The RFK Jr. Purge at the CDC Vaccine Panel
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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. removes all the members of a federal vaccine advisory panel, citing ethics concerns and proclaiming a, quote, clean sweep. Meantime, President Trump announces the U.S. and China have struck a deal on trade, though many of the terms still not publicly announced. Welcome. I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We're joined today by my colleague, columnist Alicia Finley.

In an op-ed on Tuesday, RFK Jr. announced that he was removing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, saying this, quote, without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028, unquote. Let's listen to a bit of RFK Jr. in the Oval Office on Tuesday, explaining what his goal here is.

Today, a compliant child must take between 69 and 92 vaccines to stay in school on some stage. And not one of them has been safety tested in a pre-licensing placebo-controlled trial. And that is just malpractice. So the people who were in charge of that are now gone.

And we're going to bring people onto the ACIP panel, not any vaxxers. We're bringing people on who are credentialed scientists, who are highly credentialed physicians, who are going to do evidence-based medicine, who are going to be objective and who are going to follow the science and make critical public health determinations for our children.

based upon the best science. Alicia, to start at the beginning, what is the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices? And what is the importance of the changes that the RFK Jr. and the HHS department are making here? So this committee has been around for decades, and it's actually kind of an informal committee. There's a little bit of a statutory basis for it, but it was initially intended to help advise the Surgeon General on vaccines, vaccine schedules, and

And Purview has since expanded and is actually in large part created by the HHS secretary. The HHS secretary can revise its charter essentially at any time. And by charter, I mean its review powers and its compositions. It can add members. It can take them off.

The HHS secretary has a large amount of control over this panel that's supposed to advise it on the vaccine schedule, recommend what vaccines should be available and the kids should get at what time periods. Though it could also advise on other matters. For instance, during COVID, the advisory board or committee was convened to consider safety effects.

on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine when it was found to cause a very rare blood clot. And the advisory committee recommended nonetheless keeping it on the market while providing a warning. It also provided recommendations for the COVID booster shots, even though it was not necessarily added to the immunization schedules, but it recommended that they be available to people 65 and older.

older as well as high risk populations. Now, interesting fact of Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director at the time, actually overruled the panel for the second time in almost 60 years and said that COVID boosters should be made more broadly available.

So I guess my point here is that it provides an advisory capacity, but it doesn't have any binding authority. The ultimate authority on a lot of the stuff still does lie with the HHS secretary or the CDC director. Now, one other point here is that it provides recommendations for what vaccines are on the children's immunization schedules.

By virtue of that, those vaccines that are on the children's immunization schedules are also covered under this National Injury Compensation Program, which is a no-fault alternative to the tort system that allows people who have been mainly children, but also pregnant women, who have been claimed to have been harmed by a vaccine to seek compensation outside of the traditional tort system. This was a program that was set up in 1986 by Congress.

to limit mass torts against vaccine makers that were driving them from the market.

So recommendations are important in restricting or reducing litigation against vaccine makers. I guess we'll have to wait to find out who will be appointed to the ACIP committee in place of these removed 17 members. But aside from the desire for the Trump administration to have effective control of the committee that RFK Jr. says in this op-ed, he's also raising some ethics concerns. Here's part of what he writes on.

Most of ACIP's members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines. The problem isn't necessarily that ACIP members are corrupt, most likely aimed to serve the public interest as they understand it. The problem is their immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy.

And Alicia, I wonder what you make of that.

It's more that they have experience in the vaccine industry. And the complaint that you often heard from Republicans about this sort of thinking is that that means the only people that often Democrats or the left want qualified for these positions are people who've never worked in business, never been in the industry that they are proposed to regulate. You know, the only people qualified are people who have been professional activists, more or less.

So if you look at the panel, all their self-identified potential or perceived conflicts are actually required to be disclosed. And RFK actually required them to be publicly disclosed and listed them on a CDC website. And you can go through them.

And most of his beef is that they seem to have served as trial investigators in vaccine or mostly vaccine, but in some cases, other pharmaceutical product trials. And what that means to be a trial investigator is you essentially assist with the analysis of safety and efficacy. And there are usually drug companies, probably a few dozen doctors at large academic centers around the country to do this.

And they aren't making buku bucks. Their compensation is usually maybe $100,000, $200,000, less than their billable hours, by the way, for seeing actual patients. They do this because, yes, they do believe in vaccines. But I would also note that when they do this, these trials are double blind. So when they review the evidence from patients or if they see patients who claim to have

experienced not necessarily a safety effect, but have suffered some kind of injury during the trial. They review them to see if it could have been possibly linked to the vaccine, but they don't know who actually received the vaccine or who received the placebo. So these financial incentives don't really tilt how they review the evidence.

So I think the implication, actually, it's more than an implication. It's an accusation that essentially they are in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry is wrong. Many of them do believe in vaccines.

But in the past, they've actually narrowed their recommendations from what the industry or what certain vaccine makers would have liked. For instance, with the HPV vaccine, instead of recommending it for everyone up to the age of 45, which is actually what is on the FDA label, they actually just recommended it up for teenagers through the age of 26.

because they said we weren't really certain of whether the benefits over the ages of 26 would outweigh the unknown and potential risks. So I think it's just flat out wrong to say that they are somehow making decisions that are biased toward the industry. I think they are doing what they cost-benefit analysis and reviewing all the evidence before them. That doesn't mean they're always right. There have been in the past. They have recommended vaccines, as RFK pointed out in an op-ed.

They wrote a shield in the late 1990s that turned it out to have side effects that were discovered later on. And that vaccine was pulled. But it wasn't because the panel was like blinkered or was ignoring evidence at that time. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment. The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America. And Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small.

The Air Force Research Laboratory is partnering with Google Cloud, using AI to accelerate defense research for air, space, and cyberspace forces. This is a new era of American innovation. Find out more at g.co slash American innovation. Welcome back. On the point about the way these trials are run, you heard RFK Jr. in that clip we played talk about how some vaccines have been approved without placebo-controlled trials. And I wonder what you make of that. I mean, a couple of thoughts there.

strike me. One is that if you have a vaccine that you are confident of and it is for a very serious disease, there may be ethical concerns with running a placebo-controlled trial. We're going to give some of these young children a measles vaccine, and we're going to give some of them a shot that is a placebo, and some of the people in the placebo group will get measles and will die, and then we will know the answer to the question. It seems like there are ethics concerns that

with that. And then number two, there are very sophisticated ways of getting at these questions, I think, without requiring necessarily that kind of study. You can run a vaccine trial against a previous version of a vaccine, for example. And we are in the era of big data. I have to think that

There are ways to test these vaccines that people looking at the question in good faith can agree are reliable without necessarily giving a sugar pill essentially to one group of children when you're going out and doing these vaccine trials.

So, yeah, there's a lot to unpack here. The RFK is being his typical slippery self when he talks saying that they are tested against a placebo or I guess what he would call a true placebo. All new vaccines that come to Margaret are either tested against what we

the industry would call a placebo injection, though he doesn't consider it a true placebo because they include some kind of materials that he says that could alter the results and cause side effects that are actually similar to the actual vaccine. And that's therefore not a real placebo, which is just preposterous.

The only case where a vaccine nowadays wouldn't be tested against a placebo is if it were tested against an already approved vaccine for the ethical reasons you mentioned. So the current version of the HPV vaccine that works against

Nine, I believe nine variants was tested against an earlier approved vaccine that was for only three of the variants. And what they reviewed the safety and efficacy for both vaccines. And it turns out actually the newer vaccine had fewer safety signals, I guess we would say, and much higher efficacy than the earlier version.

And so you might have, for instance, a COVID vaccine. A new COVID vaccine probably wouldn't be tested against the placebo, though I understand Marty McCary, the FDA commissioner, does plan to do randomized controls for the booster shots.

But in a normal case, it would be tested against novel technology or COVID vaccine would be tested against the current mRNA ones. Similar for measles, it would be a little more difficult because measles has been basically eradicated in the U.S., but you would test it against the current version, which we know works and is safe.

So I think what RFK is doing is purposely misleading people and showing mistrust in the vaccines. But all that stuff has an effect. I mean, preposterous is the word that you just used, Alicia. And notably, a couple of things. One, RFK Jr. is a lawyer by trade. He recently was on Capitol Hill testifying before Congress. And he said this, quote, I don't think people should be taking medical advice from me.

unquote, which is a bit amusing hearing from the nation's health and human services secretary. But it's concerning because we are in an era where vaccination rates are falling and measles has been spreading. It looks like we might break a record of measles cases since that disease was declared eliminated, no longer spreading domestically in the U.S. That happened in about 2000.

There were about 1,275 cases in 2019. That is the high since that measles elimination was declared. So far in 2025, we are at about 1,168 cases, 12% of those hospitalized and three confirmed measles deaths.

And Alicia, I worry that that is the environment that RFK Jr. is contributing to when he goes up on Capitol Hill and says, I don't think people should be taking medical advice from me. And then a few weeks later is talking about how all the vaccine experts appointed by the U.S. government to this panel are accusing them of being ethically conflicted.

Right. He's talking out both sides of his mouth here. I think there's a constitutional case, perhaps, for actually just eliminating this panel in general. There are numerous advisory panels the FDA relies on, and they have sometimes just tried to shift responsibility for approving or not approving certain products or making recommendations or not making them to this panel just to kind of absolve themselves of a political responsibility or blowback that may occur as a result.

That's one point on that. A second point is I'm not a doctor. I'm not making any recommendations here. I'm just suggesting maybe you do your own research and look in and read up on what these other quote unquote experts who are all

Also on, by the way, on the payroll of the trial attorneys are saying about these vaccines. And that's who he intends to bring in actually to evaluate some of the evidence on the safety effects in the CDC, a guy named by David Geer, which is, in my view, very concerning.

Third point, the trial lawyer ties and his son currently works at a law firm that is suing Merck over its Gardasil vaccine. Now, RFK actually initially, recall, had a stake in that litigation that he agreed to give up, but his son hasn't and his son actually will inherit that stake.

So that doesn't really absolve him of his own conflicts in these kinds of decisions. And he should probably have to recuse himself from every decision involving vaccines that is made at HHS or FDA or CDC. But he's not doing that. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment. The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America, and Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small.

Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority is using Google AI to create smarter tolling systems and improve traffic flow for Texans. This is a new era of American innovation. Find out more at g.co slash American innovation. Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker. Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Welcome back. Finally, on Wednesday morning, Donald Trump posted this on Truth Social. It is in all caps. I will not read it that way. You'll have to use your imaginations. Our deal with China is done, subject to final approval with President Xi and me. Full magnets and any necessary rare earths will be supplied up front by China. Likewise, we'll provide to China what was agreed to, including Chinese students using our colleges and universities, which has always been good with me.

We are getting a total of 55% tariffs. China is getting 10%.

Alicia, help me untangle this. Obviously, any sort of trade agreement between the U.S. and China will include more nitty gritty details than that. But as far as we can see the details of this deal so far, what's in it? Well, I think you can call this a truce. It's not lasting a big trade agreement. They had already agreed to reduce their tariffs from from 145 percent down to that 55 percent, which includes his first term, 25 percent.

on some Chinese products and Xi had agreed to reduce the 125% that he put on down to 10%. That was after kind of a tit for tat ratcheting up after the liberation day. But that was almost a concession that the tariffs were really harming U.S. businesses and grinding trade between China and U.S. to complete halt.

So that was actually wasn't really much of, I guess, concession at all on Trump's part or on Xi's part. What's in this new framework, I guess the details, as you say, are still a little hazy, is an easing of China's export controls on rare earth minerals and exports, which had really begun earlier.

harming U.S. businesses, manufacturers, and even the defense industry, which relies on these rare earth minerals and magnets because China has essentially a stranglehold on them.

The U.S., in return, is easing some of its export controls on jet engines as well as chip design, which are hindering China's AI ambitions. But I think China actually probably got the better end and has the upper hand here. It still can...

impose the rare earth mineral export controls again in another six months. And actually, if Trump decides, you know, in the heat of a moment to slap more tariffs on or to impose more restrictions, China can retaliate again and restrict the exports of these rare earth minerals.

In my view, this is kind of an ace in the hole for China. Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, can use the rare earth minerals as leverage in any kind of negotiation, and that would include potentially if he were to invade Taiwan. So the broader import, I guess, is that Trump needs to do more to try to actually contain China and to counter its predatory practices. And

This trade deal just doesn't do that. What makes that six month timeline interesting, Alicia, to me, is it seems like Trump's trade policies are always up in the air, written in pencil until one day on the spur of the moment. At least that's how it seems from the outside. He erases it and write something else in. And notably, we are now more than halfway through the 90 day pause for

for the Liberation Day tariffs that were announced in early April. The end of that 90 days is supposed to come at the end of July, July 31st, I believe. And so you have to add that timeline in too. And it is hard to know, even in a matter of few weeks, what the Trump administration's trade policy, forget about just toward China, overall toward the rest of the world, toward any of these trading partners is going to look like, which

It makes it awful difficult if you're running a business to try to figure out how to invest, how to hire, where to build, how to import, how to sell your products. Right. And look no further than the 50% new steel and aluminum tariffs that he imposed that took everyone I know, including the industry, by surprise, which seemed to have been kind of a sop to Cleveland Cliffs when the steel manufacturer, when Trump agreed to approve the Nippon takeover, or I guess

Maybe Trump probably wouldn't like that term. Partnership with U.S. steel. But really, he has very mercurial trade policy. You never know. He wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and decides to slap tariffs on an ally. And the problem with this is it makes it very difficult to build alliances to counter China. And there are many practices that

that really are concerning, including its intellectual property theft. It has been providing components to Russia and China for drones and other military systems that they then use against Ukraine and other U.S. allies, Israel. So there needs to be kind of a global alliance to isolate Ukraine

and punish China. But Trump's kind of doing this go-it-alone trade policy that is instead alienating our own allies. Thank you, Alicia. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast at wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button. And we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of Potomac Watch. The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America. And Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small.

Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority is using Google AI to create smarter tolling systems and improve traffic flow for Texans. This is a new era of American innovation. Find out more at g.co slash American innovation.