RFK Jr doubled down on debunked claims about Black people and vaccines – themirror.com

Secretary of Health Robert F Kennedy Jr has doubled down on his historic claims about Black people and vaccines, raising concern among scientists.
Before joining Trump's government RFK Jr was an outspoken anti-vaccine activist previously chairing the Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine advocacy group.
During his confirmation hearings earlier this year, he made comments which have got many scientists worried.
Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) had brought up a comment RFK once made about vaccinations and the Black community. In 2021, he said, “We should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites, because their immune system is better than ours.”
This is something experts have been thoroughly debunked. Rather than backtrack, RFK doubled down during the hearings, referencing a “series of studies” while claiming research shows “Blacks need fewer antigens.”
“Right now, how vaccine schedules are tailored is based on things like your age, your exposure risk, if you have other chronic underlying health conditions ― but race isn’t one of them, and there isn’t research that suggests that it should be,” Joel Bervell, a medical myth-buster on social media, told HuffPost at the time.
Bervell added: “In medicine, in science, we know that race is a social construct, meaning that you can’t look at someone’s genes and identify what race they are."
This comes after 17 experts who were ousted from a government vaccine committee last month said they have little faith in what the panel has become, and have outlined possible alternative ways to make U.S. vaccine policy.
RFK Jr abruptly fired the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, accusing them of being too closely aligned with manufacturers and of rubber-stamping vaccines. He handpicked replacements that include several vaccine skeptics.
In a commentary published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the former panel members wrote that Kennedy — a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement before becoming the U.S. government’s top health official — and his new panel are abandoning rigorous scientific review and open deliberation.
That was clear, they said, during the new panel’s first meeting, in June. It featured a presentation by an anti-vaccine advocate that warned of dangers about a preservative used in a few flu vaccines, but the committee members didn’t hear from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staffers about an analysis that concluded there was no link between the preservative and neurodevelopmental disorders.
The new panel recommended that the preservative, thimerosal, be removed even as some members acknowledged there was no proof it was causing harm.“That meeting was a travesty, honestly,” said former ACIP member Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at Stanford University.
The 17 discharged experts last month published a shorter essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association that decried Kennedy’s “destabilizing decisions.” The focus was largely on their termination and on Kennedy’s decision in May to stop recommending COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women.
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