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A panel tasked with advising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine policy recommended Thursday that makers of flu vaccines should remove a well-studied ingredient used as a preservative, capitulating to anti-vaccine advocates who falsely claim it causes autism.
Most flu vaccines already do not contain the ingredient, thimerosal, but it is still used in multi-dose vials to prevent bacterial contamination when multiple needles are inserted.
The panelists were hand-selected by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary who is best known for spreading conspiracy theories about vaccines and public health. Kennedy had fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices earlier this month.
Thimerosal has been in use in medicine for nearly a century. It has repeatedly been studied and found to be harmless, but skeptics point to the fact that it contains a very small amount of a type of mercury.
Hoping to put parents’ minds at ease, the CDC asked pharmaceutical companies in 1999 to remove thimerosal from vaccines out of an abundance of caution. But critics of that decision argue that it spread mistrust by suggesting thimerosal was harmful.
One of Kennedy’s panelists voted against the recommendation to remove thimerosal.
Dr. Cody Meissner, the dissenter, said after the vote that “the risk from influenza is so much greater than the non-existent, as far as we know, risk from thimerosal.”
“So I would hate for a person not to receive the influenza vaccine because the only available preparation contains thimerosal. I find it very hard to justify,” Meissner said.
Leading the panel’s two-day meeting was a controversial Swedish epidemiologist, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, who is broadly supportive of vaccines but opposed COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccination for children at the height of the pandemic.
Last year, he said that Harvard Medical School fired him for refusing a COVID-19 shot that was required for people who worked at the hospital.
“Vaccines are not all good or bad,” Kulldorff said Wednesday as the meeting began. “If you think that all vaccines are safe and effective and want them all, or if you think all vaccines are dangerous and don’t want any of them, then you don’t have much use for us. You already know what you want. But if you wish to know which vaccines are suitable for you and your children, and at what ages, then we will provide you with evidence-based recommendations.”
Kulldorff also accused the media of fueling mistrust in public health institutions by reporting on officials who publicly question vaccine safety.