SUBSCRIBER-ONLY NEWSLETTER
By David Wallace-Wells
Opinion Writer
In September, after months of mostly out-of-sight maneuvering, the Make America Healthy Again movement stepped forthrightly into the policy spotlight. The flurry of news marks a chapter’s end in the saga of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s public health reign: In just five days in September, we got the most substantive meeting of his reconstituted Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, now stuffed with vaccine skeptics, and a much- anticipated Department of Health and Human Services announcement on the causes of autism, rolled out to much fanfare by the president.
So it’s not a bad time for a first-act assessment. The ACIP session on Sept. 18 and 19 had loomed for months as an enormously consequential event, with the panel considering changes to the conventional immunization schedule, opening up the possibility that the country’s basic, familiar vaccine protocol would be taken apart or sabotaged. The meeting is now behind us, an absolute embarrassment of bad science, disingenuous argumentation and basic bureaucratic dysfunction. (See here and here and here for some colorful summaries.)
