“All of the guardrails for this kind of a committee, which I served on many years ago, have simply disappeared,” says Sara Rosenbaum, Professor Emerita of Health, Law and Policy at George Washington University.
She’s referring to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy’s “retiring” of the entire 17-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
You know, the group that did such a bang-up job for the Centers for Disease Control during the pandemic.
“After the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves vaccines based on whether the benefits of the shot outweigh the risks,” the BBC explains, “ACIP recommends which groups should be given the shots and when, which also determines insurance coverage of the shots.”
A lot of money rides on what this board determines, you see.
Which is a big element of Kennedy’s complaint against the whole of the Big Pharma/Big Government complex. “The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal prior to what he calls a “clean sweep.” “Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines.”
Various newspaper reports quote a lot of experts expressing their shock and worry, but — in the articles, mind you — avoid Kennedy’s key points.
After the corruption of “science” by Big Government during the pandemic, sweeping out the old board gets an enthusiastic thumbs up.
Let’s hold the new board members fully accountable; perhaps they could break with tradition by not holding any meetings in secret.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Krea and Firefly
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