Conflicts on vaccine panels were at record lows before Kennedy's firings

Source: NBC News

Aug. 18, 2025, 11:02 AM EDT


When Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all of the members of an influential vaccine panel earlier this summer, he said the committee was “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest.”

But new research, published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, finds that the two major vaccine advisory committees have had record-low conflicts of interest for nearly the past decade.

Kennedy has long held that members of the vaccine advisory panels to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration maintain close ties to the pharmaceutical industry. At his first confirmation hearing in January, Kennedy claimed that 97% of the CDC advisers had conflicts of interest.

“When he started citing these big statistics like 97%, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really big,’” said lead study author Genevieve Kanter, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy. “When I started looking at the vaccine data, I wasn’t really seeing those kinds of numbers.”

Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/conflicts-vaccine-panels-record-lows-kennedys-firings-rcna225219