It’s turning out to just be one of those days, y’all. He has fired the *entire* board. I expect I should have seen this coming due to his previous views on vaccinations (as in don’t) so why is this pissing me off so badly? Well, for one thing, it’s personal with me.
There are some vaccines I *need* to prevent me from getting too sick with anything, including, yes, Covid. I had quite a go-round with pneumonia earlier this year. I got the vaccine for it anyhow because if it does hit me again, and it might, it won’t be so bad that I nearly end up in the hospital again. I avoided it that time, but barely.
So vaccines do a damn lot of good for me *and my husband*. There are some that he needs just as badly as I do, because we are both in at least one high-risk group. Some members of my family are not so much with the vaccines, and it’s pointless to try and show them why. They won’t listen.
US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday dismissed an expert panel of vaccine advisers that has historically guided the federal government’s vaccine recommendations, saying the group is “plagued with conflicts of interest.”
The entirety of the 17-member Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, which advises the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the vaccine schedule and required coverage of immunizations, will be retired and replaced with new members, Kennedy announced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. The HHS secretary has the authority to appoint and dismiss ACIP members, who typically serve four-year cycles. But removing the entire panel prematurely is unprecedented.
This is stupid. Conflicts of interest my ass. He’s an anti-vaxxer, so he fires anyone who could, and would! tell him he’s a dumbass. The amount of information that’s going to be lost is catastrophic, or in buzzword terms, a catastrophic loss of institutional knowledge. Oh, my dear sweet lawd. He’s not going to even consider that, and I don’t need to say (again) why.
Kennedy said that a number of the panel’s members — traditionally pediatricians, epidemiologists, immunologists, and other physicians — were “last-minute appointees” of the Biden administration. “Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028,” he wrote.
ACIP members are not political appointees. However, Kennedy, a longtime critic of federal vaccine policy and vaccine safety, argued that the current group is rife with conflicts of interest and has not been transparent in its vaccine recommendations. ACIP recently considered narrowing the recommendations for Covid-19 vaccinations among children.
What in the hell do you think you’re doing, you idiot? He fired all of them. At once. AT ONCE. And by the way, what does this “last-minute appointments by the Biden administration mean? Show me the PROOF. Prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have no idea what you’re doing.
He’s just as bad as DOGE. He’s been firing people all over the place on specious excuses without actually looking at the entire situation. We all remember what happened in certain parts of the federal government when there was a scramble to re-hire, say, the people who kept the nukes safe.
Has this happened anywhere in RFK Jr’s part of the cosmos? Probably not, yea, you’re right. Move fast and break things as long as they serve your idea of how the place should be run. Please let us get rid of tRump at the next election, somehow, some way. Thanks for sticking with me!
*****From Ursula*****
Friends, I hate to bug people for money, but times are tough. We’re doing all that we can to hang in. Anything you can do to lighten the load would be appreciated. And we now have Politizoom mugs and tote bags. Let me know if you are interested. Thanks!
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The current government wants to kill us all!