A scientist in charge of Covid-19 and respiratory syncytial virus data has abruptly resigned, telling colleagues she doesn’t trust the Centers for Disease Control under the leadership of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will use it “objectively.”
Fiona Havers led the CDC’s surveillance of hospitalizations for Covid-19 and RSV until she resigned in a Monday morning email. According to her LinkedIn profile, she had worked at the CDC since 2012.
“Unfortunately, I no longer have confidence that these data will be used objectively or evaluated with appropriate scientific rigor to make evidence-based vaccine policy decisions,” her email, which was obtained and reported on by The Washington Post, read.
Havers said in her email she was most proud of helping to allow data from her and her colleagues to be presented at every Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices meeting since 2020.
The committee is responsible for evaluating the safety, efficacy and clinical need of vaccines and then presenting its findings to the CDC.
Havers said she was “grateful” for the work she had taken part in “that has provided decision-makers with real-time, high-quality, rigorous scientific evidence that have been used to track disease severity over time, tailor vaccine messaging to groups at highest risk for severe disease and provide critical inputs for vaccine cost-effectiveness analyses.”
Last week, Kennedy announced his removal of all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices.
The move was made to restore “public trust above any pro- or anti-vaccine agenda,” Kennedy said in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
But he later replaced committee members with people who have been critical of vaccines.
Kennedy had said his picks were “committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense.”
Havers’ resignation follows the quitting of CDC Covid-19 vaccine adviser Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos and Melinda Wharton, a CDC vaccine official who oversaw the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices.
