The jury was rigged.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s also the nation’s most prominent anti-vaxxer, did the rigging, with the approval of Donald Trump, in plain sight, for all to see, and with no apologies.
And so, there’s little debate when you say the panel’s vote to remove the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation to universally vaccinate infants against hepatitis B was also rigged.
Rigged and dangerous and with every reason to believe that much worse is yet to come from the CDC advisory panel.
And now, after the rigged vote, the CDC is no longer — say the actual experts — a trusted source for advice on vaccines. I’m not an expert, but I’d say we’ve known for a while we couldn’t trust Kennedy on much at all.
Still, it doesn’t hurt to keep reminding people. Or to keep noting that the health secretary’s recommendations — on hepatitis B and a range of vaccines — risk the lives of children.
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Which is even worse than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s alleged kill-everyone order on the probable illegal attacks, on the open seas, on alleged Venezuelan drug runners. So far, more than 80 alleged drug runners on apparently unarmed motor boats have been killed.
It could even be worse than Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem’s masked, jackbooted ICE thugs.
These guys in the Trump cabinet are hard to rank, but it’s plain to see just how rank their decision-making can be.
The CDC advisory committee vote was hardly a shocker. The shocker would have been if RFK Jr.’s hand-picked panel of anti-vaxxers — formerly known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) — had voted to maintain the longstanding recommendation on hepatitis B.
Even so, it took four iterations of the new rule — and one delay in voting after another — to decide even to vote Friday. Were the panelists embarrassed by the chaotic meetings or maybe just the scientific evidence they were ignoring?
Or were they just determined to get something — anything — on paper that they must have hoped wouldn’t be too humiliating? If so, they were wrong.
The 8-3 vote means nothing scientifically. But it means everything in RFK’s Trump-supported war on childhood vaccines.
The panel didn’t get everything wrong, say the experts, just most of it.
It is still recommended that infected mothers get their infants vaccinated within 24 hours of birth. It also says that mothers, if they and their doctors choose, can get the vaccination regardless of the mother’s infection status. And that insurance will still pay for the vaccine.
But it was also recommended, with no evidence, that children should be retested for immunity after two months. That was so outside the scientific consensus that the panel could only muster a 6-4 vote with one abstention.
And also well outside the consensus is the panel’s recommendation that worried families should have their relatives and friends and caregivers tested. Millions of Americans don’t even know they have hepatitis B.
This is all of a piece to cause confusion, to muddle the facts, to make mothers worry they might be endangering their newborns.
In any case, Dr. Leana Wen, a Washington Post health care columnist, says it’s not only mother-to-baby transmission that is at issue. She notes a CDC report — from as long ago as earlier this year — that 1 in 10 children with hepatitis B contract the virus in other ways.
She also breaks it down this way: “About 90 percent of infected babies go on to develop chronic hepatitis B, a lifelong incurable disease that can silently damage the liver for decades before it manifests as liver failure. Many will develop liver cancer, which has a five-year survival rate of less than 20 percent.”
And so, this time, it was farce first, and then looming tragedy. But this anti-vax vote is not, to steal a line from Churchill, the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
(You could argue that the actual end of the beginning was when the CDC took down its scientifically based message that childhood vaccines did not cause autism. It was changed to one that reads: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”)
In a news release, the American Academy of Pediatrics said the “irresponsible and purposely misleading” recommendations would harm children.
“I want to reassure parents and clinicians that there is no new or concerning information about the hepatitis B vaccine that is prompting this change, nor has children’s risk of contracting hepatitis B changed,” said the AAP’s president, Susan J. Kressly.
“Instead, she wrote, “this is the result of a deliberate strategy to sow fear and distrust among families.”
The distrust is working. According to a recent Pew poll, most Americans still believe the benefits of MMR vaccinations are greater than the risks. But nearly 10 years ago, 91% of Republicans believed it and now only 78% do. The numbers get worse when people are asked if childhood vaccines in general are safe. Just over half of Republicans agree.
In a New York Times deep-dive look at RFK Jr.’s 20-year war against vaccines, Kennedy told reporters, “What I do with vaccines is a very, very small part of my job.”
Yes, he actually said that.
I guess it could be true, unless, as The Times noted, you need a COVID vaccine. Or now, a hep B vaccine. Or if you’re looking for more than a billion dollars in grants for research on new vaccines that Kennedy has canceled.
It has gotten so bad that states have formed coalitions to offer their own recommendations on vaccines. And six medical groups, at last count, have sued the HHS and RFK Jr. for vaccine-recommendation malpractice.
These are numbers offered up in a letter to the rigged CDC panel from more than 70 public health officials:
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Since the universal vaccine was first recommended in 1991, chronic hepatitis B infections in children have fallen by a staggering 99%. Of course, those numbers are from the old pre-Kennedy CDC, which also said the universal vaccine has prevented more than 500,000 childhood infections in that time and saved an estimated 90,000 lives. There were 18,000 cases in 1991. There are about 20 this year.
That’s CDC data, which Kennedy, of course, insists he doesn’t trust and doesn’t even want collected any more. Who needs data when data, after all, can be distorted and it only confuses people.
But Kennedy asks us to trust a University of Colorado expert, Cynthia Nevison, who made a far different presentation to the panel on Thursday. She’s an expert on climate change, as it happens, but maybe not vaccines.
According to the New York Times, she also claims to be an expert on autism. She co-authored a 2021 paper that was published by the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, along with Mark Blaxill, an anti-vaxxer of the first order who joined Nevison’s presentation to the anti-vax committee.
But the journal later retracted the article, saying they didn’t trust the researchers’ credibility. That didn’t stop Kennedy from picking them to present the case against the hepatitis B vaccine.
There was a third co-author, Toby Rogers, who told the committee the hepatitis B vaccine should never even have been licensed by the FDA.
So, the committee is rigged, the presenters questionable, but it’s even worse than that. We are left to wonder how it is that those on the rigged committee don’t seem to understand that, despite what the real experts say, they are risking making our children sicker.
I’d like to see a CDC study, or anyone’s study for that matter, explaining what they could possibly be thinking.
The rigged jury is still out. The verdict: You decide.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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