You may have heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. say that the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee - the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) - was hopelessly compromised. He’s claimed that 97 percent of its members had conflicts of interest, pointing to government reports as his “smoking gun” to support his decision to fire every member of the advisory panel and replace them with new members.
On the surface, that sounds like common sense. I mean, who wouldn’t be concerned if 97 percent of a scientific advisory board had financial conflicts of interest?
The problem, of course, is that RFK Jr. is not being honest. His “97 percent” citation is deeply misleading.
The number comes from a 2009 inspector general report on 17 different CDC advisory committees - not just ACIP - for the year 2007. And what that report actually found was that 97 percent of members’ forms had at least one omission or administrative error. It absolutely did not find 97 percent of members had shady financial ties. It found 97 percent had at least one error on their paperwork.
Here, we’re talking things like forgetting to date a form, or not initialing a change in the margin. NPR noted that the disclosure form was notoriously confusing to fill out1. In many cases, the so-called “omissions” weren’t omissions at all - the requested information was provided in full detail by the committee member somewhere else in their file, for example it was listed in a CV or another attached document, but it was not duplicated in the right box on some other form, and therefore was counted as one of the 97% with an error.
The report also noted that, across the 17 committees, only seven out of 246 people - just 3% - actually voted on a matter when they should have recused themselves. So, funnily enough, RFK Jr. would have been more accurate to summarize the report by saying that 97% of CDC committee members did NOT have undisclosed conflicts of itnerest. Further, those 3% cases came from one unnamed committee (it’s unclear whether ACIP was involved at all). In any event, none of this supports the claim that ACIP was riddled with conflicts and needed to be purged.
So, when Kennedy invokes the “97 percent” figure to justify his firing the entire ACIP panel in 2025, it’s nonsense.
That brings us to the obvious question: if it’s not “97 percent,” and the 3% figure we just discussed was from 2007, how many committee members in 2025 actually had real, current, financial conflicts of interest? (Spoiler: it’s less than 1%.)
This is where some new data come in. A peer-reviewed study in JAMA analyzed every ACIP meeting from 2000 through 2024. In the early 2000s, about 43% disclosed a conflict. Since 2016, the average has been ~6%, and in 2024 it was just 5%. Of those, less than 1% were personal financial conflicts such as consulting fees or stock ownership - the rest were research grants!!
If you want to gather the top scientists on any given topic, you should expect that some of them have previously been awarded research grants related to that topic…
In other words, ACIP conflicts have been historically low for years, and, since 2016, less than 1% actually had the type of “financial conflicts” that you would imagine when you hear that term.
The system was working incredibly well.
But, Kennedy fired the entire vaccine advisory panel anyway. And here’s the kicker: he replaced them with people who actually do have glaring conflicts - like ties to anti-vaccine groups, litigation, and public statements peddling misinformation. His hand-chosen replacements have significantly less experience in vaccine science than the experts they replaced. Some have literally been paid to testify against vaccine manufacturers in court.
So, the man who screamed about phantom conflicts on ACIP turned around and introduced real conflicts - he swapped out career experts in the field for a cesspool of people who agree with his opinions on COVID, vaccines, and public health, and I fear that children will pay the price.
But, he tells the story convincingly, hoping that no one bothers to check the facts.
-@dr.noc
Which, given the report’s findings, should feel obvious. If 97% of people are making administrative mistakes when filling out your form, you probably need to go back and re-design your form…
On a second note, thank you so much for communicating the truth to all of us in language that is accessible to all.
As a scientist myself, with an educational background in genetics, microbiology and immunology, I am totally appalled and fed up with JFK Jr.'s obvious conviction that he can lie to us and think we're all too uninformed, or foolish, to question anything that comes out of his mouth.