By Max Dublin at Brownstone dot org.

For many months now a historic debate about vaccine safety and effectiveness has been unfolding in America's regulatory agencies and recently the debate has escalated into open partisan warfare.

It started on June 9, 2025 when Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. dismissed all 17 sitting members of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replaced them with his own picks. As one might have expected such a sweeping step was very controversial.

Critics asserted that Kennedy's move was completely partisan, that he was replacing a group of reputable scientists with a bunch of unprofessional political hacks who would follow his agenda. Kennedy retorted that the dismissed committee were conflicted, that they were too close to the major drug companies that manufacture the vaccines. He pointed out that they had never recommended against introducing a new vaccine—including even those that were later withdrawn for safety reasons—and maintained that they had become "little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine." He also stressed that a clean sweep was necessary to restore public trust in vaccine science and policy as it had been seriously shaken by the controversy surrounding the Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

The first upshot from Kennedy's revamp of the vaccine regulators occurred on September 4, 2025 when Food and Drug (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary appeared on CNN's The Lead and announced "We've been looking into the VAERS database self-reports, there have been children that have died from the Covid vaccine." VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) is the US government's organization for reporting vaccine harms. It is a passive reporting system and, until Kennedy's shakeup, was known for its lack of followup investigations. Makary's words were momentous. They were a sharp break with past government messaging because—despite numerous reports in the media that had already put the idea of child deaths due to Covid vaccination in the air—up until then the official administration line had been that no child deaths were linked to the Covid-19 vaccine.

Makary's announcement was a prelude to the reconstituted ACIP's first undertaking which, not surprisingly, was to review the Covid vaccine. The committee held two meetings in September 2025 to review and debate government policy around the novel mRNA vaccine and they issued their advice at the second one on September 19.

As chair of ACIP's Covid-19 vaccine work group MIT Professor Retsef Levi presided over these meetings, the terms of reference of any analysis are of utmost importance to its results because they set the scope of what may or may not be examined. Right from the get-go Levi set them as broadly as possible saying, "We don't believe that terms like 'safe and effective' are scientific or appropriate. ACIP should be able to ask any questions relevant to vaccine policy." It should be noted that Levi's all-encompassing terms of reference were challenged by agency lawyers but in the end were finally accepted.

During its discussions about the Covid vaccine the committee heard testimony from two members of Levi's work group who were experts in cancer research, Dr. Wafik El-Deiry, Director of the Legorreta Cancer Center at Brown University and Dr. Charlotte Kuperwasser, Prof. in the Department of Developmental, Molecular, and Chemical Biology at Tufts University School of Medicine. Along with her specialty in molecular biology Kuperwasser is also an internationally recognized expert in mammary gland biology and breast cancer prevention. El-Deiry's knowledge of molecular oncology was important for probing potential integration into the body's genetic system of the stray DNA particles which are known to be a byproduct of the novel mRNA Covid vaccine, while Kuperwasser's expertise was also valuable for evaluating reproductive and pregnancy saf...