RFK Jr. Removes All Members of CDC Panel Advising U.S. On Vaccines
June 9th, 2025Hmm.
Via: CNBC:
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday said he is retiring all 17 members of a crucial government panel of vaccine advisors.
“A clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science,” Kennedy said in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on Monday.
Kennedy is removing all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and HHS more broadly. The group reviews vaccine data and makes recommendations that determine who is eligible for shots and whether insurers should cover them, among other efforts.
Don’t worry, these good folks so cruelly targeted by the elderly RFKjr (he probably has dementia) all seem to have full-time jobs at the CDC, so all they are losing is having to go to yet another in-house meeting once a month and publish what they talked about there. I had thought that the committee would be mostly big pharma people advising the CDC, but not, so we needn’t worry over any of them having lost a job, either. No, it’s just the CDC putting together ‘advice’ for the world’s medical researchers and practitioners as to what to do next with vaccinations and how to justify it.
Interesting. Good move, I’m guessing. Is this connected to mRNA regulations?
Some background:
https://blog.maryannedemasi.com/p/rfk-jr-just-fired-the-entire-cdc
Also, ACIP meeting to recommend the Hep B shot:
https://x.com/JoshWalkos/status/1628567214344269824
Dennis, now I’m confused. Are they only fired from the panel, or from all positions they hold at CDC?
@Snowman
Hm…
OK, so all 17 Biden-appointed panel members (13 of them in 2024) have been removed from the panel but haven’t lost their empoloyment, i.e. none of them lost their day jobs.
Only one is a CDC employee, Dr Melinda Wharton, Associate Director for Vaccine Policy at the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
FWIW, it seems they don’t get paid much for the time itself, $250/day (plus travel expenses), about $1500/year for three meetings/year. As for the other former members, they work at academic institutions, medical centres, public health departments & professional organisations.
I didn’t mean to provide misrepresentative or false info.
The three meetings a year are scheduled for 2025. They’ve had varying schedules in different years, meeting 7 times a year in 2023.
What you find out about committee members depends on how far you look and how much has been revealed somewhere on the internet. I forget the names of the members I looked up; it was only some of them. Every one had a CDC job other than ACIP member reported on some other site. But that was 2 days ago.
Many academics and think-tank employees have paid side jobs with the govt. For example; Noel T. Brewer, MS, PhD, (another name I arbitrarily chose just now), a prof at UNC, “edited a book for the FDA”. That means he was paid, or awarded a grant, or sent all-expenses-paid to represent the US at a scientific meeting in Beijing, for editing it. He also “published” either 275, 375, 376 or 475 scientific papers, according to internet sites. That actually means he was the boss, or a boss, of the univ. institute containing the labs where others did the research work. He did not himself carry out 11 to 19 research projects per year for up to 25 years. He looks to be under 50. I didn’t look for a pubmed list of publications with his name in the author list so I could count them, myself. He must have been the principal author of some of them.
All this is to say that complete answers to our questions are elusive.
This is just a detail, but I wonder if the $250/day was for meals and the $1,500 was for transportation and housing? That’s how the govt covered travel expenses when I was working for it. If you got the meal money on a credit card, then it wasn’t wages and wasn’t income on your fed tax return. Govt paid the plane fare and hotel bill directly. Nobody audited the card expenses. (Eat less, spend more on your son’s birthday present.) But times have changed — money, or value for labor, is passed around even more creatively now.
One more, from Aaron Siri:
ACIP’s Executive Secretariat for years, Dr. Amanda Cohn, just joined Sanofi’s vaccine division where she will likely earn millions a year. The very same pharma company whose products were voted upon by ACIP when she was its Executive Secretariat. Would be funny if the safety of millions of infants and children did not hang in the balance. Time to finally make ACIP not a joke.
https://x.com/AaronSiriSG/status/1932581781871734977
I’m afraid that Trump and RFKjr don’t have enough time to make more than a little dent in the fed machine. Between the court rulings against them, the fed employees’ work-arounds, and the revolving doors connecting govt, industry and academia, 4 years, maybe even eight years aren’t enough. The loyal servants of the medical establishment are too many and too well entrenched.
@Snowman
Thanks for digging up that info.
After viewing the ACIP meeting video, I wonder how many simply subsume themselves to the culture, never using ethics or morality as a check, only responding on the basis of belonging, of reward/punishment, of approval from peers. I guess that’s what the NPC meme is meant to convey.
Yes, I only looked at their current positions! I think the figure of $1500 was an estimate based on three 2-day meetings/year with travel expenses on top.