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‘Efficacy Will Be Secondary’: RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Advisers Have a New Mission
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired the government’s vaccine advisers, replaced them with skeptics of the shots like himself and is now giving them a new mandate: investigating the harms of immunization. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has for decades served as an impartial outside group of experts to advise the government and reinforce public confidence that decisions on the vaccine schedule are backed by science.
But the panel’s new chair, an evangelical pastor from Hawaii, pediatric cardiologist and Covid vaccine skeptic, says it needs to instead spend more time looking into vaccine side effects. Americans should view the panel “more as a safety committee,” Kirk Milhoan told POLITICO. “Efficacy will be secondary,” he said.
The committee’s pivot goes against decades of best practices. The federal government once saw having a panel of outside, impartial advisers to weigh in on vaccine schedule changes as necessary. No longer. The members, who largely share Kennedy’s vaccine ideology, are in position to help legitimize Kennedy’s longstanding view that vaccines are unsafe.
Democrats Just Handed RFK Jr. Billions More Than He Asked For. It Was a Big Risk.
Democrats counted it as a win Tuesday when President Donald Trump signed a law providing $20 billion more for the agency that is the world’s largest health research funder than Trump requested. Democrats’ victory could prove pyrrhic. Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and his National Institutes of Health director, Jay Bhattacharya, have promised to spend the money, but not necessarily on projects Democrats will like.
They have already begun rerouting millions in discretionary funds to studies on autism, which Kennedy believes is caused by vaccines. They’ve cut support for studies of health disparities related to race or gender, and research on transgender people. They’ve withheld funds to pressure universities to change policies on campus protests, faculty hiring and admissions. And now they plan on shifting more money to red states that used to go to blue.
“I have no illusion that this bill alone will stop Secretary Kennedy’s nonstop, misinformed attacks on our health system,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, told POLITICO. For now, she’s happy with the result anyway.
“Protecting these key federal investments is a big deal that will save lives,” she said. “It means cancer research isn’t getting defunded — and neither are key programs to tackle the opioid crisis or help women get the contraception and basic preventive care they need.”
RFK Jr.: ‘Fragmented’ Addiction Treatment System ‘Has Not Worked in This Country’
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday touted a new $100 million effort to fight opioid addiction highlighting the country’s “fragmented” system for addressing substance abuse.
Kennedy said HHS will implement the Safety Through Recovery, Engagement, and Evidence-based Treatment and Supports (STREETS) Initiative in the upcoming weeks to address health care inadequacies for addicts. It builds upon the Trump administration’s efforts to address addiction as outlined in the Great American Recovery executive order signed by President Trump last week.
“The system that we’ve been using so far has not worked in this country. It’s a fragmented system where nobody really is responsible for the outcome to the addict. You have a lot of agencies checking boxes,” the HHS chief said in an appearance on NewsNation’s “Cuomo.”
House Lawmaker Raises New Concerns Over FDA’s Ultra-Fast Drug Review Program
A Democratic lawmaker raised new concerns about a Food and Drug Administration program designed to drastically shorten the review of certain drugs, including whether senior officials involved in the effort are complying with federal ethics rules. In a letter sent Tuesday, Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts took issue with the lack of transparency in FDA’s handling of the program and questioned its legal underpinnings, noting that Congress did not sign off on the plan.
Under the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher program, drugmakers are promised expedited reviews of one to two months for new medicines that support “ national interests.” It’s at the center of FDA Commissioner Marty Makary’s stated goal of “cutting red tape” at the agency.
But Auchincloss says details about the program have been “shrouded in secrecy,” in part because the FDA has not responded to multiple congressional inquiries.
States Join WHO Network After U.S. Withdrawal
U.S. News & World Report reported:
Illinois on Tuesday followed in California’s footsteps to become the second state to join the World Health Organization’s pandemic response network after President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the organization. The U.S. departure from WHO became official in late January, with the Department of Health and Human Services saying it “completed the legal withdrawal process, ending its membership, governance participation and funding contributions.”
WHO said the withdrawal “makes both the United States and the world less safe” and that it hopes the country will return to the organization in the future. But two U.S. states aren’t waiting around for that. Illinois and California are joining WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, which the organization describes as a global partnership for the “rapid identification, confirmation of and response to public health emergencies of international importance.”
