On June 9, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abruptly fired all 17 members of a key panel of medical and science experts overseeing the use of vaccines for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This move contradicted the explicit assurances Kennedy gave before his Senate confirmation to Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a physician who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pension, that he would maintain the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) “without changes.”

All of the committee members were appointed by President Joe Biden, whom Kennedy alleged was engaged in a “concerted effort to lock in public health ideology and limit the incoming administration’s ability to take the proper actions to restore public trust in vaccines.” This statement is ludicrous. Biden appointed appropriate members of the medical and scientific community to the ACIP. They had the knowledge, training and expertise to ensure that the United States’ robust vaccination program was able to continue to function.

For decades, the United States has been protected from many diseases by safe and effective vaccines. Kennedy, a conspiracy theorist and leader of the anti-vaccine movement, is determined to eliminate the use of as many vaccines as possible. He is now in the process of appointing ACIP members who share his misguided beliefs.

Among his picks are Vicky Pebsworth, a board member of an anti-vaccination group that promotes falsehoods about immunizations; Martin Kulldorff, who has publicly opposed almost every public health measure used during the pandemic; and Robert Malone, a well-known and prolific amplifier of vaccine falsehoods.

The new committee is likely to radically change or eliminate the childhood vaccination schedule, which has kept vaccine-preventable diseases such as polio and measles at bay. Consequently, many parents will skip vaccinations for their children, allowing millions of unprotected children to enter schools, where they will get infected and will infect others with vaccine-preventable diseases.

We are already seeing vaccination rates fall below what is needed to ensure herd immunity, which can only occur when enough of the population is vaccinated that pathogens cannot effectively spread. Herd immunity serves to protect the entire population, especially those with weakened or undeveloped immune systems, the very young, and the elderly.

The consequences of Kennedy’s reckless gambit may not be immediately obvious. Barring another global pandemic, the most immediate consequence of falling vaccination rates will be a slow increase in vaccine-preventable diseases, as we are presently seeing with measles and whooping cough.

But in as little as two years, the results may be catastrophic. Cases of measles, mumps, whooping cough, rubella, diphtheria, polio, tetanus, influenza, COVID, HPV and many more diseases will rapidly rise. Hospitalizations will skyrocket. Many people will be permanently harmed by diseases that could have been prevented by vaccination. Some of them will die as a result.

Kennedy’s actions have no basis in science or medicine. He brays that Americans don’t trust public health or vaccines, but to the extent that this is true, it is a direct result of his own promotion of anti-vaccine misinformation going back more than a decade.

At present, most Americans still do trust vaccines and choose to vaccinate their children, but that is not satisfactory to Kennedy. He seeks to undermine decades of real science in order to prop up his own endless disinformation campaign. He is a danger to the nation and all who live here.

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Elizabeth Jacobs is an epidemiologist and professor emerita at the University of Arizona and a founding member of the advocacy group Defend Public Health.

James Alwine is a virologist, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, a visiting professor at the University of Arizona and a fellow of the American Academy for Microbiology and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the coordinating committee for Defend Public Health. 

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