The Wall Street Journal editorial board trashed Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for appointing a slew of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists to one of the nation's most important vaccine advisory boards in a blistering takedown published on Thursday evening.
"We didn’t think anyone could do more to damage trust in public health institutions than Anthony Fauci, but Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is giving it a whirl," wrote the board. "See the eccentric crew the Health and Human Services Secretary has tapped to advise the department on vaccines."
Kennedy announced this month he was dismissing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP), a vaccine panel for the Centers for Disease Control that sets childhood vaccine schedules and determines which vaccines are covered under the federal vaccine injury compensation program.
Now, he has announced the people who will replace them — almost none of whom have actual experience with vaccines.
"Two of his new members have served as 'expert' witnesses paid by plaintiff attorneys in lawsuits against vaccine makers. Conflicts, anyone?" wrote the board. "Biostatistician Martin Kulldorff backed claims against Merck over its HPV vaccine. Mr. Kennedy held a financial stake in one of the cases, which after he became secretary he bestowed to his son, who works at the law firm suing Merck, Wisner Baum." He also appointed biochemist Robert Malone, who opposes COVID mRNA vaccination, and "served as a paid expert in litigation against Merck’s mumps vaccine, which was rejected by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Dr. Malone has downplayed the Texas measles outbreak and said two deaths of unvaccinated children owed to medical errors."
One of Kennedy's appointments, Retsef Levi, isn't even involved in medicine or biology, but is a business school professor at MIT, a sharp break from the practice of appointing doctors to ACIP.
"The secretary appears to have picked some vaccine advisers out of a Make America Healthy Again hat," the board jabbed. "Take Joseph Hibbeln, a nutritional neuroscientist whose research focus is omega-3 fatty acids. Another is emergency medicine physician James Pagano, who has written two novels and denounced a study finding that ivermectin was an ineffective Covid treatment."
The board noted that the only one of the appointees with any actual vaccine experience is Cody Meissner, a pediatrician who has advised other government vaccine panels and has promoted the benefits of immunization. "Consider him the committee’s contrarian," they continued.
"Mr. Kennedy claimed in his op-ed in these pages that reconstituting the advisory committee would restore public trust in vaccines," the board concluded. "He’s on a path to do the opposite."
