One of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s top vaccine specialists has warned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vax policies will cause “a lot of Americans to die” after resigning from the agency on Monday.
Dr. Fiona Havers spent 13 years with the CDC as a senior advisor on vaccine policy, developing a reputation as one of the world’s leading figures on immunization.
But following a series of escalating attacks on the agency from RFK Jr., starting with his announcement last month that the agency would no longer recommend Covid vaccines to pregnant women and culminating in his sacking of all 17 members of the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACPIC), Havers was forced to hand in her resignation.
“It’s a very transparent, rigorous process, and they have just taken a sledgehammer to it in the last several weeks,” Havers told The New York Times. “CDC processes are being corrupted in a way that I haven’t seen before.”
Following the dismissal of the ACPIC team, Kennedy appointed eight new members to the committee, at least half of whom have publicly testified against vaccines in high-profile trials. One appointee in particular, Vicky Pebsworth, is a board member of the National Vaccine Information Center, an anti-vax organization which spreads conspiracy theories about vaccine injuries and deaths.
“I could not be party to legitimizing this new committee,” said Havers. “I just no longer had confidence that the data that we were generating was going to be used objectively.”
“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 added.
Havers is at least the second CDC official to resign in protest of the Trump administration’s increasing antagonism towards vaccines, following Covid expert Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos who resigned two weeks earlier after claiming she “can no longer help the most vulnerable populations.”
“My career in public health and vaccines was born out of a deep desire to help the most vulnerable. That’s a value I can no longer uphold in this role,” she wrote in an internal email to colleagues following the resignation.
A number of Havers’ colleagues are also considering similar moves, with several officials rumored to be on the verge of resigning in protest of the weakening of the CDC’s authority. In an article published in JAMA on Monday, a number of fired ACPIC panelists claimed “Secretary Kennedy’s process blurs lines of legal authority” and that he had “left the U.S. vaccine program critically weakened.”
Dr. Camille Kotton, a former member of ACPIC who departed from the role last year, told the Times “My whole career, I have relied on everything that came from the CDC as the most powerful and best information available.
“Now, we’re at a time where it seems increasingly likely that we will not be able to trust information coming from the CDC,” she added.
It’s not just the ACPIC committee who have been sidelined by the current administration either—thousands of colleagues at the agency have lost their jobs under Kennedy’s tenure. And while Havers says she has nothing but respect for colleagues who choose to stay and fight the new regime, “what happened last week was the last straw for me.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told the Daily Beast that, “under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, HHS is committed to following the gold standard of scientific integrity.
“Vaccine policy decisions will be based on objective data, transparent analysis, and evidence–not conflicts of interest or industry influence.”
