EVERYONE on CDC's Vaccine Committee Gets Fired by RFK, Here's Why

On June 9th of this year, RFK Jr. dismissed all 17 members of the CDC's vaccine advisory committee. Specifically, this committee was called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. However, it's more commonly known by its acronym, ACIP, ASIP, and it's basically the CDC's vaccine expert panel. They're the ones who are responsible for studying vaccine effects as well as side effects of both the vaccines that are currently in development as well as the vaccines that that are already on the market. ASIP is also the committee that advises the CDC as a whole on which groups of people should receive which vaccines. And so, as just one example of many, ASIP is the committee which decides which vaccines should be recommended to be placed on the childhood vaccine schedule. They also determine which vaccines insurance companies must cover. And although the CDC as a whole has the final say, the recommendations that come out of ASIP are almost always followed. Like 99% of the time in the vast majority of cases, which I I want to say 100% but probably 99% whatever this committee decides on does get implemented by the CDC as a whole. Now in terms of the members of this committee, most of them they were practicing doctors and or experts at major universities. And the way it worked on a day-to-day basis is that each member of the committee was assigned to a four-year term. And basically they broke it down into different working groups with each working group being dedicated to a certain illness. So you had a working group for COVID 19, HPV, influenza, monkey pox, and so on. In fact, here's how the CDC describes ASIP's work on their own official YouTube channel. These committee members know a lot about vaccines, medicine, and public health, but their knowledge is only part of the recommendation development process. Before making a recommendation, ACIP members carefully review the data and information for each vaccine. They consider the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine when given at specific ages. After FDA approves or authorizes a vaccine, ACIP reviews the rigorous studies conducted by vaccine manufacturers to ensure that a vaccine is safe and effective at specific ages. Committee members evaluate the severity of the disease and the vaccines's effectiveness in addressing the burden of disease. Vaccines recommended for children and adults help prevent diseases that can be serious, potentially causing long-term health problems or death. Some vaccines are recommended for everyone. Others may only be recommended for certain people based on their age or other risk factors. If there is enough information to move forward with a vaccine recommendation, a quorum is required for the committee to act. Once the ACIP makes a recommendation, the CDC director will approve, amend, or reject the recommendation. If approved, the recommendation is published in CDC's morbidity and mortality weekly report and upon publication represents the official recommendation in the United States. Understanding the process and importance of ACIP recommendations help health care professionals feel confident that the vaccines they recommend to their patients are safe and effective. And obviously, although not mentioned by the CDC themselves in that video that we just watched, the decisions that ultimately come out of ASIP, they have an impact on billions of dollars of revenue for the pharmaceutical industry. That's because, if you just think about it, a positive decision by ASIP, it can have huge ramifications for a pharmaceutical company that has spent years and perhaps tens of millions of dollars working on a new vaccine. And so if you have the CDC go ahead and recommend that vaccine to every group possible, that's an obvious financial gain. Also, it's perhaps worth mentioning that any vaccine that gets placed by the CDC onto the vaccines for children program, the VCP, that vaccine becomes covered under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Scheme. In a practical sense, what that means from the perspective of an actual pharmaceutical company, it means that if the CDC places your vaccine on the actual childhood schedule, you will get legal immunity for any injuries that that vaccine might cause. Instead of being able to sue you for any damages, people have to go to a special vaccine court. And if that person wins their injury case in that court, they'll be paid their compensation by the federal program rather than the actual pharmaceutical company. Now, that's a whole another topic, but the general point that I'm trying to get across is that the ASUP committee is very important from both a policy perspective, but also from a financial standpoint in terms of the pharmaceutical industry. Now, RFK Jr., he announced the forced retiring of these 17 committee members in an op-ed that he wrote and published in the Wall Street Journal. In that editorial, RFK Jr. laid out three main reasons for firing everyone. Firstly, he complained about persistent conflicts of interest that plagued this particular committee. Quote, "The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine." The issue of having persistent conflicts of interest was actually a known problem within this committee long before RFK Jr. took over. In fact, in the op-ed itself, RFK referenced a House investigation that was published all the way back in the year 2000, which found that enforcement of ASIP's conflicts of interest rules were weak to non-existent. That study, again, from 25 years ago, it also found that ASIP members regularly participated in deliberations for and even advocated for products in which they had a financial stake. Here was RFK Jr. on just one example of what that report found again from 25 years ago. Quote, "The CDC issued conflicts of interest waiverss to every committee member. Four out of eight ASIP members who voted in 1997 on guidelines for the rotor shield vaccine subsequently withdrawn because of severe adverse events had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies developing other rotovirus vaccines. These perceived conflicts of interest though did not stop with the publication of that report all the way back in the year 2000. You fast forward a bit and in the year 2009, the inspector general of the Health and Human Services Department of the United States published another report, you can see it up on your screen, which stated that the CDC failed to enforce their conflicts of interest program. The main findings of that report were that the CDC was not ensuring that all financial disclosure forms were actually being filled out. They were not identifying or resolving potential conflict of interest for 64% of the employees. 41% of special government employees did not receive the required ethics training and also that 15% of employees did not comply with the ethics requirements during committee meetings. All right, just to pause here for a super quick moment, I'd like to introduce our sponsor and my own personal gold dealer, American Hartford Gold. Now, as soon as the latest round of tariffs hit, almost immediately the stock market hit some serious waves. we could say it became super turbulent, very volatile. And of course, these conditions don't just affect Wall Street. They affect all of us with our investments and our retirement accounts. That's why I want to introduce a company that I trust and I use myself to help secure my own savings. American Hartford Gold. They specialize in helping Americans move their assets into something tangible, something you can actually hold. 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Now, there was more nuance to this report, and if you want to dig through those uh details, I'll actually throw a link to it down in the description box below. But the point is is that even back in the year 2009, the inspector general of the health department of the United States was saying that there was significant room for improvement. We can then fast forward to today, and this is how it works. ASIP meets three times a year to discuss and vote on vaccine related matters. And according to the CDC's website, at each meeting, members of ASIP are quote required to declare any potential conflicts of interest that arise in the course of ASIP tenure. Members who declare perceived or actual conflicts of interest will be asked to recuse themselves from participating in the discussion and decision-making of the issues related to that interest. And indeed, that is how it works. Up on your screen are the number of self-reported conflicts of interest by year. And as you can see, there was a spike in the year 2020 and the year 2021 followed by a tapering off, which if you think about it makes sense since the years of the COVID pandemic had ASIP discussing and voting on a lot more vaccines than normal. Now, we here at the Epic Times, we actually wound up looking through some of the conflicts of interest for those years and a lot of them had to do with ASIP members either being involved in COVID 19 clinical trials or having their employers receive grant funding. pharmaceutical companies who were seeking some kind of an approval. And so, as just one example of many, Dr. Wilbur Chen wrote this as a conflict of interest in 2021. Quote, "Has current funding from emergent, the manufacturer of the calora vaccine, to be discussed and voted upon during this meeting?" And then just a few months later, Dr. Chen reported another conflict of interest at a different meeting. quote reported the potential perception of a conflict of interest in that his employer the University of Maryland receives a grant from Emergent Biosolutions Incorporated for the development of a Sheigela vaccine. It's really worth mentioning that by exposing this conflict of interest, Dr. Wilbur Chen chose voluntarily to abstain from voting. That's a safeguard in the system and it is how it's supposed to work. However, we don't live in a wonderland where everyone is always transparent all the time. To that end, we here at the Epic Times conducted an independent review and we found that some of the people who were fired by RFK Jr. or rather removed by RFK Jr. did vote on vaccines despite actively receiving or recently receiving money from the companies that stood to benefit from their vote. If you want to check out that full investigation, I'll throw a link to it down in the description box below for you to peruse for yourself. But I will caveat it by saying that just because there is a perceived conflict of interest does not necessarily mean that that person's vote was affected. Perhaps they would have voted that way anyway without that perceived conflict of interest. That however brings us naturally to the second complaint that RFK mentioned in his op-ed. The fact that ASIP has always voted in favor of recommending whatever vaccine was on the docket pretty much no matter what. Quote, "ASIP has never recommended against the vaccine, even those later withdrawn for safety reasons. It has failed to scrutinize vaccine products given to babies and pregnant women. To make matters worse, the groups that inform ASIP meet behind closed doors, violating the legal and ethical principle of transparency crucial to maintaining public trust. Now, we here at the Epic Times took a look at the meeting minutes for the most recent ASIP meeting, the one that took place back in June of 2024. Well, the most recent meeting with the members that were fired, and we found that just as RFK mentioned in his op-ed, there were eight vaccine recommendations on the docket. and all eight of them were given green lights with every voting member who was present in the committee voting for it. There was not a single vote against it which as RFK wrote in his editorial doesn't necessarily mean that these advisory panel members are corrupt but rather as RFK said quote the problem isn't necessarily that ASIP members are corrupt. The problem is their immersion in a system of industry aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy. This then leads to the final point that RFK made in terms of why he decided to gut the entire committee and fire everybody, which was the fact that most of the ASIP members were appointed last minute by Joe Biden literally as he was heading out the door. Specifically, when RFK Jr. came in as health secretary, this was the situation that he found. All 17 members of ASIP were appointed under the Biden administration. 13 of them were appointed in the last year of Joe Biden's presidency and eight of them were appointed in January alone, right before Joe Biden left office. What this meant in practice, according to RFK, was that quote, "These appointees would have prevented the current administration from choosing a majority of the committee until 2028. The prior administration made a concerted effort to lock in public health ideology and limit the incoming administration's ability to take the proper actions to restore public trust in vaccines." And so these were the three stated reasons. A persistent problem with conflicts of interest, the panel always voting yes on anything on the docket, and that the previous administration basically stacked the roster at the last minute. These three factors are what led RFK Jr. to purge the entirety of ASIP. And once purged, he began the process of looking to find his own appointees, saying in a statement that quote, "ASIP's new members will prioritize public health and evidence-based medicine. The committee will no longer function as a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas. The entire world once looked to American health regulators for guidance, inspiration, scientific impartiality, and unimpeachable integrity. Public trust has eroded. Only through radical transparency and gold standard science will we earn it back. Now, with the termination of everyone on the committee out of the way, RFK Jr. was free to appoint whoever he wanted, which he did. Within 2 days, RFK Jr. announced the new roster on the vaccine panel. He specifically appointed eight new members, several of whom were previously during the pandemic skeptical of both the mRNA co shots as well as COVID lockdowns in general. I'll put a graphic up of all eight of the new members and their relevant qualifications. As you can see, most of them are industry experts with decades worth of clinical and research experience and many peer-reviewed publications to their names. Notable among them are Dr. Martin Culdorf who was fired from his post at Harvard for refusing to comply with the vaccine mandate during the co years as well as Dr. Robert Malone a pioneer in the realm of mRNA vaccines who later became a vocal critic of the government's program. And for full disclosure, Dr. Malone used to have a show on Epic TV called Fallout. And by the way, just as a total aside, it truly is amazing in terms of a pendulum swing if you think about it. The doctors who several years ago were being called fringe by mainstream outlets and literally their views were censored by social media and the mainstream media are now sitting on the government's highest vaccine advisory committee. It's a complete 180. Now, the legacy news outlets, as you would expect, did not take this well. Several mainstream publications, they published articles warning of an impending drop off in vaccine support, pontificating, for example, about how quote vaccine critics appointed by RFK Jr. could limit access to shots, which might very well be true, but as of yet, this potential reality has not materialized. RFK Jr.'s newly appointed panel, they met on June 25th this year at the CDC's headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. On the agenda, they were voting on recommendations for the following vaccines: RSV pediatric vaccines, RSV children's vaccines, and I will mention, I'm not sure what the difference is between those two, but they were listed as separate agenda items. They were also voting on recommendations for flu vaccines as well as recommendations for mercury containing influenza vaccines. And according to the CDC press release that was issued upon the meeting's conclusion, the new panel of vaccine experts, the ones who were put in by RFK Jr. voted in favor of recommending each line item. For each line item, they went ahead and recommended whatever was at issue. Pregnant women were recommended to take the influenza vaccine. Kids were recommended to take the RSV vaccine and so on. They also voted to recommend only the influenza vaccines that don't contain mercury as a preservative. And so there you have it. The media's concerns about the antivax status of the new panel is as of yet unproven. We'll see what the future holds. Also, if you'd like to take a peek behind the curtain at this CDC panel of vaccine experts over on Epic TV, we just published a nearly 2-hour long interview with doctors Robert Malone and Rest of Levy, two of the new doctors who were appointed by RFK Jr. to ASIP. They broke down for us what that committee is really like behind closed doors. And in my opinion, it was a great interview and especially if you're interested in this topic, I would highly recommend you check it out. I'll throw a link to it. It'll be down in the description box below, which I will mention is that same description box right below those like and subscribe buttons. Both of which I hope you take a quick moment to smash so that this information can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm. And then until next time, I'm your host Roman from the Epic Times. Stay informed and most importantly, stay free.