RFK Jr. Furthers Agenda With Pick of Covid-Critical HHS Adviser

US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is cementing his agenda throughout the nation’s health apparatus with the choice for an advisory role of a widely known scientist critical of Covid-19 measures.

Martin Kulldorff this week moved to the role of chief science officer for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) from his previous position as chair for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

The title change adds to the drumbeat of moves by Kennedy that shake up norms around how the federal government manages public health issues such as vaccine access, including the overhaul of ACIP, with experts that align more closely with the secretary’s views.

Kulldorff takes the reins as ASPE chief science officer ahead of ACIP’s scheduled Thursday meeting to discuss the childhood vaccine schedule. The move follows recent actions like the Food and Drug Administration’s Vinay Prasad claiming Covid shots played a role in the the deaths of 10 children and the CDC updating its website to suggest vaccines may cause autism.

How much weight Kulldorff, who previously said he was fired from Harvard Medical School for refusing a Covid-19 vaccine and co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration against Covid lockdowns, carries with Kennedy’s decision making remains to be seen.

At ASPE, “in prior times,” one’s “influence is really a function of how much the people in those agencies trust that you have useful things to say,” said Sherry Glied, who served as assistant secretary for planning and evaluation during the Obama administration. “In some ways, putting him at ASPE is a way for Kennedy to have him in the building, and Kennedy can use him in that capacity however he wants.”

When it comes to vaccine matters, “Kennedy wants a kind of whole-of-HHS policy,” Glied said, and appointing someone like Kulldorff “is his way of creating that kind of coordinated effect.”

New Roles

The move allowed Kennedy to insert Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist, as ACIP chair. Milhoan is a senior fellow to the Independent Medical Alliance, an organization formed early in the Covid pandemic that was tied to unproven Covid treatments such as ivermectin.

Milhoan has made “deeply irresponsible, dangerous, untrue claims about the COVID-19 vaccine, which I believe make him entirely unsuitable to chair ACIP,” such as tying the shots to increases in cancer, said Gavin Yamey, professor of global health and public policy at Duke University.

Dorit Reiss, a professor at UC Law San Francisco focusing on public health law, said she suspects Kulldorff will now “have less direct power than he had as chair of ACIP,” though potentially “broader influence” on a wide range of topics. She noted it remains unclear as to whether Kennedy is “rewarding Kulldorff for his service so far on ACIP, or kicking him upstairs to have a more extreme anti-vaccine ACIP.”

“Between firing large numbers of qualified staff, appointing people without public health expertise and because of a noted anti-vaccine bias, Kennedy’s HHS is unlikely to have the expertise or the will to protect the U.S. from future public health threats,” Reiss said.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the HHS, called concerns over Kulldorff and Milhoan “baseless.”

Under Kulldorff’s ACIP leadership, “members voted to recommend vaccines for Americans using evidence-based science.” He also said Milhoan “has years of experience as a pediatric cardiologist and former U.S. Air Force flight surgeon, and is more than qualified to lead the ACIP committee.”

Benjamin Sommers, the deputy assistant secretary for health policy in ASPE in the Biden administration, said that during his time there wasn’t “a prominently appointed outsider filling a role that was chief science officer.”

“There were multiple political appointees at ASPE who were regularly providing policy advice to the secretary, but the specific role here appears to be new, and in that regard, it’s probably an indication that they plan to rely on this person,” Sommers said.

Science or Prestige

In announcing the appointment, the HHS portrayed Kulldorff as a renowned scientist with over 200 peer-reviewed publications. Kennedy credited him with transforming ACIP “from a rubber stamp into a committee that delivers gold-standard science.”

Kulldorff’s appointment suggests “there’s going to be more of a focus on actual science versus prestige” science, said Jeffrey Tucker, founder of Brownstone Institute who helped organize the Great Barrington Declaration. He said the move reflects the public’s shifting opinion on pandemic-era policies.

“You’re not going to have this kind of shift taking place in Washington without there being some sort of backstopping of a shift in the public mind,” Tucker said.

Should a health crises occur under the Trump administration, Tucker said the approach would likely be “more in line with traditional public health principles,” one without lockdowns that is “very careful” about things like closing schools.

Others characterized Kulldorff’s appointment as a threat to public health.

Kulldorff may once have “been a respected biostatistician, but over the past five years he’s thrown his lot in with anti-vaxxers, far-right ideologues and conspiracy theorists,” said Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist with Yale School of Public Health. “His appointment to a senior role at HHS isn’t something to celebrate.”

Noel Brewer, one of the ACIP advisers Kennedy fired, declined to comment on Kulldorff directly. He noted that HHS “has moved from flirting with being vaccine skeptical to being full on anti-vaccine,” a transformation that has been “abrupt.”

“I worry that that’s what’s going to happen as a result of the changes to vaccine policy and the increasingly anti-vaccine leadership is installed throughout the health apparatus of the United States,” said Brewer, professor at UNC-Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health.