RFK Jr.’s HHS re-establishes childhood vaccine safety task force after pressure from his former anti-vaccine advocacy group

By Meg Tirrell, Sarah Owermohle, CNN

(CNN) — The US Department of Health and Human Services said it is re-establishing the Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines, a panel of US health officials tasked with making recommendations on vaccine development, distribution and monitoring.

The task force, which will be helmed by US National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, will also include the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, according to HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon. Additional members will be announced in the future, he said.

The announcement of the task force comes after a lawsuit from Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy group formerly led by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The group sued Kennedy last month in his capacity as secretary for failing to establish the task force in a move some public health and legal experts suggested was performative, given Kennedy himself had floated the idea of reviving the panel, or a similar one, for years.

The task force, which was created by Congress in 1986 and issued its last report in 1998, will work closely with the Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines, a group that reviews issues relating to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, HHS said. Kennedy in 2018 sued NIH on behalf of the Informed Action Consent Network to obtain the dormant task force’s records. The suit was voluntarily dismissed with prejudice.

The task force will submit its first formal report to Congress within two years, with updates every two years thereafter, with recommendations focusing on development of childhood vaccines “that result in fewer and less serious adverse reactions than those vaccines currently on the market,” and improvements in vaccine development, distribution and adverse reaction reporting, according to HHS.

The announcement was met with skepticism from vaccine experts, who noted pediatric vaccines are extensively studied for safety and efficacy both before they are approved and after they’re on the market.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an anti-vaccine activist who has these fixed, immutable, science-resistant beliefs that vaccines are dangerous,” Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine scientist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the FDA’s outside vaccine advisory committee, told CNN. “He is in a position now to be able to set up task forces like this one who will find some way to support his notion that vaccines are doing more harm than good.”

Brenda Goodman contributed to this report.

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