OSU Student and Epidemiologist Speak Out Against RFK Jr.'s Policies
In his latest move to reorganize and change policy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced the removal of all sitting members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) on June 9th.
Kennedy stated, “Today, we are prioritizing the restoration of public trust above any specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda. A clean sweep is necessary to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.” The seventeen members of the ACIP were replaced by eight members, four of whom share Kennedy’s anti-vaccine ideology, and all of whom took a critical stance against procedures used during the COVID-19 epidemic.
This was not the first change pertinent to vaccines. In an editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Vinay Prasad, Director of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, and Dr. Martin Makary, FDA Commissioner, announced changes to COVID-19 recommendations from the FDA on May 20th. The final recommendation from the FDA is for individuals aged 65 and older, as well as anyone aged 6 months or older with an underlying health condition.
Several days later, on May 22nd, the FDA Advisory Committee met with Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Novavax-Sanofi to discuss development and regulations surrounding the new COVID-19 shot.
Kayvon Modjarrad, MD, PhD, Executive Director of Vaccines R&D at Pfizer-BioNTech, stated the following. “Looking to the last three years, CDC data show that despite a steady fall from the pandemic peak, COVID-19… maintains a morbidity and mortality matching influenza, even in the last year of high flu incidence. In the last year, nearly 24,000 people in the US died of COVID-19. In the face of this persisting threat, vaccines maintain a critical role in mitigating the burden of disease and death due to COVID-19. They do so by being updated according to a regular process modeled after influenza vaccines.”
On May 27th, Secretary Kennedy announced new recommendations for the COVID-19 vaccination on behalf of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He stated that healthy children and healthy pregnant women would no longer have the vaccine recommended. Neither the FDA nor the CDC websites currently offer guidance on the COVID-19 vaccines.
According to Drs. Prasad and Makary, uptake of vaccines is on the decline. Nevertheless, there is concern among members of the public. The Ohio State University student Amina Dahir said, “I think that this new rule is pushing us in the wrong direction. The effects of the pandemic are still very rampant, although our own government officials have been trying to write it off as something of the past. It’s unsafe to assume that a COVID-19 booster is unnecessary for “healthy” children and pregnant women. I believe this is especially scary and unsafe for pregnant women, because these COVID-19 boosters not only help them to build immunity but also the child they are carrying.”
She went on to elaborate, “I believe RFK Jr. is handling this extremely irresponsibly. Being Secretary of Health and Human Services is not a job to be taken lightly. However, we have seen how quick he was to bypass this rule and make this decision without communicating with members of the CDC committee, as well as other medical experts. There was no regard for the amount of American people who want to get the booster and wouldn’t be able to afford it because of their insurance, there is no regard at all for the families wanting to take better safety precautions against COVID, the list goes on. This is all around a horrible decision, and also makes me question the intentions of officials that claim to care about American citizens. If he wants to ‘make America healthy again’ then this is a terrible path to take.”
Nevertheless, from the viewpoint of the Wexner Medical Center staff, “The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center follows CDC evidence-based guidelines for research, treatments and clinical best practices in all of operations. We can’t accommodate an interview on these topics at this time.”
On February 13th, President Donald Trump formed the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission by Executive Order 14212. This Commission was to act under the guidance of Secretary Kennedy to determine potential causes of chronic illness. Eventually, fifteen individuals were appointed to the commission, with only three having education and experience in the medical field. Almost all of the commission members serve in high-ranking positions in the Trump administration. The commission’s initial responsibility was to provide the president with information on the causes of chronic disease. In its initial report dated May 22nd, the MAHA Commission announced its findings. In an unlikely turn, the findings aligned precisely with Secretary Kennedy’s theories. As he has stated previously, the causes of chronic disease in children are processed foods, environmental toxins, technology and medications, which include vaccines. A series of recommendations accompanied the findings.
The report, whose author/s remain unknown, received mixed reviews. As experts pointed out, some areas have been long known, but at other times, the statements in it go beyond what is established science. Jeffrey A. Singer, Terrence Kealey and Bautista Vivanco of the conservative CATO Institute pointed out numerous problems with the report itself, including, “Page 9 of the report claims over 40 percent of US children have a chronic health condition, citing the 2018 – 2019 National Survey of Children’s Health. But the survey doesn’t measure chronic conditions—It tracks current or lifelong conditions from a list that includes issues like ‘current anxiety problems,’ ‘current conduct problems,’ ‘current substance use disorder,’ and ‘current concussion or head injury.’”
It did not take long for errors in the MAHA Commission report to be discovered, which cited more than 500 studies and other sources. While the number of sources and studies might be impressive, they were filled with errors. Some of the studies did not exist. Katherine Keyes, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, was listed as the lead author of a study on anxiety in adolescents. She was, in fact, not the author of the study. The title of the cited study could not be found, and no study related to that subject was found in the specified issue of the journal listed. There are two studies cited that the report claims substantiate how drug advertisements led to more prescriptions being written. Neither study exists. In one area of the report covering mental health medication for children, a citation is used to show that therapy is equally effective as psychiatric medicine. Still, that paper did not include psychotherapy in its review.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services dismissed the errors as formatting issues that would be corrected. When the revised report was issued, it still contained errors.
Secretary Kennedy stated that he believed he inherited an agency that needed streamlining. He thought there were too many employees, too many divisions and too many offices performing redundant assignments. He initially cut his staff by 10,000 through voluntary resignations and retirement by offering incentives. He reduced his staff by an additional 10,000 through a standard dismissal process. In addition to the staff reductions, he consolidated departments and streamlined others. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is a major component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a significant public source of funding for medical research. With agency budgets being cut and HHS streamlining, as well, it was bound to trickle down and affect individuals and institutions beyond the federal government. According to the New York Times, 1,389 grant awards were ended. An additional 1,000 medical research studies had their funding delayed. The research that is affected is on cancer, addiction, Alzheimer’s and much more.
According to Irena Hwang, Jon Huang, Emily Anthes, Blacki Migliozzi and Benjamin Mueller of the New York Times, Eden Tanner, a chemist at the University of Mississippi, had been working with her colleague at The Ohio State University on developing a new treatment for brain cancer. They were notified in April that their grant was terminated.
In a New York Times article written by Julie Bosman, it was stated that Milwaukee, WI, students were found to have been exposed to lead. Officials requested the help of the CDC. The discovery was made that the drinking fountains in the city schools were the source of the lead poisoning. Officials in the city and at the State Health Department had requested the CDC’s help because that is what local public health departments do. They received a response telling them that their lead program had been eliminated. The lead program, which had previously assisted in environmental investigations, was cut by Kennedy.
According to Dr. Veronica Gillispie-Bell in an editorial on MSNBC online, Kennedy has eliminated the maternal mortality review committees, as well as the perinatal quality collaboratives. The first committees allow experts to know what is killing pregnant women and new mothers, so procedures can be developed to stop the causes. The perinatal collaboratives provide the methods for experts and institutions to establish life-saving procedures.
In a statement accompanying the MAHA Report, HHS outlined its next steps, which include “gold-standard scientific research” and the development of a strategy to achieve its goal of making children in the country healthy.
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