Unpacking RFK's lengthy social media post after firing vaccine committee members
A day after abruptly firing the entire committee that advises the federal government on vaccine safety, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he would reconstitute it with “highly credentialed physicians and scientists” amid backlash from his detractors about the terminations.
In a long post on X on June 10, Kennedy criticized the process by which the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices recommends new vaccines, implying that "adequate safety trials" were not being conducted before recommending new vaccines to children, a notion that was strongly disputed by vaccine experts.
Kennedy, who has a long record of promoting anti-vaccine views, also said the new Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices will have no “ideological anti-vaxxers” but that the committee will apply “evidence-based decision-making with objectivity and common sense.”
“The most outrageous example of ACIP’s malevolent malpractice has been its stubborn unwillingness to demand adequate safety trials before recommending new vaccines for our children,” he wrote.
Kennedy said a compliant American child receives more shots now from conception to 18 years of age compared to 1986, none of which required placebo-controlled trials. That was the year when the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was set up, protecting vaccine makers from liability and establishing a federal program to compensate individuals injured by certain vaccines.
“This means that no one can scientifically ascertain whether these products are averting more problems than they are causing,” he wrote.
A placebo-controlled study is a type of clinical trial where one group of participants receives an active treatment, while another group receives an inactive substance, helping researchers to determine whether the active treatment is truly effective.
But conducting placebo-controlled studies on vaccines that are improvements on existing vaccines presents ethical and practical challenges, say vaccine experts.
“If a vaccine for a serious disease (e.g., measles, polio) already exists and is proven effective, giving participants a placebo instead of the vaccine could expose them to preventable harm or death,” wrote Dr. Jerome Adams, the former U.S. Surgeon General under President Trump’s first term, in a June 9 post on X.
New vaccines always undergo a placebo-controlled study, said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Food and Drug Administration Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.
But Kennedy’s definition of placebo is different from FDA’s, said Offit.
Kennedy has sought to narrowly define placebos as salt water, said Offit, while the FDA defines it as an “inactive substance.”
“A placebo may contain sodium sulfate or potassium sulfate or may contain sucrose, or it may contain an emulsifier – those are all generally regarded as safe,” said Offit. “He doesn't regard them as safe.”
HHS did not respond to Paste BN seeking a comment on how Kennedy’s definition differs from that of the FDA.
Offit said Kennedy is a lawyer who has spent years suing pharmaceutical companies, and “his job is to scare people about vaccines ultimately, so he can bring them back to court and sue companies,” he said.
Meanwhile, in his announcement of the removal of the 17 members of the ACIP committee Kennedy said the purpose was to insulate the committee from “conflicts of interest.”