BY RICHARD SKOLNIK
White Rock

The Republican Trump administration has “gone to war” against vaccines. This includes recently changing the CDC’s website on childhood vaccines at the direct request of the Secretary of Health and Human Services to imply that “vaccines cause autism.” This is despite the complete lack of scientific evidence for this idea.

Secretary Kennedy’s battle against vaccines appears to have four pillars, dealing with trust and the destruction of key vaccine institutions:

• Reduce trust in vaccines
• Take over the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)
• Make it difficult for insurers to insure vaccines
• Throw roadblocks in front of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program

The US Government is working hard to reduce trust in vaccines. Secretary Kennedy fired the members of ACIP and replaced them largely with people who lack the knowledge of medicine, public health, vaccines, and epidemiology to serve our needs. Insurers are required under the Affordable Care Act to cover vaccines recommended by ACIP and Secretary Kennedy has destroyed ACIP’s credibility and introduced ambiguity into ACIP’s recommendations. He is also working actively to change policy so that people with autism could seek compensation from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. This would probably bankrupt the Fund and without the Fund I doubt that any manufacturer will make or sell a vaccine in the US.

In this light, Paul Offitt, one of the most respected vaccine scientists ever, wrote a recent article titled:

CDC 1946-2025: R.I.P.?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has now weaponized the CDC website to promote his anti-vaccine views

In the article, Dr. Offitt noted that “24 studies performed in 7 countries on 3 continents … have all found the same thing. Children who have received the MMR vaccine were not at greater risk of developing autism than those who didn’t receive it. Researchers could have done a hundred studies, or a thousand studies, or a million studies but that still wouldn’t have proven that it couldn’t happen. You can never prove never. However, at this point, I think it is fair to state that a truth has emerged. MMR vaccine doesn’t cause autism; and neither does thimerosal, a vaccine preservative, or aluminum salts, a vaccine adjuvant.”

He could also have noted that the idea that “vaccines cause autism” began with a study that was published in 1998, that 10 of 13 co-authors retracted their support for the vaccine/autism link in 2004, and that the paper was later retracted because the research for it was conducted “unethically” and “dishonestly.” In addition, the author of the study lost his license to practice medicine in the UK. Unfortunately, he now lives in Texas and remains involved in anti-vax efforts.

So, what should we do? Don’t trust recommendations coming from the federal government on vaccines. Rather, take vaccine recommendations from professional bodies like the American Academies of Pediatrics, Family Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and the American College of Physicians. You can also trust recommendations from some hospital and university centers of excellence such as the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) and its Vaccine Integrity Project. Hopefully, your own physicians are being guided on vaccines by these groups.

In addition, I encourage you to do what you can to preserve our access to unbiased scientific evidence on vaccines and vaccines themselves. This is a political matter and not a scientific one. A good place to start is to flood Senator Cassidy’s office with calls from people all over the US, demanding that he urgently demand the resignation of Secretary Kennedy. You may recall that Senator Cassidy is a physician who voted to confirm Kennedy on the promise that Kennedy would protect America’s vaccine policy, a promise which has clearly been broken. You can reach Senator Cassidy at: 202-224-5824. You can also push our own Senators to demand Kennedy’s immediate firing, since the damage that Kennedy will do may take a long time and many illnesses and deaths to overcome.

Richard Skolnik is the former Director for Health for South Asia at the World Bank and the former Executive Director of the Harvard PEPFAR AIDS treatment program for three countries in Africa. He was also a Lecturer in Global Health at The George Washington University and Yale, at whose School of Public Health he still holds an appointment. In addition, he is the author of Global Health 101, Fourth Edition and the Instructor for the Yale/Coursera Essentials of Global Health. The views expressed above are his own and are not meant to represent the views of any organization with which he is or has been affiliated.