Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has tasked his newly appointed panel of vaccine advisers with probing an ingredient long-targeted by anti-vaxxers for disproven links to autism.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a panel under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will discuss the vaccine preservative thimerosal in its June 26 meeting, according to a draft agenda.
The advisory committee previously had 17 members who were all sacked by Kennedy earlier this month and replaced with eight new ones, including anti-vaccine voices like Dr. Robert Malone, who pushed COVID-19 conspiracies in a 2021 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.
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Thimerosal, a preservative that is used to prevent microbial growth in vaccines, has long been targeted by anti-vaccine activists because it contains mercury. Kennedy himself authored a book in 2014 that advocated for the removal of thimerosal from vaccines, erroneously linking it to autism.
Kennedy claimed that thimerosal is “immensely toxic to brain tissue,” but multiple peer-reviewed studies, as well as health agencies like the CDC and Food and Drug Administration, have long maintained there is no link between the ingredient and autism.
“Many well-conducted studies have concluded that thimerosal in vaccines does not contribute to the development of autism,” the CDC says on its website. “Even after thimerosal was removed from almost all childhood vaccines, autism rates continued to increase, which is the opposite of what would be expected if thimerosal caused autism.”
The FDA similarly stated that “scientific studies of the risk of other serious neurodevelopmental disorders have failed to support a causal link with thimerosal.”
As a precautionary measure, however, the FDA in 1999 recommended the removal of thimerosal from vaccines routinely given to infants. The use of the ingredient has also dropped sharply over the years as many vaccines were reformulated to single-dose packaging.
Jeremy Faust, editor-in-chief of MedPage Today, warned in an op-ed that the anti-vaccine movement will take the inclusion of thimerosal in the vaccine panel’s agenda as “a major win.”
“To be clear, removing the compound will do nothing to improve vaccine safety, but it certainly will undermine confidence in other existing vaccines,” he wrote. “While there are many alternatives for influenza vaccines that do not contain thimerosal, elevating this debunked myth to national policy lends credence to misinformation, and sets the stage for other actions that may undermine vaccine confidence in the United States.”
Last month, Kennedy removed COVID-19 vaccines from the list of shots recommended for children and pregnant women.
Dr. Fiona Havers, a physician who oversaw respiratory virus data—including hospitalization rates for COVID-19—resigned as a top vaccine specialist for the CDC on Monday in the wake of Kennedy’s controversial overhaul of the agency.
“If it isn’t stopped, and some of this isn’t reversed, like, immediately, a lot of Americans are going to die as a result of vaccine-preventable diseases,” she said in an interview with The New York Times.
