Analysis of the latest ACIP meeting at the CDC: Vaccines—and rigorous science—are increasingly under attack.
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Friends, Yesterday and today, I watched many hours of the CDC’s meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). In case you forgot, ACIP votes determine our national vaccine strategies. By law, vaccines recommended in its adopted resolutions must be covered by private insurance. (They also largely guide whether public programs will cover them.) Because the stakes are so high, Secretary Kennedy unilaterally fired every single expert on the committee this summer, replacing them with hand-picked replacements. Many of Secretary Kennedy’s new voting members understand neither the science nor the process by which this work is supposed to proceed—which I assume was the point.
Below are some thoughts from having jumped on the grenade to watch all of this for you. There are also incredibly good resources from The Evidence Collective, a group with which I am affiliated. They did a superb job covering FAQs from this meeting. If you’d like to read either the TEC “prebunk” (from before the meeting) or its debunk (from after), you can find those here:
Above all, thanks for caring about these issues! Please let me know if this was helpful. (I genuinely hope so, because many of these new voting members seem to be doing everything they can to break my brain.)
All right, let’s get to it…
The circus.
Neither folksy comments nor lip service to “respectful dialogues” render a circus into serious debate. The voting members are very proud of themselves for inviting dissenting viewpoints. The problem is that the debates we are now forced to endure are far closer to whether the Earth is round or flat than to genuinely contested areas of medical science. If it were the latter, I’d welcome it. Sadly, it is not.
Some lowlights…
Missing In Action: CDC experts.
No CDC scientist gave a presentation at the meeting. Some CDC subject matter experts were asked specific questions, and they performed well. But it is remarkable that CDC scientists have been sidelined by Secretary Kennedy’s incarnation of ACIP.
In Action: a slick lawyer ally
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