Kennedy’s Purge Is a ‘Code Red’ for Vaccines in America

Opinion|Kennedy’s Purge Is a ‘Code Red’ for Vaccines in America

“Some people believe that the term anti-vaxxer is a pejorative,” the physician Robert Malone wrote on June 9. “I do not — I view it as high praise.”

Early in the pandemic, Malone campaigned for treatment with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and against mRNA vaccines, which he described as “causing a form of” AIDS, though he later admitted he received the Moderna vaccine to treat his own long Covid. In 2021, Malone circulated a 2013 video of a high school athlete collapsing on the football field, blaming coronavirus vaccination for the death before he was served with a cease-and-desist letter from the family. More recently, he dismissed as “misinformation” news reports attributing the deaths of two girls in Texas to measles, blaming not vaccine refusal but “medical errors,” and last fall published a book, “PsyWar,” claiming that between the C.I.A. and Department of Defense, the United States maintains “reality-bending information control capabilities” and that much of federal government’s business is conducted via sexual favor. “The term ‘anti-vaxxer,’” he repeated June 9, “it is not a slur, but a compliment.”

Two days later, he was appointed to the advisory board that steers America’s vaccine policy.

Richard Nixon conducted his “Saturday night massacre,” back in 1973, when one after another federal prosecutor refused to withdraw a subpoena of the White House tapes. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, staged his night of the long knives a week ago Monday, firing all 17 members of the vaccine advisory board, called the A.C.I.P., in one fell swoop — a historically unprecedented action and one that broke an explicit promise he made to Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and a physician, as a condition of his confirmation as secretary. The epidemiologist and immunologist Michael Mina called Kennedy’s move a “code red” for vaccines in America.

None of the A.C.I.P. advisers were warned or had their firings explained; they had to read the news in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that accused them of “malevolent malpractice.” Cassidy, who dodged questions from reporters on the subject, was left sputtering on X: “Of course, now the fear is that the A.C.I.P. will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion.” Malone, whose appointment to the board hadn’t yet been announced, posted proudly, “Promises made, promises kept.”

The new appointees are not all fully committed skeptics — though, beyond Malone, they include several people who have testified in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, as well as a longstanding board member for an anti-vaccine nonprofit and an M.I.T. business-school professor who has been publicly describing mRNA vaccines as mass killers since 2023. (The choices also include a nutritional scientist focused on fatty acids in the brain and a founder of a biotech company without a single piece of published research to his name.)

The new group fails to include experts on any diseases that vaccines prevent. Or experts on vaccines themselves. Or experts on infectious-disease epidemiology. Or experts on clinical trials. “We’ve taken people who had expertise and fired them for a bogus reason,” says the University of Pennsylvania vaccinologist Paul Offit, a former member of the A.C.I.P. and the creator of the rotavirus vaccine. In their place have been installed what the bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, also of the University of Pennsylvania, described to me as “vaccine skeptics.” Offit calls them, more pointedly, “purveyors of disinformation.”