When President Bill Clinton worked with a bilateral conference to establish a federal program for vaccine guarantees for poor children, they agreed that the power to buy a drug manufacturers would have to rest with the Health Secretary. The authors of the bill did not consider that an extremely vocal critic of children’s vaccines would appear as a candidate for the role.
This critic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., comes to the Senate for confirmation hearing this week. If confirmed, it would have the power to limit or even discontinue contracts with vaccine manufacturers for more than half of the nation’s children under vaccines for children of $ 8 billion.
The program has been credited with the increase in national vaccination rates and protects almost 38 million low -income and working class children from diseases such as polio, measles, cough and chickenpox.
Mr Kennedy said he would not get vaccines away from anyone, but has a long history of challenge to vaccine safety. The extensive authority that will pursue vaccine policy has become increasingly alarming for public health experts, researchers and legislators from both parties.
Some architects of the program try to persuade senators to oppose his candidacy.
“I think it is dangerous to children’s health,” Donna E. Shalala, Mr. Clinton’s Health Secretary and former Democratic Congress, said in an interview. He said he had spoken to Republican senators who expressed concern about Mr Kennedy, but would not name them.
Confirmation hearings about Mr Kennedy will begin on Wednesday before the Senate Finance Committee and will continue on Thursday before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. The back-to-back sessions will give the senators of both parties the opportunity to ask Mr Kennedy to point out questions about how to oversee large health services and vaccines of the nation.
Legislators have already begun asking questions about the power that the health secretary would have over the vaccines. At a round table for the vaccine policy owned by Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Bermond last week, Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester, Dlaware Democrat, asked: “What are the protections and ways in which one will be in which one will Could it come and have an impact on reducing the use of vaccines? ”
Experts told the Senators that the Authority included the exercise of power over vaccine approvals and the use of the prominent position possibly to increase fears or state things that are untrue.
A spokesman for Mr Kennedy, Katie Miller, refused to answer a question immediately about Mr Kennedy’s view of the children’s program, saying: “He does not plan to break the news through the New York Times.”
For decades, Mr Kennedy has sown doubts about the safety of the vaccines and their ingredients. In 2021, he asked federal officials to recall the authorization of all vaccines in a crown at a time when thousands of Americans die every week from Covid.
Mr Kennedy has also worked for years to claim that Merck’s HPV vaccine, a major cause of cervical cancer, caused injuries. The files released before confirmation hearings also show that it plans to maintain its financial share in this difference of vaccines if confirmed.
His activism has made legislators in both parties. Several Republican senators, such as Kedak’s Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski in Alaska and Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, suggested that they are on the fence on how to vote.
Mr McConnell, survivor of polio and former democratic leader, said that anyone who is involved in “attempts to undermine public confidence in proven treatments” will face difficulty in confirming the Senate. Mr Cassidy, a doctor and chairman of the Aid Committee, has not said how he will vote. Mrs Murkowski told CNN she had concerns, adding that “vaccines are important”.
The vaccine program for children was created in response to measles fireplaces that disproportionately influenced poor children who could not afford their vaccinations. It is now protecting from 19 diseases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The law established by the program gives the Minister of Health the power over the purchase of millions of vaccines, including the power to conclude, modify or reduce agreements. Pharmacists have delivered 71.5 billion doses to about 37,000 medical providers to all the United States and its territories since the start of the program.
Federal officials “control all means of supply and distribution”, according to Sara Rosenbaum, a peer professor on the health of law and policy at George Washington University, who was asked by Clinton’s management to build the program.
“Who would ever think it was a problem that gave the secretary this kind of power?” he asked.
Some of the program defenders are worried that we are simply talking about the vaccine program may endanger if Mr Kennedy assumes responsibility.
“Peoples are too nervous to talk these things loud because they do not want to happen,” said Richard Hughes IV, a lawyer representing vaccines and is a lecturer at George Washington University. “But these are things that they could very well happen.”
Lawyers specializing in vaccines have pointed out other areas where the Minister of Health of the Nation has power over vaccines. One is the vaccine injury program created in 1986 to protect vaccine manufacturers from responsibility and to create a judicial system for compensating for people who are damaged by vaccines.
Although Mr Kennedy suggested that the shield of responsibility provides incentives to vaccine manufacturers to cut the corners, he would not have the power to remove it – located in Congress. However, the Health Secretary may add injuries to a damage table that was supposed to have been caused by vaccines. The secretary may also add or remove vaccines from the jurisdiction of the court.
As an employee over the Food and Drug Administration in the executive chain of administration, the Secretary could push the Agency to stop or recall the approval of established vaccines or to withhold the approval of those who seek permission.
“These are real opportunities,” said Denise Hill, a Lawyer of Iowa, who specializes in the vaccine law. “And if you asked me five, 10 years ago, I would say that it is never going to happen, but now I can’t say it with any certainty.”
Mrs Hill said it would also be possible for Trump’s administration to try to put in the chapters for the children’s vaccines program, such as rejecting its mandate to enter the kindergarten to enter the kindergarten.
The Secretary would also have the power in an influence on a CDC consulting team called the Advisory Committee on Immunization or Acip Practices The Commission could be dismantled, according to Mr Hughes. The secretary could also review the vaccine security issues and reject the Commission’s recommendations.
This committee tends to influence politics at state level, doctors and private insurers. But it has more direct power over which vaccines are distributed by the children’s program. Dr. Walter Orenstin, who ran the CDC immunization programs when the children’s program began, said he was worried that Mr Kennedy could change the committee’s makeup.
“It is possible that they could really put on the Acip a significant number of anti-inflammatory people, and this would then have some potentially negative implications for changing today’s recommendations,” Dr. Orenstin said. “It could mean that vaccines will not be provided through the vaccines for children.”
Ms Rosenbaum, who helped create the system, said the Medicaid vaccines covered the vaccines and the cost of their management decades ago. But even so, many doctors did not want to go to the problem to pay in advance to maintain the vaccines equipped with their offices.
Ms Rosenbaum said that the system they built was revolutionary because it authorized the Health Secretary to negotiate prices with vaccine manufacturers and to transfer the doses directly to thousands of providers.
The program has been expanded to cover working class families above the Chip -based Medicaid income limits or children’s health insurance plan. These programs cover about 38 million infants, children and adolescents, including those based on Native American health systems.
Thirty years later, Mrs Rosenbaum said, as Mr Kennedy faces confirmation, people who are familiar with the program have assumed that it can be target if confirmed. “People did not react with an alarm for no reason,” he said.
