United States: A recently constituted advisory panel to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. voted Thursday to reverse more than 15 years of recommendations that flu vaccines include an ingredient falsely blamed by the anti-vaccine community in cases of developmental disorders such as autism.
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The vote represented a potent break in the federal approach to vaccines that imparted into motion the vaccine skepticism of Mr. Kennedy and struck the initial in a series of lethal blows to a scientific procedure that has furnished a successful and efficient vaccine to Americans throughout decades.
Mr. Kennedy dismissed 17 members of the panel of experts approximately two weeks before and subsequently added eight new people, at least half of which have been unsupportive of certain vaccines.
I really hope Americans realize these people are idiots and ignore them.
— Jacqueline 🇺🇦🇵🇸 (@maggiekenney) June 27, 2025
Kennedy’s New Advisers Rescind Recommendations for Some Flu Vaccines https://t.co/vmiBkR3MRT
As per the panelists, “We came to this meeting with no predetermined ideas and will make judgments as if we are treating for our own families,” the New York Times reported.
The two-day meeting on an Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices provided the most direct evidence to the critics that the Trump administration is poisoning the system that has long been informing clinical decisions about the process of vaccination.
Moreover, as Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, an expert on vaccines who resigned from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month, noted, “As a physician and scientist who has devoted my entire career to vaccines and preventing and treating infections, this meeting has been devastating to watch.”
Scores of studies have determined the vaccine component, otherwise known as thimerosal, to be safe.
It has existed in the majority of childhood immunizations since the year 2001, the New York Times reported.
“The risk from influenza is so much greater than the nonexistent risk as far as we know from thimerosal,” as the lone dissenter, Dr. Cody Meissner, who is a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, widely considered to be the most qualified member of the new committee.