Top 20 Vaccines You Should Know About

Wall Street Journal: RFK Jr. Makes His First Move Against Vaccines

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has been Health and Human Services secretary for little more than a week, but he's already pressing what looks like an anti-vaccine agenda. Kennedy never did disavow his vaccine views in the runup to Senate confirmation. He merely said he wouldn't take away anyone's vaccines. But the HHS secretary has many tools to undermine vaccines, and his early moves are revealing.

News reports say he's preparing to sack members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. This is the group that decides whether and how to recommend vaccines for the public. Its recommendations help determine which vaccines are covered under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

That's the program Congress established to compensate individuals injured by vaccines. Its aim is to limit litigation against vaccine makers so they'll take the high risk of developing them. Plaintiffs can only sue if they first file claims with the special vaccine courts and are rejected. Trial lawyers hate the system since it makes it harder to round up plaintiffs.

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Kennedy is targeting the committee members for alleged conflicts of interest. But none of the members work for drug companies. They're medical professors and physicians with careers studying vaccines.

Perhaps Kennedy doesn't like that they have done research showing vaccines are beneficial and may have—oh no!—even advocated for them. One member advised a presidential cancer panel during President Trump's first term on how to boost uptake of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. If the committee withdraws a vaccine recommendation, it could be removed from the vaccine compensation program and open manufacturers to mass tort liability.

Kennedy's concern about conflicts of interest is especially striking given his own ties to trial lawyers who sue drug companies. He helped spearhead litigation against Merck over its HPV vaccine in which he had a 10% financial interest. He recently agreed to cede his stake to his son who works at the law firm, Wisner Baum, that is suing the company.

Relatedly, in that HPV litigation, the first jury trial began a month ago in a California court. The plaintiff alleges that Merck's Gardasil HPV vaccine caused her postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS).

The Food and Drug Administration in 2016 determined there was no evidence that the vaccine caused this syndrome. Merck's vaccine trials showed no difference in the syndrome's incidence in the placebo and vaccine groups.

Yet Wisner Baum claims Merck "hid adverse events by dismissing them as unrelated to the vaccine." That's hard to reckon given that the FDA review details wide-ranging adverse events in trial participants, including car crashes, suicides and animal bites. More participants died from auto and plane accidents than were diagnosed with POTS. ...

Independent doctors who worked on the trial were also blinded to whether patients received the vaccine when they determined if an injury was caused by the vaccine. This evidence may explain why the California trial wasn't going the plaintiff firm's way. After several weeks of hearings, lead trial lawyer Mark Lanier asked Merck to adjourn the trial and start a new one in September.

Lanier says publicity around Kennedy's confirmation hearing may have tainted the jurors. But the plaintiffs could have sought to delay the trial at any time. Why seek a new one after three weeks of hearings — and notably — the day after Kennedy was confirmed? Do they hope Kennedy will use his new position to help their case?

Lanier told Reuters, "without elaborating," the news service said, that he expects a new scientific study by September that might help his case. Our sources say he's referring to a study the CDC is currently conducting on POTS and adolescent vaccinations. The CDC reports to Kennedy.

Merck consented to Lanier's request, which lets it focus on defenses in federal multi-district litigation. But the Gardasil plaintiffs and trial lawyers around the country now have a very powerful friend in government who can help them.

Would Louisiana doctor and Sen. Bill Cassidy, who provided a decisive vote for RFK Jr.'s confirmation, care to comment?

RFK Jr.-Linked Lawsuit Against Merck Suspended After Confirmation: Reuters

Merck and a plaintiff suing the pharma have agreed to suspend a trial connected with the human papillomavirus vaccine Gardasil, according to an exclusive Tuesday report from Reuters.

The case is connected to newly confirmed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in 2018 helped spearhead a mass legal action against Merck, as per a separate Reuters exclusive published last month. Citing two lawyers familiar with the matter, Reuters at the time reported that Kennedy had worked with vaccines injury attorney Robert Krakow, who alleged that Merck had misled customers, convincing them that Gardasil was safe and more effective than it actually was.

Kennedy at the time helped persuade several "influential" lawyers to take up cases against Merck, according to the January Reuters story.

Meanwhile, in its article on Tuesday, the publication reported that counsel for the plaintiff had approached Merck proposing to adjourn the suit and discharge the current jury. In a text message to Reuters, lawyer Mark Lanier said that the confirmation hearings played into the decision to suspend the trial, noting that he did not know whether Kennedy's testimony in front of the Senate would affect the jurors or not.

Merck agreed to Lanier's proposal, with the explicit requirement that it "would provide no financial or other consideration." The parties are scheduled to meet and convene a new jury in September, by which point Lanier expects a new study on Gardasil to have been published, as per Reuters.

Kennedy was formally appointed last week as the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. In this post, he will have authority over the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which oversees complaints of potential side effects from people who received certain covered vaccines. Injuries associated with human papillomavirus vaccines are covered by the compensation process.

Kennedy's confirmation came amid strong controversy regarding his documented history of being critical of vaccines and pushing many unsubstantiated health claims. In hearings before the senate finance and health committees, several lawmakers blasted Kennedy, accusing him of "peddling half-truths," as Senator Michael Bennet (D-Co) put it, pointing to a previous interview where Kennedy called Lyme disease a military weapon.

Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician, made his dilemma known during the second day of Kennedy's hearing, calling him someone "who spent decades criticizing vaccines, and who's financially vested in finding fault with vaccines." Cassidy at the time said that for his vote, he needed to first determine if Kennedy could "change his attitudes and approach now that he'll have the most important position" affecting vaccine policy in the country. Cassidy ended up falling in line with his party and voting to confirm Kennedy.

Exclusive-Merck Vaccine Case Linked To HHS Secretary Kennedy Delayed Mid-trial

By Dan Levine and Mike Spector

(Reuters) - Merck and a woman suing the drugmaker agreed to halt a trial over alleged injuries from the drugmaker's human papillomavirus vaccine in a case with ties to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the company and an attorney for the plaintiff said.

Merck and the plaintiff plan to reconvene in a Los Angeles state court in September with a new jury, the company said in a statement provided to Reuters.

Kennedy, confirmed as HHS secretary last week, played an instrumental role in organizing mass litigation against Merck over Gardasil before taking office, but has not been involved in the Los Angeles trial after entering an initial court appearance in the case. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Prior to his confirmation, Kennedy, 71, was an environmental lawyer who long sowed doubts about the safety and efficacy of vaccines that have helped curb disease and prevented millions of deaths for decades.

On Friday, plaintiffs' lawyers approached Merck and proposed the jury be discharged and the case adjourned, the company said. Merck agreed "subject to an explicit stipulation that Merck would provide no financial or other consideration in exchange for the agreement to adjourn," the company said.

Mark Lanier, an attorney for plaintiff Jennifer Robi, said in a text "it was really tough having the trial while the (Kennedy) confirmation hearings were ongoing." Lanier said he was uncertain whether the Kennedy hearings would have a positive or negative impact on jurors, and decided it was better to reconvene in September with a new jury. A new scientific study about Gardasil is also expected by then, Lanier said, without elaborating.

Both Merck and Lanier also pointed to upcoming proceedings in another Gardasil case consolidating lawsuits in a North Carolina federal court that might affect the Robi case as a reason for the delay.

The unexpected agreement to adjourn the case occurred after the trial had been underway for several weeks, the culmination of a lawsuit filed in 2016 that had survived legal challenges from Merck to make it before a jury.

"It seems to me unusual for plaintiffs, who have been working for this, to want a delay," said Dorit Reiss, a professor at UC Law San Francisco who specializes in legal and policy issues related to vaccines.

Robi, 30, was vaccinated with Gardasil as a teenager and claims the shot led to impaired mobility that confined her to a wheelchair. Her lawsuit also claims that Merck marketed the vaccine as safe while concealing knowledge of dangerous side effects. Merck has denied the claims.

"Merck remains confident that it will prevail in the Robi litigation based not only on the scientific evidence and defenses that it had presented during plaintiff's own case, but also the additional evidence Merck would have presented in its defense, which had not even begun when plaintiff's counsel proposed the adjournment," the company said.

"An overwhelming body of scientific evidence, including more than 30 years of research and development along with real world evidence generated by Merck and by independent investigators, continues to support the safety and efficacy profiles of our HPV vaccines," the company added.

Before his confirmation, Kennedy said in response to questions from a Senate committee that he would divest his financial interest in Gardasil litigation to his non-dependent, adult son. He had previously said he would retain a financial interest in cases he referred to Wisner Baum, one of the law firms suing Merck over the HPV vaccine alongside Lanier.

Wisner Baum did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Gardasil is recommended as a routine immunization for 11 and 12-year-olds by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to prevent cervical and other cancers caused by the virus. Nearly 160 million doses were distributed in the U.S. Through the end of 2022, federal data show.

(Reporting by Dan Levine in San Francisco and Mike Spector in New York; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

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