Ousted vaccine panel members say rigorous science is being abandoned

Seventeen experts ousted from a U.S. vaccine committee are expressing little faith in what the panel has become

NEW YORK -- The 17 experts who were ousted from a government vaccine committee last month say they have little faith in what the panel has become, and have outlined possible alternative ways to make U.S. vaccine policy.

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abruptly fired the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, accusing them of being too closely aligned with manufacturers and of rubber-stamping vaccines. He handpicked replacements that include several vaccine skeptics.

In a commentary published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the former panel members wrote that Kennedy — a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement before becoming the U.S. government’s top health official — and his new panel are abandoning rigorous scientific review and open deliberation.

That was clear, they said, during the new panel's first meeting, in June. It featured a presentation by an anti-vaccine advocate that warned of dangers about a preservative used in a few flu vaccines, but the committee members didn't hear from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staffers about an analysis that concluded there was no link between the preservative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

The new panel recommended that the preservative, thimerosal, be removed even as some members acknowledged there was no proof it was causing harm.

“That meeting was a travesty, honestly,” said former ACIP member Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at Stanford University.

The 17 discharged experts last month published a shorter essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association that decried Kennedy's “destabilizing decisions." The focus was largely on their termination and on Kennedy’s decision in May to stop recommending COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women.

In the new commentary, the ousted committee members took it one step further and prescribed some steps that could be taken to maintain scientifically sound vaccine recommendations.

“An alternative to the Committee should be established quickly and — if necessary — independently from the federal government," they wrote. “No viable pathway exists to fully replace the prior trusted and unbiased ACIP structure and process. Instead, the alternatives must focus on limiting the damage to vaccination policy in the United States.”

Options included having professional organizations working together to harmonize vaccine recommendations or establishing an external auditor of ACIP recommendations. There are huge challenges to the ideas, including having access to the best data, the authors acknowledged.

There's also the question of whether health insurers would pay for vaccinations that are recommended by alternative groups but not ACIP.

They might pick and choose which vaccines to cover, said the University of North Carolina's Noel Brewer, another former ACIP member.

For example, they might pay for vaccines that offer more immediate cost savings for health care, like the flu vaccine.

“But maybe not ones that have a longer-term benefit like HPV vaccine,” which is designed to prevent futures cancers, Brewer said.

Officials with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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