First things first: Vaccines and antibiotics are among the greatest scientific advancements in human history, and their ledger of lives saved versus lives lost is incomprehensibly imbalanced.
But that doesn’t mean we haven’t lost our way in recent years. Both claims can be true. We’ve become a drug-addled nation, with an almost reflexive instinct to reach for a pharmaceutical fix for everything that ails us. Next time you watch TV, pay attention to both the volume and the length of all the drug commercials you’re fed, and you’ll see what I mean. Put another way: The U.S. accounts for around 4% of the world’s population, but we also account for a whopping 30%-40% of worldwide pharmaceutical spending.
Something’s terribly wrong with this picture. There’s no bigger business than Big Pharma. Its 50 largest companies constitute a market cap of nearly $5 trillion, and most of those companies are U.S.-based. Thus, Big Pharma’s influence on American society is monumental. This includes vaccines, where Big Pharma’s monied influence is both undeniable and often corruptive.
Yesterday, Donald Trump’s bomb-dropping health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., sought to address this issue in a resounding way by ousting the entire 17-member board of a heretofore obscure but vitally influential entity called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. We can already hear the counter-conspiracy theorists wailing about RFK Jr.‘s, shall we say, eccentric history as it pertains to vaccines, but this bloodletting wasn’t so much about the pros and cons of vaccines as it is about the process for how these vaccines gain approval for injection into the bloodstreams of the American people. It’s also about restoring our trust in an industry that badly and disastrously sullied itself during the COVID crisis, largely thanks to the politically driven misinformation and censorship of the Biden administration.
As Kennedy wrote yesterday in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:
In 2000 the House issued the results of an investigation of ACIP … found that enforcement of its conflict-of-interest rules was weak to nonexistent. Committee members regularly participated in deliberations and advocated products in which they had a financial stake. The CDC issued conflict-of-interest waivers to every committee member. Four out of eight ACIP members who voted in 1997 on guidelines for the Rotashield vaccine, subsequently withdrawn because of severe adverse events, had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies developing other rotavirus vaccines. A 2009 HHS inspector-general report echoed these findings. Few committee members completed full conflict-of-interest forms — 97% of them had omissions. The CDC took no significant action to remedy the omissions. These conflicts of interest persist. Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines.
Kennedy isn’t claiming that the ACIP’s outgoing board members were necessarily corrupt; only that they’re part of a system that, in its current guise, promotes “a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy.”
That view, of course, isn’t good enough for those who were ousted. Said panel member Noel Brewer: “Up until today, ACIP recommendations were the gold standard for what insurers should pay for, what providers should recommend, and what the public should look to.
The gold standard, eh? A panel that, according to RFK, has never once not recommended a vaccine? This 100% approval track record sure seems kinda rubber-stampy to me.
Or take Dr. Tom Frieden, president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives and former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who said Kennedy’s move was “a dangerous and unprecedented action that makes our families less safe.”
Frieden added, “Make no mistake: Politicizing the ACIP as Secretary Kennedy is doing will undermine public trust under the guise of improving it. We’ll look back at this as a grave mistake that sacrificed decades of scientific rigor, undermined public trust, and opened the door for fringe theories rather than facts.”
Frieden is the former director of the CDC, eh? The Associated Press doesn’t say, but if I had to guess, I’d say he was appointed by a [checks notes] Democrat. And sure enough, Barack Obama.
As for “politicizing the APIC,” Frieden didn’t seem to be too worried about the politicization of the APIC just two days ago, when all of it members were Biden appointees, and many have histories of donating to Democrats. Indeed, some of them were appointed by President Autopen on his way out the door.
As for Kennedy’s clean sweep undermining public trust, I’d ask: What public trust? How did that COVID vaccine mandate work out? How about all the young and perfectly healthy people who were coerced into taking it — even though they had practically zero chance of dying due to COVID — and now have myocarditis because of it? Talk about a “grave mistake.” (Ever notice how Trump’s fantastically successful but odiously Biden-implemented Operation Warp Speed has been memory-holed by both the Right and the Left?)
Does Frieden think the American people trust this secretive and conflict-riddled board to set the nation’s vaccine policy without a hint of influence from Big Pharma?
I think otherwise, and I’m happy that Kennedy decided to clean house and start from scratch. “A clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science,” he said. “Public trust has since collapsed, but we will earn it back.”
