An anti-vaccine lawyer who has regularly sued federal and state health agencies spoke Friday at a meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's vaccine advisory panel, an unheard of departure for a committee that has been a trusted source of vaccine advice for decades.
Attorney Aaron Seery also served as the personal attorney for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist.
Siri gave a lengthy presentation on childhood vaccination schedules, covering side effects from common vaccines and emphasizing the hepatitis B, pneumococcal and diphtheria-tetanus-whooping cough (whooping cough) vaccines. Siri previously advocated for the Food and Drug Administration to retract its decision. polio vaccine approval.
Art Kaplan, director of medical ethics at New York University Langone Medical Center, said Siri's presence at the meeting suggests the panel, formally known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, is “trying to use a pre-agreed ideology to get what they want, which is to get rid of childhood vaccinations.”
“This is a scientific problem, and he is the wrong guy, with the wrong conflicts, with the wrong style, with the wrong information,” Kaplan said.
Siri also pointed to a purported link between autism and vaccines given in the first six months of life (a claim that has been widely debunked), arguing that there are no studies disproving the link.
“If you're going to say vaccines don't cause autism, back it up with data,” Siri said.
Decades researchincluding extensive safety studies of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, found there is no link between vaccines and autism. A large Danish study Since July, they have found no association between aluminum exposure from vaccination during the first two years of life and an increase in the incidence of neurodevelopmental disorders. AND major revision in 2021evaluated 138 studies and determined that MMR vaccines do not cause autism.
Siri suggested at the meeting that a downside of some childhood vaccines is their failure to prevent transmission, pointing to studies of a type of whooping cough vaccine in the United States. baby baboons. Public health experts say the goal of these vaccinations is to prevent symptomatic illness and death. He also suggested that childhood vaccines had not been adequately evaluated for safety, despite decades of continuous monitoring for side effects.
“The concern is that none of them were licensed based on an inert, placebo-controlled clinical trial,” Siri said.
People who question the safety of vaccines often suggest that trials be conducted with an inert placebo—meaning that some trial participants will receive the new vaccine while others will receive an inactive substance, such as saline, to compare results.
But public health experts say there is a legitimate reason not to use a placebo in some cases: It would be unethical to hide the benefits of a vaccine from study participants, so trials often test new vaccines against older versions.
“Siri's claim that childhood vaccines have 'never been tested on a placebo' is talk, not fact,” Dr. Jake Scott, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University School of Medicine, said in a text message. “For most common childhood vaccines, there are inert placebo-controlled studies, including large studies using saline or sterile water controls published in major journals.”
Scott testified before Congress in September, his research team documented 398 randomized control trials that assessed the active ingredients in childhood vaccines and used inert placebos such as saline or sterile water.
Dr. Cody Meisner, a pediatrician and the only ACIP member to previously serve on the committee, said Siri's presentation was a “horrible, terrible misrepresentation of all the facts.”
“The fact that you came here and made these absolutely outrageous statements about security is a great disappointment to me, and I don't think you should have been invited, I'll be completely honest,” Meissner said during the meeting.
Siri's unconventional presentation followed a chaotic day and a half of hearings in which panel members and speakers made false claims about the safety and effectiveness of hepatitis B vaccines and cherry-picked data. The committee voted Friday morning to roll back old recommendation all newborns should receive a first dose of hepatitis B vaccine. Instead, advisers say, women who test negative for hepatitis B can consult their doctor about whether their baby should receive a dose at birth.
Kennedy fired previous advisory board members in June due to what he said were “ongoing conflicts of interest” and replaced them with a group that largely expressed vaccine skepticism.
At Friday's meeting, Siri disclosed a number of conflicts, including multiple ongoing lawsuits against the Department of Health and Human Services and its affiliated agencies. These include lawsuits over alleged Covid vaccine injuries and exemptions from vaccination requirements, he said. Siri previously sued the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to force it to release research showing that vaccines do not cause autism.
Seery said he was asked to speak Friday along with Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital. Hotez said he rejected the request because “ACIP appears to have moved its mission away from science and evidence-based medicine.” Offit, who also accused the committee of becoming political, said he couldn't remember receiving an invitation but would not have attended the meeting anyway.
Kaplan, the medical ethicist, said such a debate would not be productive.
“We don't really need to debate evolution again, we probably don't need to debate the conventional wisdom about whether we were on the moon—and we don't need to debate that,” he said.
