NIH hospital board rebukes Kennedy over new vaccine injury clinic
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
The board overseeing the National Institutes of Health research hospital delivered a harsh rebuke of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. late last week, voting unanimously to support a statement by its chair accusing Kennedy of undermining trust in science and politicizing the hospital’s work.
The chair, Jack Leslie, opened the board’s quarterly meeting by reading aloud a six-minute statement that said he was “troubled” by Kennedy’s recent unannounced visit to the NIH, where the secretary held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new clinic to study vaccine injuries and led a roundtable discussion with patients who said they had been injured by vaccines.
Leslie said that serious vaccine injuries are “rare but real” and that rigorous research is required. But after Kennedy announced the initiative on social media last week, along with a video of the roundtable featuring signs that said “Vaccine Injured,” Leslie said he grew concerned.
Kennedy said the government “must listen to patients and families who report vaccine injuries — not dismiss or gaslight them.” But Leslie said the signs suggested a foregone conclusion to the research, ordered by a secretary who is openly critical of vaccination.
“If this research finds evidence of harm, many will dismiss it as the work of a secretary who has long argued that vaccines are dangerous,” Leslie said. “If it finds none, patients will be told that the clinic was a sham. Either way, they are left with answers no one trusts — and science only helps patients when the public believes it.”
He continued: “The clinical center’s standing rests on one thing: the confidence of patients, physicians and the public that the research done here is designed to find the truth, not to confirm a conclusion reached in advance. Trust is slow to build and quick to lose.”
The clinic, called the Vaccine Injury Center, will study people who report experiencing health problems following vaccination to better understand the causes, risk factors and possible treatment. A spokesperson for Kennedy, Emily Hilliard, did not directly address Leslie’s comments. But she said the vaccine initiative would “help ensure that people who experience health problems following vaccination are taken seriously.”
The hospital, formally called the NIH Clinical Center, is entirely devoted to research; it cares for patients who are participants in clinical trials. The board was established a decade ago to oversee the hospital’s operations, with a focus on safety and quality. It consists of experts in biomedicine, healthcare administration, public health and patient representatives.
Leslie, a former chair of the global public relations firm Weber Shandwick, has advised the World Health Organization and numerous health-oriented philanthropies, and government bodies under presidents of both parties. He also chairs the board of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, and advises global health institutes at two universities, Duke and Georgetown.
He said that after he read an article in The New York Times about the initiative, which was published before Kennedy’s announcement, he called the clinical center’s CEO, Dr. Jonathan Green, and asked to put the vaccine injury initiative on the board’s agenda.
During the meeting Friday, Green suggested that the initiative was simply an extension of work the clinical center was already doing.
“The NIH has conducted research on the safety and efficacy of vaccines for decades in the past, and it is ongoing,” Green said. He said the vaccine injury clinic would require no new resources and that its work would “undergo the same rigorous scientific and ethical review as every scientific study” conducted by the NIH.
