an especially effective way to sanewash extremism, Reiss told me, and to overturn the system through what appear to be normal channels. If the nation's most prominent group of vaccine advisers bends toward anti-vaccine, the term loses its extremist edge—and the scientists who argue, based on sound data, that vaccines are safe and effective risk being labeled anti-government.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Under RFK Jr., Vaccine Approval Is Getting More Politicized, Not Less
"Vaccines have become a divisive issue in American politics," asserted Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his June 9 Wall Street Journal op-ed. "Public confidence is waning." This is true. But the HHS secretary bears responsibility for much of that division and waning confidence. And he's just made it worse. How? Kennedy has politicized the U.S. vaccine approval process by summarily firing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) earlier this week. Typically appointed to four-year terms, Kennedy has taken the unprecedented step of prematurely sacking the entire panel. Two days later, he announced his selection of eight new members, many of whom are chiefly famous for espousing contrarian views with respect to vaccine safety and efficacy. So what did Kennedy find wrong with the original ACIP panel? The secretary asserted that it "has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interests" stemming from members' "immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy." At least in his Journal op-ed, the secretary offers no evidence of any unreported or improper conflicts of interest among those he just fired. It is worth noting that the fired ACIP members were vetted before they were appointed and that they each declare any conflicts that later emerge before each of the committee's meetings. What about RFK Jr.'s vague claims hinting at nefarious "immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms" on the part of committee members? If your automobile keeps stalling out, you take your jalopy to a trained mechanic for diagnosis and repair. If your computer system has been hacked, you seek help from qualified computer engineers. You earnestly hope that your mechanics and computer engineers are fully immersed in their respective systems of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms—that is, you hope they are experts who know what they are doing. Looking over the pre-firing ACIP membership list, they chiefly appear to be immersed in the fields of immunology, vaccinology, and epidemiology. In other words, they, on the face of it, have the training you would expect them to have in order to expertly diagnose the relative safety and efficacy of vaccines. For the most part, the new appointees are notably lacking in such professional expertise. The HHS secretary gives his game away when he characterizes his wholesale firing as being "above any pro- or antivaccine agenda." With respect to his new ACIP appointees, Kennedy promised that "none of these individuals will be ideological anti-vaxxers." That's great. After all, an anti-vaccine agenda makes as much sense as anti–automobile repair or anti–computer debugging agendas. The agendas we want are pro–making cars run, pro–computers correctly ciphering, and pro–vaccines that protect against diseases. However, in looking over the backgrounds of the new ACIP members, several of them can be fairly characterized as being at least anti-vaxxer-adjacent. First, there is physician researcher Robert Malone, who has made exaggerated claims about being the inventor of the mRNA technologies that led to the development of the successful mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Eventually, Malone became a COVID-19 vaccine skeptic, asserting that "they are not working." In 2023, he credulously cited a bogus analysis that claimed COVID-19 vaccines were responsible for 17 million excess deaths worldwide. Later epidemiological research suggests that the vaccines averted around 4 million deaths globally. A 2024 Brookings Institution report suggests "the delivery of vaccines to a substantial majority of the American population by mid-2021 saved close to 800,000 American lives relative to what would have occurred had vaccines not been developed." Then there is public health nurse Vicky Pebsworth. She is a board member of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). NVIC continues to peddle the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism, as does our HHS secretary. Next up is Massachusetts Institute of Technology management professor Retsef Levi. In 2023, Levi called for the immediate suspension of all COVID-19 vaccination programs. His chief concern was the reported detection of heart inflammation (myocarditis) cases in young males who had been vaccinated. Subsequent research has shown that post-vaccination myocarditis is considerably less harmful than post–COVID infection myocarditis and conventional myocarditis. In his announcement of the new ACIP members, Kennedy declared, "All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense." Maybe so, but the backgrounds of several of these appointees provide good reasons for skepticism. The post Under RFK Jr., Vaccine Approval Is Getting More Politicized, Not Less appeared first on
