RFK Jr. Conducted a Pointless Vaccine Purge

The Wall Street Journal ran a letter co-authored by Charley Hooper and me today (print version tomorrow.) I have hesitated to quote more than 2 paragraphs but I think my contract that allows full quotation only after 30 days applies to my paid work, not my free work. So I’ll take the chance and quote the whole thing.

As you note in your editorial “RFK Jr. Conducts His Vaccine Purge” (June 11), HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired the 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices over a charge of conflicts of interest. He’s provided no evidence of such entanglements, settling instead for the claim that the “public must know that unbiased science guides the recommendations from our health agencies.”

Yet we have evidence of this from a related case. Like ACIP, the Food and Drug Administration uses outside experts on advisory committees. The FDA has tried to exclude members with ties to industry, which has slowed the approval of drugs for rare conditions because the few experts all have such ties. Fortunately, the effects of committee conflicts of interest have been evaluated and shown to be nonexistent.

In 2006 the physician Sidney Wolfe and several colleagues published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that drew on 76 meetings of FDA advisory committees that involved “yes” or “no” votes on individual drugs. They found that if voters with conflicts of interest had been excluded, none of the 76 outcomes would have changed. The participants with conflicts, moreover, were more likely than those without to vote for drugs that would compete with “their” company’s product.

In other words: Until proven otherwise, we have no reason to think ACIP had such a problem before Mr. Kennedy’s purge.

David R. Henderson

Hoover Institution

Pacific Grove, Calif.

Charles L. Hooper

Objective Insights, Inc.

Grass Valley, Calif.

Thanks to Charley for providing the backup link for the JAMA article. I got a request from the letters editor to provide the link and some screenshots backing up our claim. I was about to leave with my wife to celebrate Father’s Day.