Washington D.C. – This past week, the embattled Trump-RFK Jr. FDA took several further steps to undermine public trust in safe and effective medical treatment. Earlier this week, the FDA announced it is ‘investigating’ whether the Covid-19 vaccine is linked to adult deaths on the heels of the agency’s widely-criticized leaked memo that claimed, without evidence, the vaccine led to the death of 10 children. Those dubious claims ignited a firestorm of criticism from public health experts, including a dozen former FDA commissioners who sharply challenged the origin of FDA official Vinay Prasad’s assertions while pointing to the “substantial evidence” showing COVID-19 vaccines reduce children’s risk of severe disease and hospitalization. The Trump FDA also opened a “safety review” of two treatments used to protect babies and toddlers from RSV– a therapy that RFK Jr’s own vaccine panel recommended just months ago. This illness hospitalizes tens of thousands of young children annually, and the announcement similarly received criticism from scientists.
These latest moves to sow public distrust in our proven vaccines come on the heels of last week’s vote to overturn a longstanding policy on Hepatitis B vaccinations for newborns, the “highly infectious virus that leads to chronic liver disease in most infected children.” It is all part of a desperate and deliberate strategy from the Trump administration to baselessly sow fear and confusion among parents around vaccines. When public officials – even those representing an administration notorious for false misinformation – give credence to unproven claims about treatment for newborns and infants, it can have a chilling effect on parents who are often left confused and uncertain about what’s best for their children’s health.
“These probes are an anti-vaccine farce and the Trump administration’s motive is transparent,” said Kayla Hancock, Director of Public Health Watch, a project of Protect Our Care. “They intend to keep irresponsibly fear-mongering and breathing life into unfounded claims about vaccine safety to justify their scheme for restricting access to proven and effective preventative treatments. They want to rattle public confidence in life-saving and prolonging vaccines, not for any credible public health reason, but because they believe there are political points to be scored playing to anti-science conspiracies. The public danger is coming from inside Trump and RFK’s HHS.”
“The Trump administration claims they’ll provide evidence of their salacious claims about the Covid vaccine and children, but the damage has already been done – and that was the point,” added Hancock. “It reeks of a familiar Donald Trump tactic of making outrageous claims without any proof and then endlessly promising to show the receipts that conveniently never materialize.”
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:
- Endpoints: A source inside the FDA told Endpoint that “Prasad’s investigation … hasn’t definitively confirmed that the deaths were caused by the vaccines.” […] [The apparent disagreement inside the agency is the latest sign that Prasad may not have the evidence he wants to shift how the agency regulates vaccines.
- NBC News: Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease expert and spokesman for the American Academy of Pediatrics, said he believes the [RSV] treatment review is meant to “sow distrust” in immunizations. O’Leary said rolling back access to RSV injections would “inevitably lead to fewer children receiving the monoclonal antibody and more kids getting hospitalized.” Roughly two to three of every 100 infants under 6 months are hospitalized with RSV every year.
- STAT News: “Changes to the ways in which the Food and Drug Administration plans to regulate vaccines represent a threat to effective and available vaccines and public health, 12 former commissioners wrote Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The changes, as described in a leaked memo by Vinay Prasad, the agency’s top regulator of vaccines, “will upend core policies governing vaccine development and updates,” the former commissioners wrote in the piece, a striking show of unanimity among those who have served in both Republican and Democratic administrations.”
- STAT News: “Many of the experts who STAT spoke with believed that Prasad had written the memo with the express purpose that it would be leaked. He made note in the lengthy email of the fact that there have been previous leaks from within CBER.
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