Tag: cdc

New CDC Vaccine Panel Recommends Merck’s RSV Shot for All Newborns

Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) this morning voted to recommend all newborns receive Merck’s new monoclonal antibody shot, designed to protect against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

Two of the seven committee members, Retsef Levi, Ph.D., and Vicky Pebsworth, Ph.D., opposed the recommendation, citing safety concerns. The remaining five members supported it.

The vote marked the first — and closely watched — decision by the new members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), appointed early this month by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He replaced all 17 sitting members, citing long-standing conflicts of interest that he said had plagued the committee for years.

Kennedy’s decision outraged the mainstream public health industry, which feared the new committee would be more critical of vaccines. It even prompted a move by vaccine manufacturers, insurers and the professional medical organizations they support to bypass government health agencies’ recommendations by creating a nongovernmental system for recommending and purchasing vaccines.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration earlier this month approved Merck’s RSV shot, clesrovimab, which will be marketed as Enflonsia. It joins two other recently approved RSV drugs. One is Sanofi and AstraZeneca’s monoclonal antibody shot for infants, Beyfortus (nirsevimab). The other is Pfizer’s RSV vaccine, Abrysvo, for pregnant mothers.

Data presented by the CDC during Wednesday’s ACIP meeting reassured committee members that the recently approved RSV interventions were safe and effective.

However, an analysis of the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink for the 2023-2024 respiratory season revealed an association between Abrysvo and an increased risk for hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, which include gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, eclampsia and HELLP syndrome, a life-threatening pregnancy complication.

Presenters repeatedly emphasized that RSV — a common respiratory virus that usually causes mild cold-like symptoms but can be serious in infants — is the leading cause of hospitalization for infants in the U.S. There are fewer than 100 deaths per year from RSV in the U.S., according to data presented at the meeting.

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ACIP Members Push Back on CDC’s COVID Vaccine Safety Claims

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) COVID-19 vaccine work group today assured the agency’s new panel of vaccine advisers that the vaccines are necessary, effective and have no safety concerns beyond a small risk of myocarditis among an age-limited group of young men.

The new members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) pushed back on several claims made by the presenters, including the agency’s methods for assessing efficacy and safety.

They also questioned claims the group made about how dangerous the COVID-19 virus is, especially for children.

ACIP didn’t schedule a vote today on COVID-19 vaccines. The committee only heard data presentations by the work group and engaged in a question-and-answer session.

Today’s meeting was the first since U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired the previous 17 ACIP members and replaced them with eight (now seven) new members.

The work group members haven’t changed under the new administration.

Last month, Kennedy announced changes to the COVID-19 vaccination recommendations for children and pregnant women.

The CDC now recommends “shared clinical decision-making” between parents and providers for healthy children ages 6 months to 17 years who are not moderately immunocompromised. The agency changed its guidance on COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant women from recommended to “no guidance.”

After several hours of presentations, the work group concluded that the 2024-2025 vaccines were effective in preventing hospitalizations and critical outcomes from COVID-19 in adults, that there is robust safety surveillance with no known risks beyond myocarditis.

The group also concluded that pregnant women are at greater risk from COVID-19, and that maternal vaccination has been shown to protect infants — a claim unsupported by any data from the presentations, said Dr. Meryl Nass, who live-blogged the meeting for CHD.TV.

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CDC Advisers Vote To Recommend Removal Of Mercury From Influenza Vaccines

Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on June 26 advised the agency to stop recommending influenza vaccines containing a mercury-based preservative.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in a series of votes reaffirmed the existing recommendation that virtually all individuals aged at least 6 months of age receive an annual influenza shot. The panel further advised, though, that individuals only receive thimerosal-free vaccines.

About 95 percent of influenza vaccines administered in the United States in late 2024 and early 2025 were free of thimerosal, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Tracy Hoeg, an FDA official, told the committee that there appear to be enough influenza vaccine doses without thimerosal for the upcoming virus season, which runs from the fall into the winter.

A spokesperson for Sanofi told The Epoch Times in an email: “We acknowledge the recommendation of the new ACIP. We now await the decision by the CDC on the path forward.

“We will have sufficient supply of Sanofi flu vaccine to support customer preference for this season.”

Seqirus, which also produces influenza vaccines with thimerosal, has not responded to requests for comment.

ACIP provides advice to the CDC’s director, who typically adopts the recommendations.

The CDC has no acting director listed on its website. President Donald Trump’s nominee for the post, Susan Monarez, is being considered by the Senate. The CDC and its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, did not respond to requests for comment.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier in the year adopted some recommendations offered by ACIP.

Kennedy has long opposed vaccines with thimerosal, and the panel heard before the vote from Lyn Redwood, a past president of a nonprofit that Kennedy founded who is now listed as an employee of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Redwood said in her presentation that a number of studies have provided evidence against thimerosal, including a 2003 paper that found an association between thimerosal exposure and tics and a 2007 study that found links to several positive and several negative associations, including a lower measure of executive functioning.

“There have been studies that have found evidence of harm,” Redwood said.

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CDC’s New Vaccine Advisers Vow to Study Cumulative Effect of Childhood Vaccine Schedule

The CDC’s new advisory committee today announced plans to look at the cumulative effect of all vaccines given during childhood.

Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., the committee’s new co-chair, said:

“The number of vaccines that our children and adolescents receive today exceeds what children in most other developed nations receive — and what most of us in this room received when we were children.

“In addition to studying and evaluating individual vaccines, it is important to evaluate the cumulative effect of the recommended vaccine schedule. This includes interaction effects between different vaccines, the total number of vaccines, cumulative amounts of vaccine ingredients, and relative timing of different vaccines.”

A new committee work group will look into these issues, Kulldorff said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently recommends at least 70 doses of 15 different vaccines for children and adolescents up to age 18.

Another new work group will look at vaccines that have not been subject to reviewed in more than seven years, he added. “This was supposed to be a regular practice of the ACIP, but it has not been done in a thorough and systematic way. We will change that.”

ACIP began its two-day meeting today despite a call from Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) late Monday to delay the meeting until the committee “is fully staffed with more robust and balanced representation.”

On June 11, U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named eight researchers and physicians to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory panel, two days after removing all 17 ACIP sitting members.

However, according to The New York Times, one of the new members, Dr. Michael A. Ross, a physician licensed in Virginia and a former professor of obstetrics and gynecology, withdrew from the committee.

Kennedy reconstituted the committee to “avoid conflicts of interest,” citing past members’ financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, he said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed about the change.

According to Cassidy, although the new committee members “have scientific credentials, many do not have significant experience studying microbiology, epidemiology or immunology. In particular, some lack experience studying new technologies such as mRNA vaccines, and may even have a preconceived bias against them.”

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FDA, CDC advisers say lost pregnancies higher than expected following early mRNA vaccination

President Trump’s second-term agenda has been careful not to cast doubt on his signature first-term achievement, the development of COVID-19 vaccines through Operation Warp Speed, which congressional Republicans continue to laud and even claim was sabotaged by Pfizer to deny Trump a consecutive term despite his base souring on the therapeutics.

A new preprint study on mRNA COVID vaccines in early pregnancy, coauthored by top advisers to Trump’s Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, may fuel the splintering of the Make America Healthy Again movement as the jabs’ opponents ramp up pressure on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to ban them.

Not yet peer-reviewed, the study analyzed hundreds of thousands of Israeli medical records on pregnant women in the three years before and after SARS-CoV-2 emerged in China, finding 43% more “observed-to-expected” fetal losses per 100 pregnancies — 13 instead of nine — when the first mRNA dose is taken between 8-13 weeks’ pregnancy.

Pregnant women who took a booster between 8-13 weeks lost an additional two pregnancies per 100, a “potential dose-response relationship,” the study said.

By using pregnant women who got flu vaccines between 8-27 weeks and women who received either vaccine before their pregnancy as “comparative controls,” the authors said they were able to show the association is unique to COVID vaccines. 

The former had a “consistently lower-than-expected observed number of fetal losses, likely the result of healthy vaccinee bias” – in which people with overall better health tend to have higher vaccination rates – while the latter had “according-to-expected or lower-than-expected numbers of fetal losses,” the study found.

It said “almost all” mRNA doses were made by Pfizer, whose own 2021 report to the FDA – which the agency hid for 16 months until a court made it public – shows 44% of women in Pfizer’s clinical trial lost their pregnancies.

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Activists Hopeful as CDC Advisers Vote on Thimerosal Removal

Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are set to vote on June 26 on whether to recommend that the CDC act to remove thimerosal from influenza vaccines, raising hopes from people who have advocated eliminating the preservative.

“We are hopeful that the consideration of thimerosal will spark a thorough discussion that it deserves, hopefully leading to its removal from all vaccines,” Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, told The Epoch Times via email.

Thimerosal, approximately 50 percent mercury by weight, has been used in vaccines since the 1930s.

Concerns that the preservative could cause health problems resulted in a congressionally mandated 1999 review that concluded that some infants might be exposed to levels of mercury above recommended guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency.

A House of Representatives subcommittee in 2003, following the review, said that “mercury is hazardous to humans” and that it “should be minimized or eliminated entirely” from medicinal products.

The Food and Drug Administration, which has worked with companies to reduce or eliminate thimerosal from vaccines, says that the use of thimerosal has subsequently declined, but it maintains that studies “support the safety of thimerosal-containing vaccines.”

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Did Head of CDC Vaccine Safety Office Delete COVID Vaccine Injury Records?

A key official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) responsible for monitoring vaccine safety and reports of vaccine injuries may have mishandled or deleted official records subpoenaed by Congress, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) alleged earlier this week. The New York Post first reported the story on Thursday.

Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, director of the CDC Immunization Safety Office, maintained the records in question. Shimabukuro previously authored a key paper and participated in public messaging claiming the COVID-19 vaccines were safe and effective for pregnant women.

Johnson, chairman of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, requested the records in a subpoena sent in January to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The subpoena pertained to an investigation into internal COVID-19 vaccine safety communications.

According to the New York Post, the subpoena led HHS to discover “potential discrepancies” in the emails maintained by Shimabukuro.

“HHS officials recently informed me that Dr. Shimabukuro’s records remain lost and, potentially, removed from HHS’s email system altogether,” Johnson wrote in a letter he sent earlier this week to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and HHS Principal Deputy Inspector General Juliet Hodgkins.

Johnson called Shimabukuro’s possible mishandling of his official records “highly concerning.”

Journalist Paul D. Thacker, a former U.S. Senate investigator, said, “Every American should be concerned about government scientists deleting or hiding federal information to shape a political agenda. That information belongs to the taxpayers.”

Nebraska chiropractor Ben Tapper, whose questioning of the COVID-19 vaccines led the Center for Countering Digital Hate to add him in 2021 to its “Disinformation Dozen” list of the “leading online anti-vaxxers,” said he was “not surprised” by Johnson’s allegations.

“For years, I’ve seen patterns like this before regarding vaccine safety data. The public health establishment often prioritizes profits over people and continuously seems to protect the lies over the truth. The idea that critical records might vanish — whether through negligence or intent — fits a familiar playbook,” Tapper said.

California attorney Rick Jaffe said Johnson’s allegations are “troubling, but not surprising, given longstanding concerns about transparency at the CDC.”

In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request last year, the CDC told Children’s Health Defense the agency has no records of certain internal email communications relating to the agency’s follow-up investigation of safety signals associated with COVID-19 vaccines.

HHS, CDC and Johnson’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

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Former Vaccine Committee Did Not Follow the Rules

In the spring of 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services underwent a sharp shift in leadership and oversight. With Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. assuming the role of Secretary, one of the most scrutinized decisions was his removal of 17 members from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The move followed years of concern about industry entanglement and sparked immediate backlash. Those dismissed issued a public letter defending their integrity and insisting that they had followed all disclosure requirements. But a detailed look at ACIP’s meeting history reveals that reporting a conflict of interest is not the same as acting on it—and that many of these members repeatedly failed to recuse themselves from discussions and votes where conflicts were plain.

ACIP is a federally chartered committee that sets the nation’s vaccine recommendations. Its decisions determine what vaccines are required for school entry, which are covered under federal programs like Vaccines for Children (VFC), and how billions in taxpayer dollars are spent. With that responsibility comes the requirement—both legal and ethical—to act free from industry influence. That doesn’t just mean disclosing conflicts. It means avoiding decisions in which personal or institutional interests could interfere with impartiality.

Over the last two decades, numerous ACIP members declared financial ties to vaccine manufacturers, but continued to participate in discussions and cast votes on matters directly tied to those companies. In many cases, those votes concerned vaccine products made by companies funding the members’ own clinical trials or compensating them as advisors. Under the CDC ethics policy, aligned with federal advisory standards, members are expected to recuse themselves from both discussion and voting when a conflict is present. Many did not.

For example, Dr. Cody Meissner, who served from 2008 to 2012, disclosed that his institution—Tufts Medical Center—received research funding from MedImmune, Pfizer, Wyeth, and AstraZeneca. Yet he voted on influenza and pneumococcal vaccine recommendations during that same period, with no recusal recorded in the meeting minutes.

Dr. Tamera Coyne-Beasley, who served from 2010 to 2014, repeatedly disclosed Merck-funded clinical trials conducted at the University of North Carolina. She voted on Merck-related vaccine policies, including HPV and adolescent immunization schedules, without recusal.

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CDC Advisers Ousted by RFK Jr. Voted on Vaccines Despite Conflicts

Multiple people who until early June served on a federal vaccine advisory committee cast votes on vaccines despite receiving or recently receiving money from pharmaceutical companies that stood to be affected by the votes, according to an Epoch Times review.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on June 9 removed all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines, citing issues such as conflicts of interest.

Dr. Helen Y. Chu, a professor of medicine and allergy and infectious diseases at the University of Washington, reported throughout 2024 receiving funds from Merck, among other pharmaceutical companies. In October 2024, in her first meeting as a member of ACIP, Chu voted in favor of expanding recommendations for vaccination against pneumococcal disease.

Merck manufactures multiple pneumococcal conjugate vaccines.

Chu did not submit any conflict of interest disclosures for the meeting, according to a CDC database.

ACIP members “are required to declare any potential conflicts of interest that arise in the course of ACIP tenure,” according to the CDC’s website. Members who declare perceived or actual conflicts of interest, the site says, “will be asked to recuse themselves from participating in the discussion and decision-making of the issues relating to that interest.”

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RFK Jr. Purges CDC Vaccine Committee—And Suddenly, Every Pharma-Funded ‘Doctor’ on Twitter Has the Exact Same Script

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has taken decisive action against regulatory capture by dismissing all 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee. This bold move represents a significant step toward restoring independence in vaccine policy decisions. His reasoning? Simple: You don’t “restore trust” by keeping the same Pharma-backed bureaucrats who’ve spent decades rubber-stamping every vaccine Big Pharma shoves at them. Who was on the ACIP committee? The geniuses who rubber-stamped injecting experimental mRNA cocktails into infants while dismissing parents’ concerns as “misinformation.”

As Mike Adams (the Health Ranger) put it: “If I were HHS Secretary, I would solve the entire vaccine problem in one day. ‘You’re all FIRED!’ I would auction off the furniture, sell the buildings, pink-slip everybody on day one and return health decisions to the American people (and the states) instead of a bunch of corrupt pharma whores who profit from maiming and killing children. Problem solved.”

RFK pretty much just did that.

NBC spun the news this way: “Manufactured chaos: Kennedy guts CDC’s vaccine panel of independent experts.” Let’s pause to appreciate NBC’s hilarious definition of “independent experts.” Apparently, “independent” now means “financially entangled with Big Pharma but still somehow magically unbiased.” But sure, NBC, tell us more about how Kennedy’s the one causing “manufactured chaos.” The only thing being gutted here is Pharma’s ability to treat the CDC like their own private focus group.

But here’s where it gets hilariously suspicious…

Within hours of RFK’s announcement, a swarm of blue-check “doctors” flooded social media with near-identical meltdowns:

  • “This is dangerous!”
  • “RFK is anti-science!”
  • “He’s gutting public health!”

Gee, I wonder if those keyboard warrior doctors are on Big Pharma’s payroll. How many zeroes did it take to turn them into corporate attack dogs? Hilarious how they ‘forgot’ to mention that many of their fired buddies on the ACIP committee were practically swimming in Merck, Pfizer, and Moderna cash. And what a coincidence—their outraged tweets all landed in the same four-hour window. Almost like… a coordinated Pharma meltdown. Weird, right?

Let’s be clear: This was never about science. This was about a captured system rubber-stamping vaccines with less scrutiny than a TikTok dance trend, all while committee members lined their pockets with Pharma speaking fees, sat on corporate boards, and voted on products from their own financial partners. Now that RFK Jr. has derailed their gravy train, we’re witnessing something glorious: the vaccine-industrial complex having its mask-off meltdown moment—complete with coordinated media hysterics and the kind of tantrum usually reserved for toddlers who lost their juice box.

The truth is simple: When “trusted institutions” suddenly start screaming in unison, it’s not consensus—it’s collusion.

No, the backlash isn’t organic—it’s a scripted meltdown.

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