ACIP To Discuss COVID ‘Vaccine Injuries’ Next Month, Despite That Not Being In Its Purview

It was plainly obvious when RFK Jr. decided to fully remake ACIP, the CDC committee that advises the nation on immunization schedules and practices, that it was done so to place Kennedy sycophants that would enact his batshit theories on vaccinations. ACIP, now chockablock with anti-vaxxer, anti-science grift-gremlins, has been slowly chipping away at decades of good medical practice around immunization. The administration has already altered the recommended vaccine schedules for COVID and Hep B, while appearing to potentially question polio vaccines as well. It has been, to be pointed, an unmitigated shitshow thus far.

But at least ACIP has managed to color inside the lines of its own mandate to date. That appears to be about to change, as reporting indicates that ACIP’s meeting next month will put COVID vaccine injuries on the agenda.

Dorit Reiss, a vaccine policy expert at the University of California Law San Francisco, said the panel does not typically focus on vaccine injuries.

“Vaccine injuries are not a direct part of the committee’s mandates,” Reiss said in an email. “When they make vaccine recommendations, they should consider vaccines risks, and new risks may lead to changed recommendations; but that’s not directly about vaccine injuries.”

This isn’t to suggest that ACIP completely disregards risks associated with vaccinations, as Reiss mentions. ACIP does make changes to vaccination schedules and recommendations based on macro-data it is provided for specific vaccines. But discussions about the prevalence and validity of claims of vaccine injury are well outside ACIP’s purview. To use but one facile piece of evidence of that, you can review the CDC’s own webpage about what ACIP’s purpose and program does. You will notice that there is not a single reference to vaccine injury within it. Nor does the ACIP page that outlines its own charter. There you will see vague references to ACIP’s duties include the “consideration” of “vaccine safety”, but that is the macro-data I referenced earlier, not a deep dive into the specific topic of vaccine injury.

Vaccine injury is a serious topic, for which the Vaccine Injury Compensation System (VICP) was created in the 1980s. Consulting in lawsuits and writing about vaccine injuries is how Kennedy made millions of dollars. Expanding VICP, a stated goal of his, and using ACIP to add validity to those expansions, is a great way for Kennedy and his allies to make more and more money from these types of lawsuits immediately, or once he’s out of government.

It’s just another grift, powered by hand-picked muppets willing to do his bidding in ACIP.

“Some committee members have made repeated claims about Covid vaccine harms that were either unsupported by verifiable data or reflected clear mischaracterizations of the existing scientific literature,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Last year, Osterholm launched the Vaccine Integrity Project, which serves as an alternative source of vaccine information to the CDC.

“If the committee intends to revisit vaccine safety questions, it has an obligation to do so transparently and rigorously,” he said. “Given past misstatements, members do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.”

No, they most certainly do not. You may not think that questions about COVID vaccines are all that important any longer. We’ve moved on, you may think, from this novel virus being a major issue in our lives. And for some of us, that is true. I am very pro-vaccination, but I’m not getting every booster out there.

But that’s not really what this is about. Kennedy wants ACIP to spotlight supposed COVID vaccine injuries in a way that will certainly come with questionable evidence at best. Not out of concern for public health, mind you. But almost certainly for money.