The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one of the 13 agencies Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy oversees, last week quietly linked to a database (via an X post) that lists conflicts of interest within the CDC’s powerful vaccine decision making committee — the Advisory Commission on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
The post on the agency’s website last Friday is part of Kennedy’s drive to promote ‘radical transparency’ within HHS. While refreshing, it’s also worrisome how much some members of ACIP have direct ties to Big Pharma.
Established in March 1964, the ACIP is composed of fifteen regular members, who are experts in the fields of immunization practices and public health; in the use of vaccines in clinical practice or preventive medicine; in clinical or laboratory vaccine research; and in the assessment of vaccine efficacy and safety. The ACIP also requires that at least one member have expertise in consumer perspectives and/or social and community aspects of immunization programs.
On its face, it looks like ACIP takes necessary steps to prevent conflicts of interest: Members are disallowed to be employed by, or involved with, employees of vaccine manufacturing companies – and individuals who hold patents for a vaccine can not be on the ACIP.
But the ACIP also includes ex-official members from Federal agencies involved with vaccine issues, and non-voting liaisons from medical and professional societies and organizations. That raises red flags.
The group typically meets in front of the public three times a year. Once voted on and approved by the director of the CDC, the vaccines that are given a green light are typically mandated for children by individual states. Little known fact: ACIP members are the people who decide what vaccines your children must take to be permitted to attend public schools.
The companies that make the vaccines – Merck, Pfizer, Moderna, among others – are granted protection from civil liability under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. This is why claims of vaccine injury are brought against the Secretary of HHS – not pharmaceutical companies.
All this aside, the CDC recent posting reveals compelling details about ACIP members’ conflicts of interest and thereby opens the organization up to further scrutiny.
One case in point of a conflict of interest the CDC revealed involves Dr. Wilbur Chen, who served on the ACIP from December 13,2020 to June 30, 2024. At a February 28, 2021 meeting, Chen reported that, according to the CDC posting, he was “involved in clinical studies of COVID vaccines until October 2020. He abstained from COVID-19 vaccine approval vote.”
This is interesting information, and it is good that Dr. Chen did not participate in the vote. However, one must wonder about the influence of Chen on the ACIP members who were voting on research on a vaccine with which he was deeply involved. Dr. Chen is clearly a person with great influence in the field of vaccinology, as described here.
Chen served as a principal investigator under Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institute on Allergic and Infectious Disease (NIAID) and received funding for his work by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Chen is connected to the most influential power brokers in the world of vaccinology and virology. How can we assess the impact of Chen on the votes of other commission members? Just because he recuses himself on one or more votes, is it ethical for him to be a voting member of the ACIP at all?
Another example: Dr. Robert Atmar, who served on the ACIP from July 1, 2016 to June 30, 2020. At the December 19-20, 2020 meeting Atmar, the CDC revealed, “Abstained from COVID-19 vaccine vote and voted on a general vote on prioritization for which no members need to abstain.”
Atmar, the CDC’s new post reveals, reported that he “is serving as the Co-Director of the Clinical Operations Unit (COU) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium (IDCRC) that is working within the COVID-19 Prevention Network (CoVPN) to evaluate Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccine candidates in Phase 3 clinical trials. He is the Site Principal Investigator (PI), including those produced by Moderna, AstraZeneca, Janssen, Novavax, and Sanofi.”
Dr. Atmar is yet another federally-funded principal investigator, another person of great importance in vaccinology as explained here. Being a principal investigator on federal research initiatives is a highly desirable position for scientists.
According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), “The Principal Investigator (PI) has overall responsibility for the design, conduct, reporting and scientific integrity of the research.” Further, “The NIH PI may assign responsibility for specific aspects of the conduct of the research to appropriately qualified individuals. However, at all times the PI retains overall responsibility for the conduct of the research and must assure both the protocol and the research team’s actions are compliant with law, regulation, and policy.”
Again, just because these disclosures about Dr. Atmar have been made, it still begins the question: why was he permitted to be a voting member of ACIP at all?
In his book The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy documented Dr. Fauci’s use of PI’s as agents for his agenda going back to his handling of the HIV crisis in the 1980s and the promotion of the toxic drug, AZT.
In just the above two examples from the CDC webpage, we see the pervasive involvement of ACIP members with the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Chen and Dr. Atmar may well be good people, but it is clear that both men are industry insiders.
The American people should know that and be able to assess whether members of the ACIP are beholden to them or to Big Pharma.
One would think that the legacy media would support Kennedy’s moves for transparency.
One would be wrong.
In its reporting on the recent CDC disclosures, NBC downplayed the issue. It instead rolled out experts who immediately criticized the conflict-of-interest disclosures.
One such expert – Arthur Caplan, head of the division of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. “The database could be used to sow doubt about the advice given by ACIP, giving a false appearance that members have strong ties to the industry,” Caplan told NBC.
The two samples I selected demonstrate that Caplan is wrong. ACIP members are deeply embedded within the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex.
Could it be that Caplan’s employer, NYU, also has pharmaceutical industry ties which influence Caplan’s comments?
This National Library of Medicine report exposes the ties between medical schools and drug companies.
NYU professor Dan Littman, for example, is on the Board of Pfizer.
NYU adjunct instructor, Raymond Kerins, has long standing ties to Merck, Bayer, and Pfizer.
Here are the Pfizer’s Board Members. You might recognize Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA Commissioner.
NYU and Merck have worked together on vaccines in the past, as shown here.
It should also be noted that Caplan’s employer, NYU, received over 72 million dollars spread out over 131 federal grants, as detailed in this NIH report.
One would think that Dr. Caplan, a medical ethicist, might be a little more forthright about the pervasive influence of Big Pharma, given his own employers’ deep ties to the larger complex of organizations that constitute the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex.
NBC also featured another industry expert – the ubiquitous Dr. Paul Offit – who criticized Kennedy, saying the HHS Secretary is wrong to suggest Big Pharma influences vaccine policy. “There is not a single shred of evidence showing that is true,” Offit proclaimed.
In my article in The Kennedy Beacon last week, “Measles Mania: What the Legacy Media Won’t Tell You,” I noted that in 2009, Age of Autism’s Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill reported that Offit earned 29 million dollars from a vaccine he invented that the ACIP approved while he was an active commission member.
Just like in the examples of current ACIP members shown above, Dr. Offit also recused himself from that vote. But does that really put him off the hook?
In the end, Dr. Offit and the rest of the Big Pharma insiders still got exactly what they wanted.
Is 29 million dollars enough evidence for you, Dr. Offit?
The corruption at the CDC’s ACIP runs deep. Offit, Chen and Atmar are just the tip of the iceberg.
This originally appeared on The Kennedy Beacon.
