While America watched President Trump bomb Iran (and joke
about renaming
Pete Hegseth his “Secretary of War”) and the GOP Congress continued
its insane push to destroy
Medicaid so Trump’s wealthy friends could receive their tax cuts, two
pretty terrible things also happened that are likely to jeopardize the lives of
children in America and around the world.
Those two awful things were the handiwork of Trump’s
secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, at this
incredible juncture, should obviously be renamed America’s “anti-health”
secretary.
First, Kennedy announced (in a falsehood-riddled video
statement to international public health leaders gathered at a global event in
Brussels) that the United States will no longer contribute funding to Gavi, a
global alliance that helps buy vaccines to treat the world’s poorest
children, according
to a report from Politico, which broke the story.
The reason, Kennedy said, was that Gavi was ignoring
safety. That’s a lie. All vaccines are tested for safety. Vaccines have saved
the lives of millions of people, especially children. But that didn’t stop
Kennedy from continuing his decades-long conspiracy campaign against vaccines
by using his post in the Trump administration to end successful vaccine
programs.
What is true is that, should the
Trump administration follow through on Kennedy’s statement and deny U.S.
funding for vaccines through Gavi, tens of thousands of the world’s poorest
children will be sickened by some of the deadliest infectious diseases known to
humankind. Some of them will die as a result.
“Secretary Kennedy's statement to Gavi, the vaccine
alliance, is literally sickening,” Tom Frieden, the former director of
President Obama’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote on X.
“Sickening because millions of children’s lives are in
the balance because of Mr. Kennedy’s fringe beliefs and misinformation on
vaccines,” Frieden wrote. “Sickening because the U.S. is turning its back on
women and children at risk of death and disability. And sickening because it
reflects the invasion of anti-vaccination falsehoods into life-and-death
programs.”
Atul
Gawande, who was head of global health at the U.S. Agency for International
Development, posted on X, “This is a travesty and a nightmare. The US was a
founder of @Gavi. It lowers vaccine costs for the world, has vaccinated 1B
children, and averted 19M deaths. This pull out will cost 100s of thousands of
children's lives a year — and RFK Jr will be personally responsible.”
Other public health leaders were just as appalled by
Kennedy’s ridiculous, unfounded claim that Gavi had somehow ignored safety by
making life-saving vaccines available to save the lives of some of the world’s
poorest children.
Kennedy’s decision to have the United States renege on
its pledge to support Gavi is “terrible but totally predictable,” wrote Ashish
K. Jha, President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 coordinator. “Gavi helps poor kids
around the world get vaccinated against polio and measles and other
life-threatening diseases. This is just mind bogglingly awful.”
Gavi, of course, defended itself. “Gavi's utmost concern
is the health and safety of children,” the group said in a statement responding
to Kennedy’s assertion.
Other global public health leaders similarly rebutted
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine stance. “Gavi prioritizes saving lives, and it's done
with incredible scientific rigor,” said
Bill Gates, whose philanthropic foundation co-hosted the Gavi summit with
the European Union. “We're constantly looking at safety.”
But Kennedy’s anti-science, anti-vaccine promise to
de-commit U.S. funding to Gavi might not have been the most terrible action
last week by Trump’s anti-health secretary.
His second act last week was to make certain that the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s main advisory committee on
vaccines somehow came to the tortured, anti-science conclusion that the entire
childhood vaccine schedule needed to be reconsidered.
Some quick background. During his Senate confirmation
hearings, Kennedy promised to the Senate health panel chairman Bill Cassidy
(R-La.) that he would
not do anything to undermine the CDC’s Advisory Committee on
Immunization Practices, the gold-standard panel that recommends vaccine
standards and practices. Much of the U.S. and global medical and public health
establishment has relied on ACIP for vaccine recommendations for decades.
Kennedy reneged on his promise to Cassidy and fired all 17 of the ACIP panel members. He replaced them with several known anti-vaccine conspirators.
The first ACIP meeting with Kennedy’s new ACIP
members was held on Wednesday, and its first action out of the box was to cast
doubt on childhood vaccine recommendation schedules.
One of the two new ACIP co-chairs, Martin
Kulldorff, announced
within the first few minutes of the meeting that the panel was calling
into question the entire childhood vaccination schedule and would start a
review of vaccines that have been approved and safely used for years. He also
announced that ACIP would look at the cumulative effect of vaccine shots given
to children during their school-age years.
In a move that’s clearly designed to cast doubt on the
safety and effectiveness of the entire childhood vaccine schedule, Kulldorff
said the ACIP review will literally go back in time and look at shots that have
been approved for seven or more years. He cited the hepatitis B shot given to
infants at birth and the combination measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox
shot, two immunizations that have been targeted by vaccine skeptics.
Calling into question the entire childhood vaccine
schedule is not just incredibly dangerous and contrary to the long-established
safety and efficacy profile of these childhood vaccines, but it’s also going to
cause immense pain and angst for millions of parents.
And what Kulldorff—who said at the ACIP meeting that he
had been fired from Harvard for refusing to get a Covid-19 vaccine because he
had said he “already had (herd) immunity” from infections—was doing with the
review is simply parroting conspiratorial, anti-science nonsense that has
circulated among anti-vaxxers for years.
“These are anti-vaccine talking points and have been for
decades,” Paul Offitt, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education
Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told
STAT.
Other public health leaders were even more direct about
what Kennedy’s deliberate manipulation of ACIP means as part of his
anti-vaccine conspiracy campaign.
“It’s deeply concerning to me that—within minutes of the
meeting starting—the new ACIP chair immediately sought to cast doubt on the
safety and effectiveness of childhood vaccines,” Richard Besser, who served as
acting CDC director, told The
New York Times. “Vaccine experts regularly study the childhood
vaccination schedule and have repeatedly deemed it to be effective and safe.
I’m worried that this is a harbinger of even worse things to come.”
Both actions by Trump’s anti-health secretary—the U.S.
decommitment on Gavi that will threaten the world’s poorest children and the
ACIP review of long-approved vaccines safely and effectively delivered to tens
of millions of American children—sadly leads to just one inescapable
conclusion.
Almost nothing that emerges from Trump’s HHS can be
trusted. Kennedy is blatantly foisting years of anti-science, conspiratorial
nonsense into critical HHS agencies like CDC. And it means that the American
people will need to look for scientific and medical guidance from places other
than the department that Trump’s anti-health secretary leads.
-Jeff Nesbit was the assistant secretary for public
affairs at HHS during the Biden administration.
-The Contrarian