RFK Jr. is holding up $600 million in vaccines for poor countries - Politico

Kennedy told senators some African and Asian children are getting shots with dangerous ingredients the U.S. has phased out. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push to remake the U.S. vaccination schedule is on hold following a federal judge’s decision last month, but the health secretary is still using his power to affect which shots children in poor countries receive.

Kennedy says the children are getting obsolete shots with dangerous ingredients that the U.S. has long since phased out. He is holding up $600 million Congress appropriated for the vaccines to pressure the international humanitarian group, Gavi, that distributes them.

“Gavi has refused to provide the United States with the specific data, studies, or detailed accounting of how U.S. funds are used,” Emily Hilliard, senior press secretary at the Health and Human Services Department, said in a statement to POLITICO.

The U.S. co-founded Gavi a quarter-century ago to get vaccines to the world’s poorest nations and Congress has long provided a big chunk of its budget. But Gavi says it hasn’t received the money it’s due for the current and last fiscal years, which makes up about 15 percent of its budget. The funds are set to expire on Sept. 30 if the Trump administration doesn’t release them. The group provides vaccines for 20 diseases, including measles, malaria and polio, to more than 50 low-income countries across the globe.

Gavi’s funding is officially controlled by the State Department, but Kennedy’s influence shows how his skeptical views about vaccines are still affecting government policy. That’s despite a Boston federal judge’s decision last month that said most of the vaccine policy changes Kennedy had ordered in the U.S., including a significant reduction in the number of shots recommended routinely for children, were invalid because he hadn’t followed his department’s own procedures. Kennedy has long believed, in defiance of research showing otherwise, that some vaccines have dangerous side effects.

Susan Collins (R-Maine), the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, told POLITICO in an emailed statement her staff has been in touch with Gavi about the U.S. funding and that she plans to send a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio urging him “to quickly move to provide the U.S. contribution to Gavi, consistent with congressional intent.”

Collins said Gavi has helped vaccinate more than one billion children in the world’s poorest countries and purchased more than $12.5 billion of U.S.-made goods and vaccines to achieve that goal.

Advocates for Gavi say the withholding of funds will cost children’s lives. They also say the vaccines the group uses are safe and are better-suited to the challenges of immunizing people in the developing world, where refrigeration is spotty and it’s harder to get people boosters, than the vaccines used in the U.S. and other wealthy countries.

Hilliard said Gavi has thus far declined to develop a plan for phasing out a mercury-based vaccine preservative called thimerosal that Kennedy believes is likely to cause autism. The Trump administration has asked Gavi to stop using vaccines that contain the preservative.

Kennedy wrote a 2014 book arguing the preservative is dangerous, Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak, and moved to phase it out in the U.S. — where it is still used in some flu shots — last year.

The Boston judge’s decision reversed that decision, finding the Kennedy-appointed panel that had advised the change was not properly appointed.

Given concerns about the safety of thimerosal, the CDC worked with vaccine makers in the 1990s to phase it out in the U.S. and it was largely removed from pediatric vaccines offered to Americans by 2001. But the agency at the same time has said the preservative is safe.

Thimerosal is used in several vaccines Gavi provides, including in a shot against five diseases, according to the group’s former chief executive, Seth Berkley. He said many developing countries lack adequate refrigeration to store vaccine vials containing a single dose, which are often used in the U.S. and don’t contain thimerosal. But developing countries often use vials of multiple doses, which take less refrigeration space but in some cases contain thimerosal to prevent bacterial contamination.

Without the shots with thimerosal, “kids would go without vaccines — which maybe is the desire — but that would lead directly to deaths from those diseases,” Berkley added, referencing the commonly held view that Kennedy’s goal is to broadly reduce vaccination.