Next week, members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent vaccine advisory panel are slated to discuss COVID-19 booster shots, as well as other vaccines. But Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently fired members of that panel, to the criticism of a number of health experts.
One of those critics is Dr. Jerome Adams, who served as surgeon general in the first Trump administration.
“The biggest concern I have is that the public, the medical community are no longer going to have the trust in the recommendations that come out of this committee that they’ve had in the past,” Adams said, “and that’s just tragic.”
4 questions with Dr. Jerome Adams
What are your concerns about the firings on the CDC’s independent vaccine panel?
“The abrupt dismantling, along with the opaque new direction that they’re going in, is quite simply a shocking betrayal of public trust that’s further shaking people’s confidence in life-saving vaccines, and many of us in public health believe it’s going to open the door to diseases that we spent decades trying to stop.”
What do you make of Kennedy’s claims in an opinion piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal that a clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence?
“I disagree with his approach and his assessment of what’s going to happen.
“Number one, there are scientific concerns, and we can have scientific debates, but the newly named members have a lack of expertise; they are credentialed in some areas, but they lack the deep expertise in vaccinology, immunology and virology that prior members brought to the table. And then you’ve got folks like Dr. Robert Malone and Mr. [Retsef] Levi who’ve been criticized for spreading misinformation in the past.
“You also have procedural concerns. We’ve now set the precedent that whenever a new president and a new HHS secretary comes in, if they don’t like the results of ACIP [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] they can just kick everybody out and start all over again.”
“The biggest concern I have is that the public, the medical community are no longer going to have the trust in the recommendations that come out of this committee that they’ve had in the past and that’s just tragic.”
What are you hearing from officials in the second Trump administration about your concerns?
“I’m in touch with officials in the White House and Congress constantly. And that’s one of the reasons I’m speaking out.
“I’m hearing Republican donors. I’m hearing senators and members of Congress and staffers expressing deep concern about the direction we’re going in. Many people embrace the chronic disease focus that RFK said he was going to bring, the focus on nutrition and physical activity, but so far, it’s been vaccines, vaccines, vaccines. And any progress we make on chronic disease is going to pale in comparison to the harm done if we see the return of measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, and we see 50,000 people a year continuing to die from COVID-19.”
How do you respond to Kennedy’s statement that, ‘Vaccines have become a divisive issue in American politics, but there is one thing all parties can agree on: The U.S. faces a crisis of public trust.’
“I’m borrowing this from someone else: You can’t light a fire and then pull the fire alarm and come in and say only you can put out the fire. What I mean by that is a lot of the mistrust is being stirred up by the actions and the rhetoric of quite frankly, RFK and some of his supporters and so I would caution them to be very cognizant of the words they’re using the processes they’re going about doing things or that they’re doing an end run around.
“I also think we need to remember that our economic health, our national security, depends on us being safe from vaccine-preventable diseases and infectious diseases.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Jill Ryan produced and edited this segment with Peter O’Dowd. Ryan also adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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