In his continued assault on vaccines and the extremely well established science behind them, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., posted a brief video to X on Tuesday undermining the expertise of the actual scientists tasked with setting vaccination recommendations.
“I couldn’t be more pleased to announce that as of today the covid vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule,” Kennedy said. This move, which flies in the face of what actual experts say, seems to have entirely sidestepped the established process by which the CDC amends its vaccination schedule — a process that is supposed to involve the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. As one expert in vaccine law told the Washington Post, ignoring the committee basically doesn’t happen.
The HHS secretary was flanked in the video by FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and NIH director Jayanta Battacharya. Collectively, this crew is systematically doing away with or ignoring the actual expertise they claim to have. In the video, Battacharya — who not so long ago oversaw another advisory board’s total destruction, at the National Cancer Institute, because who needs cancer researchers’ advice to run the National Cancer Center — intoned severely: “It’s common sense. And it’s good science.”
I dunno, Jay, is the “good science” in the room with you now? Because the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists “strongly recommends that pregnant individuals be vaccinated against COVID-19.” Because a 2024 study published in JAMA found that in utero exposure to the vaccine reduced the odds of “neonatal intracranial hemorrhage, cerebral ischemia and hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, and neonatal mortality.” Because a 2022 review of almost two dozen studies found a fifteen percent reduced risk of stillbirth with covid vaccination. And so on.
The CDC’s own website still — for the moment — says that vaccination during pregnancy is safe, and that the vaccines “reduce the risk of severe illness and other health effects from COVID-19,” and “might help prevent stillbirths and preterm delivery.”
But none of that matters when you’re the smartest guys in the room. The worst guy in your college english class, the most annoying hanger-on to your pub quiz team, these are the people in charge of the public health of the country now. Advisory boards, committees, collections of experts — to the dumbest guys in the room, convinced they’re Galileo, they must all sound like heathens.
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