WASHINGTON, Aug 28 (Reuters) - Departing senior officials of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention left the agency due to changes to its vaccine advisory board and other vaccine policies, they told Reuters in an interview on Thursday.
Deb Houry, Demetre Daskalakis and Dan Jernigan, who resigned on Wednesday in a major leadership upheaval at the nation’s top public health agency, said that vaccine advisers appointed by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccines, were making recommendations before reviewing data.
“We became aware by conversations with work groups that many of them were deciding on what recommendations would be before actually having the data. And for us, that’s problematic,” Houry said in a group interview from the Emory University School of Public Health shortly after the three were escorted from the agency’s Atlanta headquarters.
“As scientists, you should never know in advance what you want the data to show,” added Houry, who had been the CDC’s chief medical officer.
Kennedy has made sweeping changes to the nation’s vaccine policies, including firing all members of the CDC’s expert vaccine advisory panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, in June. He replaced them with hand-picked advisers including several like-minded anti-vaccine activists.
