06-05-2025
What's Behind RFK Jr.'s Placebo-Testing Order For Vaccines?
Last week, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will require all new vaccines to go through a round of placebo trials—something that the HHS is positioning as a 'departure' from past practices but which medical experts say is longtime practice.
'It's a bit of a head scratcher, because he makes it sound as though this is something new,' Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told Forbes senior editor Maggie McGrath in a recent Forbes Newsroom segment. 'We've been testing vaccines with placebo controls for the last 75 years. That's how we do it.'
Hotez said that the statement from HHS requires more clarity, because if annual flu shots and Covid boosters are included in Kennedy's mandate, the additional layer of testing could delay the availability of both shots this fall.
'You have to wonder about the ethics of it, because it would take so long to do that you couldn't rapidly have another mRNA variant in time. So it would essentially squash the program,' Hotez says. 'I think we need some clarification from Department of Health and Human services on what they're talking about. If it's to mandate that all new vaccines that haven't gone through placebo controlled trials to reaffirm that they go through placebo controlled trials, well, we've already doing it... but if he's also talking about a randomized, placebo-controlled trial [for an update of an existing vaccine], it's a question of feasibility and whether it would be available in time.'
To see the full conversation, click through here or watch the video above.
