One of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s goals on his anti-vax to-do list might be getting checked off sooner than later.
Food and Drug Administration head Marty Makary is reportedly planning to axe Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for young children from the FDA approval list.
Despite leading the FDA, Marty Makary has joined Kennedy’s efforts to axe COVID-19 vaccines.
According to an email obtained by The Guardian, the FDA told Pfizer that it’s planning to yank the approval in the near future, potentially leaving children under 5 years old without a vaccine option.
Should Makary and Kennedy go through with it, vaccines like Moderna and Novavax will be left in its place, but they are only approved for children in that age group if they have certain underlying health conditions.
In 2021, Kennedy made a plea for the FDA to pull Pfizer’s vaccine for younger children far—before he was leading HHS. And while Makary doesn’t share the same beliefs as his boss—like the disproven conspiracy that vaccines cause autism—he does share some similarities with Kennedy, including a long track record of questioning the FDA.
Now the two are working together against vaccine manufacturers.
In June, Makary instructed COVID vaccine manufacturers to update their warnings list with a rare side effect that can impact young men. On one hand, vaccine skeptics may applaud the push for medical transparency. But experts warned that this specific approach might have been the wrong way to handle addressing a rare—and temporary—side effect.
A cartoon by Clay Bennett.
And while people are still unsure of whether or not to get the jab when COVID cases are on the rise, Kennedy and Makary decided to stop recommending the vaccine for pregnant women and children.
But it’s not just warning labels that are changing. Since Kennedy started on the job, more than $500 million for vaccine research was cut, while experts studying vaccines were also let go.
Then again, Kennedy and his colleagues believe that the pandemic is over, so there’s no reason to prepare for any potential future crises.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the HHS said in a statement in March when announcing more research cuts.
It continued, “HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again."
