Want vaccine advice? Don't go to Kennedy!

Kennedys War on Expertise gathers pace....

As a youngster, I made sense of a difficult world through the beauty of science and later its application to human suffering as a doctor. It is not without its problems, but to science-based healthcare being trashed by Kennedy, it feels personal and important.

Now Kennedy is sacking Americas best medical vaccine scientists and replacing them with for the most part with his hand-picked stooges.

Call me old fashioned, but I dislike children becoming ill, disabled and losing their lives due to preventable illnesses. With anti-science on the march, it matters.

SUMMARY

• The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices (ACIP) has been established for decades to provide expert advice on vaccines and the vaccine schedule to the CDC.

• It largely determines the US vaccine schedule and which vaccines are publicly funded.

• During the approval process Kennedy stated he would not sack the committee.

• He lied. The experts heard of their sacking from the media.

• He has packed the committee with his anti-vaccine contacts.

• His false accusations of corruption and conflicts of interest on the panel mask his own.

My fascination and horror with Kennedy is growing daily. It might pale into insignificance against other evils, like war, what is happening to immigrants, the military, science in general and Trumpism, but it is a highly significant and dangerous descent into authoritarianism.

WHY HAS HE DONE THIS?

His tweets reveal his antivaccine messaging has become worse with the intoxication of power, in fact is in fact, tending to become rather Stalinesque.

1 Corruption

Kennedy always uses the ‘corruption’ ploy against those who disagree with his beliefs and now takes this to new heights. He is wrong. ACIP meetings have been live streamed and available to the public for years. All members must declare conflicts of interest and recuse them from any decisions related to any potential conflict. Independent groups have monitored them and found no problem. There has been no corruption in the ACIP.

His use of the word extends to his claim to ban HHS scientists from publishing their work in independent medical journals and will set up his own in-house journal, over which he., or his personal picks will have editorial control. That is corruption.

The previous panel were selected due to their expertise in the important areas needed to understand how vaccines work. The table describes who they were and their relevant expertise, thanks to Dr Bob Morris.

2 Vaccine safety and RFKJrisms.

Though the medium of Tweets, he explains:

"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.”

Outrageous. Malevolent. Malpractice. Stubborn – all in one sentence. The language is as disturbing as the content is wrong. He goes on to lament the number of vaccines children receive and that:

“ACIP has recommended each of these additional jabs without requiring placebo-controlled trials for any of them. This means that no one can scientifically ascertain whether these products are averting more problems than they are causing.”

There can be no doubt that new vaccines are tested against placebo and improved vaccines need to be tested against the best available vaccine. Placebo trials for better, rather than new vaccines would deny trial participants access to the best treatment already available, which is highly unethical and would lead directly to harm.

His manipulates concern about children getting too many shots, by most seen as a good thing if you consider for a moment the suffering they prevent.

When faced with journalists’ response, he replies, again on Twitter:

“Many vaccine promoters have challenged this assertion. They are always wrong. Last week, @CNN, which has devolved into a shameless propagandist for Big Pharma, triumphantly announced that it had proof that my pronouncement that "there have been no placebo-controlled safety trials for any routine vaccines" was false. CNN gleefully proclaimed that it had found 257 placebo-controlled studies for routine vaccines”

More Stalinesque terminology. Shamelessly. Triumphantly. Gleefully! Calling journalists Propagandists is a real concern. They found 257 placebo studies simply because they are there in the medical literature.

He goes on…

“CNN is wrong. No routine injected vaccine on CDC's schedule was licensed for children based on a placebo-controlled trial. In instances where a vaccine was used as a control, it too was never licensed based on a placebo-controlled trial. That is not conjecture. It is a fact based on FDA's clinical trial data. (See sirillp.com/noplacebo). As Secretary of @HHSGov, acknowledging this lamentable truth is part of my promise of radical transparency.”

His source is a law firm which specialises in vaccine litigation, not the real data. The placebo controlled trials for vaccines have been done – they are simply there, in the literature.

Radical transparency’ means telling us all what he believes on Musk’s Twitter and shutting down dissent. He concludes this burst of ACIP related Twittering by stating his foundational belief; that vaccines are responsible for childhood chronic disease:

“If we are to identify the exposures that are causing this epidemic of autoimmune diseases, we need to rule out products given dozens of times to young children, specifically to modify the immune system, as potential culprits."

He ignores the vaccine trial data, post marketing surveillance, large epidemiological studies and safety monitoring which show the vaccine schedule to be a good thing. Vaccines do not cause autoimmune disease and are the most studied of medical interventions.

New Stooges…

Kennedy has replaced all 17 members of the ACIP with his own 8 personal appointees, bypassing normal exacting vetting procedures to appoint his own favourites. He claims:

"All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense. They have each committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations"

It makes an odd bunch. Kennedy tactically chose one doctor with recognised vaccine expertise, three others who have none, plus four of his chums who are included in the dedication of his hateful, HIV and germ theory denying book “The Real Antony Fauci”. Compared to the table of the former members above, it is a descent from expertise and its recommendations will be taken with a hefty pinch of salt.

Note Robert “I invented mRNA vaccine” Malone, and Martin “Let it rip” Kulldorff. Malone was one of many researchers who contributed to the development of the mRNA technology but is fibbing when claiming to be the inventor. He has become a prominent celebrity on the back of promoting the dangerous hydroxychloroquine and the ineffective Ivermectin.

Kulldorff is a signatory of the Barrington Declaration which would have led to large numbers of deaths if enacted early in the pandemic. Both have appeared as “expert” witnesses in legal cases against vaccine manufacturers.

Vicky Pebsworth is an active and paid member of a leading antivaccine group, the horribly mis-named National Vaccine Information Centre.

Joesph Hibbeln is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist with an interest in nutrition but no apparent expertise in vaccinology or infections disease.

Retsef Levi is an operations manager at MIT with strong views against MRNA vaccines who has exaggerated the magnitude and severity of myocarditis among vaccinees and co-authored a highly criticisedpaper on vaccines side effects with Joseph Lapado the frankly bonkers surgeon general in Florida.

James Pagano is a retired A+E doctor who has written novels and is a climate change denier. He was disappointed the Republicans didn’t repeal the Affordable Care Act, which hints at his political allegiances. He has no expertise in vaccines or infectious disease.

Dr Micheal Ross is an obstetrician with no apparent expertise in immunology or vaccines.

Cody Meissner is a paediatrician who actually knows something about immunology and has relevant experience, though included due to his opposition to childhood COVID vaccines and masking at the height of the pandemic.

If they continue to have to declare conflicts of interest, most of this panel will have to recuse themselves from most of the agenda items most of the time. They won’t.

In other words, it’s a public health disaster.

It is evident that there is little experience in the panel to critically examine data and come to decisions independent from Kennedy’s prejudices and beliefs. The one reasonable voice will be drowned out by bias. I wonder if their deliberations will be made public.

“This is a disaster for public health,” says Adam Ratner, a paediatric infectious diseases physician in New York City. “It has the potential to set us back decades.” I agree. So what will they actually be discussing when they next meet?

On the next ACIP agenda…

“The agenda will include discussions on anthrax vaccines, chikungunya vaccines, COVID-19 vaccines, cytomegalovirus (CMV) vaccine, Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, influenza vaccines, Lyme disease vaccine, meningococcal vaccines, pneumococcal vaccines, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) vaccines for adults, and RSV vaccines for maternal and pediatric populations.”

(A Notice by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on 06/09/2025)

How this collection of folks will deal with this is beyond me. Understanding these diseases and their prevention requires considerable experience and expertise, and that is what the committee now startingly lacks. Experts in virology and immunology would have to work hard to get through the agenda, while most of this lot will struggle to pronounce Chikungunya. One presentation alone to the previous committee on COVID included 140 very dense slides of information and data.

McCarthyism and Lysenkoism and Kennedyism.

This is a dangerous time. McCarthyism in the 50’s was founded on the belief that anyone with left leaning views should be persecuted. He caused immense suffering with the destruction of careers and persecution of those who oppose him. Sadly, there are echoes here once again.

The USSR showed how much harm can be caused by the promotion of cranks into positions of power with Lysenko. His disbelief in genes or Mendelian genetics let to a revision of Soviet agricultural policy with persecution of scientists who pointed out why he was wrong. Lysenkoism led to millions of deaths due to agricultural failures.

Now Kennedys ultimate mission to manipulate the HHS to prove his beliefs also offer dangerous echoes of the past. Already defunding of USAID and PEPFAR will lead to huge numbers of deaths about which he or Trumps team care little.

With the ACIP likely to recommend removal of vaccines from the schedule and make them unaffordable to millions of American kids, we will return to horror stories familiar to us who have seen children suffer and die of infectious disease beyond the current needless deaths and complications from Measles, Whopping cough and the other vaccine preventable diseases.

The question is how the parents of a child who has died or become disabled due to the lack of a vaccine fare in court.

The Real ACIP?

There is a fightback beginning. Genuine experts in virology immunology, epidemiology and the other relevant specialities will I hope, set up an alternative source of advice. While not being able to influence what will be funded by Medicaid or Medicare, it will serve as a source of genuine analysis, information and wisdom which will now be so lacking from the HHS and provide the stability needed for healthcare workers who need support at this difficult time.

Concerned members of the public can make comments for the next ACIP meeting here and like the People’s CDC, I hope the meeting will be flooded with them.

I find it hard to imagine how a Family doctor or Paediatrician will explain to a parent why their child will not be protected against serious illness.

The answer will be one word: Kennedy.