The Wall Street Journal ran a letter co-authored by Charley Hooper and me today (print version tomorrow). I have hesitated to quote more than 2 paragraphs, but I think my contract that allows full quotation only after 30 days applies to my paid work, not my free work. So I’ll take the chance and quote the whole thing.
As you note in your editorial “RFK Jr. Conducts His Vaccine Purge” (June 11), HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired the 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices over a charge of conflicts of interest. He’s provided no evidence of such entanglements, settling instead for the claim that the “public must know that unbiased science guides the recommendations from our health agencies.”
Yet we have evidence of this from a related case. Like ACIP, the Food and Drug Administration uses outside experts on advisory committees. The FDA has tried to exclude members with ties to industry, which has slowed the approval of drugs for rare conditions because the few experts all have such ties. Fortunately, the effects of committee conflicts of interest have been evaluated and shown to be nonexistent.
In 2006 the physician Sidney Wolfe and several colleagues published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that drew on 76 meetings of FDA advisory committees that involved “yes” or “no” votes on individual drugs. They found that if voters with conflicts of interest had been excluded, none of the 76 outcomes would have changed. The participants with conflicts, moreover, were more likely than those without to vote for drugs that would compete with “their” company’s product.
In other words: Until proven otherwise, we have no reason to think ACIP had such a problem before Mr. Kennedy’s purge.
David R. Henderson
Hoover Institution
Pacific Grove, Calif.
Charles L. Hooper
Objective Insights, Inc.
Grass Valley, Calif.
Thanks to Charley for providing the backup link for the JAMA article. I got a request from the letters editor to provide the link and some screenshots backing up our claim. I was about to leave with my wife to celebrate Father’s Day.
READER COMMENTS
steve
Jun 17 2025 at 2:33pm
I think it’s OK to always keep in mind that the large pharmaceuticals may have different interests than the general public at times and that it can be harmful. Purdue Pharma is a good example. However, the large majority of the time interests align as consumers and producers both want better drugs/therapies. The very large majority of time you need input from industry experts or experts who have worked with industry when making decisions about drugs and therapies. Just like any other area of the economy most of the actual experts will have either worked in industry or done research that has been financed by industry.
It’s best to have a mix of industry and non-industry and make sure that all interests are disclosed. Then monitor, as has been done, the results. Anyway, this is all BS. RFK just wants to name people who agree with his views. Probably pt a couple fo real experts on just so he can pretend it’s legit.
Steve