Repost: Yikes! A presidential commission on vaccines?
What did this story from January 2017 cover and is it still relevant?
Editor’s note: On 11 January 2017, I published the following story on EBD Blog, one of the blogs I ran during the first couple of decades of the 2000s. Thanks to the wonderful services of Archive.org (AKA, “The Wayback Machine”), a contemporaneous copy of the posts to EBD Blog are available there. You can use that service to read a copy of the original, but here’s a copy of that copy. Given the 2025 news about vaccines, it seems pretty relevant. The links in the story also point to archived versions of those originals.—JohnL
Yikes! A presidential commission on vaccines?
In 10 January 2017’s Washington (DC, US) Post, Abby Phillip, Lena H. Sun, and Lenny Bernstein reported that US President-elect Donald J. Trump is apparently considering creating a commission on autism. The sensational headline is “Vaccine skeptic Robert Kennedy Jr. says Trump asked him to lead commission on ‘vaccine safety’.”
There are multiple other versions of this item,
Dan Merica of CNN (with video): “Trump team denies skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was asked to head vaccine commission“;
CBS News: “ Robert Kennedy Jr. says he will chair “vaccination safety” committee for Trump“; and
Domenico Montenaro of NPR with “Despite The Facts, Trump Once Again Embraces Vaccine Skeptics.”
And, for an opinion piece on the “news” event, see Brandy Zadrozny’s take from The Daily Beast, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Compared Vaccines to a Holocaust—and Now Trump Wants Him to Investigate Their ‘Safety’Notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. thinks pediatricians are like Nazi concentration camp guards—and Trump just gave him the power to promote the disproven vaccine-autism link.”
Fast forward: The current era
As Secretary of Health and Human Services in 2025, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., took actions his press office called a “bold step to restore public trust in vaccines,” he disbanded the panel of advisors (the “Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices” or ACIP) originally selected for their scientific expertise (coverage from New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal). Secretary Kennedy very quickly appointed in their place a group of experts1 he contended were highly accomplished and not a group of “anti-vaxxers,” but news reporters from ABC News, AP News, Katie Couric, NPR, New York Times, Scientific American, and others explained that members of the scientific community expressed concerns about the new members of the panel.
Although it appears that Secretary Kennedy’s ACIP is not outright promoting the widely discredited assertion that measles-mumps-rubella vaccinations cause autism, the panel may still be pursuing closely related fallacious ideas. For example, an HHS press release from 23 July 2025 explained that Secretary Kennedy endorsed ACIP’s recommendations to remove thimerosal from influenza vaccines.2
I hope that this new committee will provide solidly grounded advice to the secretary and the citizens of the US. I fear, however, that all this turmoil adds uncertainty to decisions that individuals and (especially) parents will have to make about whether and when to receive vaccinations. With COVID-19 infections continuing, measles re-emerging, and other vaccine-preventable problems all around, it seems to me like a bad time for policies that undermine vaccination.
I am not qualified or even informed enough to make recommendations about “the jab,” but there are trustworthy sources who can provide such recommendations. One on whom I depend is Katelyn Jetelina (and her colleagues) over on Your Local Epidemiologist.
Footnote
It seems amazing to me how quickly the ACIP was cleared of its members and new members were in place. I was appointed to a federal advisory committee and the legal requirements were step. The vetting process and the amount of paperwork that I had to submit in advance of the appointment took me weeks to assemble.
Thimerosal is a preservative that includes ethylmercury and is used in some vaccines to prevent contaminations; it was a frequent target of anti-vaxxers who believed that fallacious connection between vaccines and autism.