Member of RFK Jr’s new vaccine panel withdraws over conflict of interest | Robert F Kennedy Jr
A member of the new revision of the Secretary of Health, Robert F Kennedy Jr, withdrew from the Federal Vaccination Vaccin Council Group after a conflict of interest, a spokesman for the Guardian told.
Dr. Michael Ross, who participated in several private health care companies, withdrew after examining his financial participation.
Kennedy unilaterally dismissed the 17 members of the Cisters for Disease Control and Prevention Consultative Committee (CDC) on vaccination practices (ACIP) in June, arguing that they had too many conflicts of interest.
Ross was one of the eight of Kennedy’s ideological allies appointed to the committee, after the secretary argued that former members of the committee were subject to too many conflicts of interest.
“Yesterday, Dr. Michael Ross decided to withdraw from the ACIP during the journal Financial Holdings,” said a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health and Social Services (HHS).
“The sacrifice to serve the ACIP varies from one member to another, and we appreciate the will of Dr. Ross to go through this rigorous process.”
The spokesperson made the comments after the Guardian surveys on disclosure of interest conflicts for new members of the ACIP. Although the Trump administration and Kennedy have developed a conflict of interest tracker specifically for the members of the ACIP, the named people of Kennedy were not added.
The HHS spokesman did not respond to the guardian’s surveys at the moment when and when the new written disclosure of conflicts of interest is published.
Instead, the spokesman said the ministry “examined all new members of the AIPI for conflicts of interest in accordance with federal law, regulations and ministerial policies”, and that members received “ethical training before paying their functions”.
The new members of the committee were invited to disclose conflicts of interest before the start of the meeting on Wednesday. The chairman of the committee, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and the committee member, Dr. Robert Malone, omitted work largely reported in vaccination litigation, and nurse Vicky Pebsworth said she was “invited to read” a declaration revealed the property of a health care actions, but said that she was below the threshold of the government’s ethics office.
On Wednesday, the review of the ethics of new members was also the subject of testimonies from the Senate.
Under the interrogations by the Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington, Trump’s candidate to lead the CDC, Dr. Susan Monarez, said that she “did not know whether the members who participate in this week’s meeting or not made the ethical review necessary to allow them to participate in these meetings”.
“If it is known that they have not followed the ethical process and that they issue recommendations, would you accept them as valid?” asked Murray.
“If they have not followed an ethical approval process, they should not participate in meetings,” said Monarez.
