NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 The 17 experts who were ousted from a government vaccine committee last month say they have little faith in what the panel has become, and have outlined possible alternative ways to make U.S. vaccine policy.<\/p>\n
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abruptly fired<\/a> the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, accusing them of being too closely aligned with manufacturers and of rubber-stamping vaccines. He handpicked replacements<\/a> that include several vaccine skeptics.<\/p>\n In a commentary<\/a> published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the former panel members wrote that Kennedy \u2014 a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement<\/a> before becoming the U.S. government\u2019s top health official \u2014 and his new panel are abandoning rigorous scientific review and open deliberation. <\/p>\n That was clear, they said, during the new panel\u2019s first meeting<\/a>, in June. It featured a presentation by an anti-vaccine advocate that warned of dangers about a preservative used in a few flu vaccines, but the committee members didn\u2019t hear from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staffers about an analysis that concluded there was no link between the preservative and neurodevelopmental disorders.<\/p>\n The new panel recommended that the preservative, thimerosal<\/a>, be removed even as some members acknowledged there was no proof it was causing harm.<\/p>\n \u201cThat meeting was a travesty, honestly,\u201d said former ACIP member Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at Stanford University.<\/p>\n The 17 discharged experts last month published a shorter essay<\/a> in the Journal of the American Medical Association that decried Kennedy\u2019s \u201cdestabilizing decisions.\u201d The focus was largely on their termination and on Kennedy\u2019s decision in May to stop recommending<\/a> COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women.<\/p>\n In the new commentary, the ousted committee members took it one step further and prescribed some steps that could be taken to maintain scientifically sound vaccine recommendations.<\/p>\n \u201cAn alternative to the Committee should be established quickly and \u2014 if necessary \u2014 independently from the federal government,\u201d they wrote. \u201cNo viable pathway exists to fully replace the prior trusted and unbiased ACIP structure and process. Instead, the alternatives must focus on limiting the damage to vaccination policy in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n Options included having professional organizations working together to harmonize vaccine recommendations or establishing an external auditor of ACIP recommendations. There are huge challenges to the ideas, including having access to the best data, the authors acknowledged. <\/p>\n There\u2019s also the question of whether health insurers would pay for vaccinations that are recommended by alternative groups but not ACIP.<\/p>\n They might pick and choose which vaccines to cover, said the University of North Carolina\u2019s Noel Brewer, another former ACIP member.<\/p>\n For example, they might pay for vaccines that offer more immediate cost savings for health care, like the flu vaccine. <\/p>\n \u201cBut maybe not ones that have a longer-term benefit like HPV vaccine,\u201d which is designed to prevent futures cancers, Brewer said.<\/p>\n A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services argued that Kennedy is restoring public trust in federal vaccine policy by replacing the ACIP roster.<\/p>\n \u201cBy replacing vaccine groupthink with a diversity of perspectives, Secretary Kennedy is strengthening the integrity of the advisory process guiding immunization policy in this country,\u201d spokesman Andrew Nixon said in a statement.<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. 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