Head of RFK Jr.’s handpicked CDC vaccine advisory panel challenges former agency directors to debate

By Katherine Dillinger, CNN

(CNN) — The recently installed chair of the committee that advises the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines opened a key meeting on Thursday by inviting several of the agency’s former directors to “a live public debate on vaccines.”

In his remarks at the meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, Dr. Martin Kulldorff said that only through debate could members of the public know who to trust for scientific advice. Kulldorff is among 12 members added to the committee this year by US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic.

“We are currently experiencing heated controversies about vaccines, and a key question is: Who can you trust? Here is my advice. When there are different scientific views, only trust scientists who are willing to engage with and publicly debate the scientists with other views,” Kulldorff said. “With such debates, you can weigh and determine the scientific reasoning by each side, but without this, you cannot properly judge their arguments.”

Kulldorff also pushed back on perceptions of the committee as anti-vaccine after its 17 previous members were dismissed in June by Kennedy and replaced with his own picks, many of whom lack expertise on vaccines or have made unproven claims or criticisms about vaccines.

“The fact is that we are honest vaccine scientists that let the data speak whether the results go in one direction or the other. That is always how science should operate,” Kulldorff said. “The members of this ACIP committee are committed to reassuring the public and restoring public confidence by removing unnecessary risks and harms whenever possible. That is a pro-vaccine agenda.”

Kulldorff, a Swedish epidemiologist and biostatistician who was a prominent early critic of the US government’s coronavirus response, closed his statement Thursday with an invitation to nine former CDC directors or acting directors who wrote a New York Times op/ed criticizing Kennedy’s vaccine moves – Dr. Richard Besser, Dr. Mandy Cohen, Dr. William Foege, Dr. Tom Frieden, Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, Dr. William Roper, Dr. David Satcher, Dr. Anne Schuchat and Dr. Rochelle Walensky — as well as recently departed officials Dr. Susan Monarez, Dr. Debra Houry, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis and Dr. Dan Jernigan.

In the op/ed, the former directors wrote, “What Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done to the C.D.C. and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months — culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as C.D.C. director days ago — is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced.”

They wrote that they worried about the “wide-ranging” health security impacts of many of Kennedy’s decisions and said he had stacked CDC advisory committees with “unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views.”

In Thursday’s remarks, Kulldorff said, “If they are unwilling to engage in an open and honest debate with the chair of a committee that they are so severely criticizing, then I advise that you should not trust them.

“If they want to be trusted, they should all accept.”

In response, Besser, who is now president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said “ACIP should not be reduced to political theater or gamesmanship.” He said that the current ACIP is an “alarming departure” from a legacy of close work with CDC scientists to make life-saving vaccine recommendations.

“CDC scientists have been blocked from informing or reviewing the committee’s work. Outside experts have been excluded. Recommendations that physicians and families depend on are no longer reliable,” Besser said. “If the committee continues down this path, the health repercussions for our nation will be severe. I urge the ACIP chair and its members to approach their work with the seriousness of purpose and commitment to science that this responsibility demands. Lives are at stake.”

Thursday’s meeting will include discussions and votes around hepatitis B vaccines and measles, mumps, rubella and varicella vaccines. Friday’s discussion will be about Covid-19 vaccines.

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