Why a vaccine expert left the CDC: ‘Americans are going to die’
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 8 hours ago
- 5 min read
By Apoorva Mandavilli
In 13 years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Fiona Havers crafted guidance for contending with Zika virus, helped China respond to outbreaks of bird flu and guided safe burial practices for Ebola deaths in Liberia.
More recently, she was a senior adviser on vaccine policy, leading a team that produced data on hospitalizations related to COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus. To the select group of scientists, federal officials and advocates who study who should get immunizations and when, Havers is well known, an embodiment of the CDC’s intensive data-gathering operations.
On June 16, Havers resigned, saying she could no longer continue while Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismantled the careful processes that help formulate vaccination standards in the United States.
“If it isn’t stopped, and some of this isn’t reversed, like, immediately, a lot of Americans are going to die as a result of vaccine-preventable diseases,” she said in an interview with The New York Times, the first since her resignation.
Havers, 49, cited an escalating series of attacks on federal vaccine policy by Kennedy. Three weeks ago, the health secretary announced in a minute-long video on the social platform X that the agency would no longer recommend COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children or pregnant women.
Last week, he fired all 17 members of the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, saying without evidence that the group was beset with conflicts of interest and that a clean sweep was needed to restore public trust.
Kennedy went on to name eight new members, at least half of whom appear to share his antipathy to vaccines. Two have testified against vaccine makers in trials.
Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., plans to introduce a bill Wednesday that would reverse Kennedy’s decision and make it impossible for future leaders to dismiss committee members without due cause.
The restocking of the committee may have enormous implications for the health of Americans. The panel’s endorsements mean insurance companies must cover the costs of immunizations and help states decide which vaccines to mandate for school-age children.
“It’s a very transparent, rigorous process, and they have just taken a sledgehammer to it in the last several weeks,” Havers said.
“CDC processes are being corrupted in a way that I haven’t seen before,” she added.
The agency was not consulted about any of it, Havers said. The CDC has languished without a director since the new administration began.
Havers had been scheduled to present new data to the scientific advisers next week.
“I could not be party to legitimizing this new committee,” she said. “I just no longer had confidence that the data that we were generating was going to be used objectively.”
Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human services, said, “Under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, HHS is committed to following the gold standard of scientific integrity.”
“Vaccine policy decisions will be based on objective data, transparent analysis and evidence — not conflicts of interest or industry influence,” he said.
Havers is at least the second official to resign because of what they perceive to be rising antagonism to vaccines at HHS. Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, who oversaw a work group on the COVID vaccine, resigned two weeks ago.
“Losing one more highly qualified and experienced CDC public health expert, such as Dr. Fiona Havers, further weakens our national public health vigilance,” said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrician at Stanford University and one of the fired committee members.
“It also demonstrates the chaos and lack of support our federal health agencies are currently experiencing,” she said.
Until now, scientists at the CDC gathered data on infections, hospitalizations, deaths and more, presenting the numbers to ACIP members and helping shape recommendations on the strategies needed to keep Americans healthy.
As head of the CDC’s platforms for tracking hospitalizations related to COVID-19 and RSV, Havers oversaw analyses of data from 14 states, representing 10% of the U.S. population.
The research she presented informed the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to authorize COVID-19 vaccines for children in 2021. The work also helped the CDC’s advisers to recommend the shots to children, adolescents and pregnant women and to prioritize doses by age and underlying medical conditions.
The data led to more than 20 peer-reviewed publications and 15 reports from the CDC, and it fed online dashboards that drew millions of views. Havers herself has published more than 100 papers while at the agency, including RSV vaccine recommendations for adults in 2023.
Early in the pandemic, Havers designed and led a national study to estimate the prevalence of antibodies to the coronavirus among Americans, a proxy for the number of infections.
She found that the number was anywhere from two to 13 times as high as the reported rates in a given region.
At the time, the first Trump administration muffled the CDC’s scientists and sidelined them in making decisions. “That was a really rough time at CDC,” Havers recalled. “The last five, six months have been worse than that.”
In an article published Monday, the fired panelists wrote that “Secretary Kennedy’s process blurs lines of legal authority” and that his decisions had “left the U.S. vaccine program critically weakened.”
Dr. Camille Kotton, who served on the vaccine advisory committee until last year, said in an interview, “My whole career, I have relied on everything that came from the CDC as the most powerful and best information available.”
Now, “we’re at a time where it seems increasingly likely that we will not be able to trust information coming from the CDC,” she said.
In April, the agency’s advisers met and recommended that the RSV vaccine be offered to everyone 50 and older at high risk of severe outcomes from the infection. But there is no permanent or acting director to sign off on those recommendations.
Kennedy did not endorse them. The decision will be reconsidered by the new committee next week.
“I think it is a very interesting ethical conundrum that we’re at now,” Kotton said, referring to scientists advising federal officials. “Do we continue to serve even though we feel like it’s a very political leadership, or do we step away?”
“I have utmost respect for my colleagues at CDC who stay and continue to try and limit the damage from the inside,” Havers said. “What happened last week was the last straw for me.”
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