“The meeting should be delayed until the panel is fully staffed with more robust and balanced representation—as required by law—including those with more direct relevant expertise,” Cassidy wrote.
“Corrupted”
Vaccine and infectious disease expert Peter Hotez, a dean at Baylor College of Medicine, responded to Cassidy, adding, “Honestly in its current form, the ACIP is mostly devoid of any meaningful expertise in vaccines or infectious diseases. It is organized to pursue a pseudoscience agenda. It’s a waste of taxpayer dollars and should be dissolved. Perhaps down the line it could be resurrected.”
One of the CDC’s leading vaccine experts, Fiona Havers—who recently resigned from the agency in protest—went further to say the CDC’s vaccine processes have been “corrupted in a way that I haven’t seen before.”
“If it isn’t stopped, and some of this isn’t reversed, like, immediately, a lot of Americans are going to die as a result of vaccine-preventable diseases,” she told The New York Times.
Meanwhile, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine agenda appears to be moving forward undeterred. On Tuesday, the CDC released the final agenda for tomorrow’s ACIP meeting. Kennedy had already altered the agenda to add discussions of two long-standing vaccines: certain flu vaccines that use the mercury-based preservative thimerosal and certain measles vaccines. There is no controversy over these vaccines among experts, but they have long been the target of misinformation and fearmongering by anti-vaccine advocates, including Kennedy.
According to the final ACIP agenda, the meeting will also now include a presentation and recommendations on flu vaccines from Lyn Redwood. She is a nurse with no expertise in vaccinations, infectious diseases, or any other relevant field for the ACIP. Rather, she was the president of Kennedy’s rabid anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense and promotes the debunked falsehood that thimerosal-containing vaccines cause autism.
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