Pharmaceutical executives are finally saying how they really feel about the extreme anti-vaccine agenda Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been ruthlessly implementing—and it’s not pretty.
According to reporting from Bloomberg at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference that ended today in San Francisco, pharmaceutical executives who had previously been careful to avoid criticizing the Trump administration appear to have reached a breaking point, with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla offering some of the most candid comments.
“I am very annoyed. I’m very disappointed. I’m seriously frustrated,” Bourla said. “What is happening has zero scientific merit and is just serving an agenda which is political, and then antivax.”
Last week, Kennedy and other health officials abruptly announced a mass overhaul of the childhood vaccine schedule, dropping the number of routine recommended vaccinations from 17 to 11. The drastic and unprecedented change bypassed all the scientific review and transparent decision-making processes that would normally underpin such changes, which would likely have taken months if not years.
Kennedy claimed that the move puts the US more in line with peer nations, but as an analysis by Stat News pointed out, the US is now an outlier, recommending significantly fewer vaccines than many other countries. Of 20 so-called peer countries that Stat compared, only one other country has a similarly low number of recommendations: Denmark.
Leading medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, are preparing a legal challenge to block the changes.