Ivermectin

Two days after purging all members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) vaccine advisory panel, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has named eight replacements. The new Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) appointees were revealed by Kennedy in a post on X, on Wednesday afternoon. They are Joseph Hibbeln, MD; Martin Kulldorff, MD, PhD; Retsef Levi, PhD; Robert Malone, MD; Cody Meissner, MD; James Pagano, MD; Vicky Pebsworth, PhD; and Michael Ross, MD. After news broke earlier this week that Kennedy had fired all 17 sitting members of ACIP, several healthcare provider groups such as the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Association of Nurse Practitioners voiced concerns that the panelists' removal could further erode trust in vaccinations. Tom Frieden, who served as director of the CDC during the Obama administration, said in a LinkedIn post that the mass ouster could "[open] the door for fringe theories rather than facts."The new members will soon have a chance to share their positions on various vaccines; ACIP is scheduled to meet from June 25 to June 27 to discuss a slate of jabs, including those for anthrax, chikungunya, COVID-19, cytomegalovirus, influenza and HPV.However, ahead of the meeting, several members' affiliations and past public statements on COVID-19 provide a rough measure of where they stand on certain vaccination policies.Vax historyAccording to a New York Times profile of Malone in 2022, he began spreading misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic — including promoting hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as treatments for the infectious disease — and claimed that he was central to the invention of mRNA vaccines, though that assertion has been refuted by his former colleagues. He appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast in early 2022, during which he said that COVID-19 vaccine developers never proved their products were safe, and that children "basically shrug this disease [COVID-19 infection] off." Kennedy recently directed the CDC to remove its recommendation for healthy kids to receive COVID-19 shots, but the agency has, so far, kept the vaccine as part of the childhood immunisation schedule — though with language specifying that it should only be given based on "shared clinical decision-making," or when the parents and physicians agree the child should receive the shot.On the podcast, Malone also attributed "mass formation psychosis," or essentially hypnotism, for why the American public believed mainstream facts about the virus, including the importance of testing and vaccination. Another new ACIP member, Vicky Pebsworth, has served on the board of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a group that has been known to share vaccine misinformation. She is currently a regional director for the National Association of Catholic Nurses. A 2021 study conducted by University of Connecticut researchers found that NVIC, along with other anti-vaccine groups, use emotional rhetoric and personal anecdotes to "sow seeds of doubt in vaccines." NVIC's website says that there have been 574 deaths in the US related to the measles vaccine, though the Infectious Diseases Society of America reports that no deaths have occurred in healthy recipients of the vaccine. Two other appointees, Kulldorf and Meissner, are affiliated with the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published in 2020 that criticised COVID-19 pandemic policies such as masking and lockdowns and instead promoted natural herd immunity as the best protective measure. Kulldorf co-wrote the proposal along with Jay Bhattacharya, the Trump-appointed director of the National Institutes of Health; Meissner co-signed it.