As fired and retired scientists rallied outside in the Atlanta heat, an advisory panel that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. handpicked to replace experts he’d fired earlier met inside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s headquarters to plan a more skeptical vaccine future.
The new members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices began their tenure Wednesday by shifting the posture of the 60-year-old panel from support for vaccine advancement to doubt about the safety and efficacy of well-established and widely administered inoculations.
Their discussions and votes this week paled in significance, however, in comparison with Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy’s announcement Tuesday that he would withdraw a $1.2 billion U.S. commitment to global immunization.
That decision will kill children in the world’s poorest countries, critics said.
The new ACIP, meanwhile, recommended that newborn Americans get a newly licensed shot to protect them against a respiratory virus. The panel also urged doctors to stop administering influenza vaccine that contains a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal. That decision, in keeping with Kennedy’s disproven claim that thimerosal helped cause an autism epidemic, will have relatively little effect, since only about 4% of flu vaccines currently contain the preservative.
More worrying to vaccine advocates, the committee’s plans to review the government’s c …