Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has expressed another unorthodox view on vaccines, with the long-time vaccine critic declaring that vaccines for respiratory bugs that target a sole part of the pathogen they are meant to protect against do not work.
The claim was dismissed as erroneous by vaccine experts, who were befuddled by the secretary’s theory, espoused during an interview with CBS News.
Kennedy made the claim in explaining a controversial recent decision by political appointees at the Food and Drug Administration to delay granting a full license to Novavax’s Covid-19 vaccine, which is still given under an emergency use authorization or EUA.
“It is a single antigen vaccine. And for respiratory illnesses, the single antigen vaccines have never worked,” Kennedy said when asked by CBS’s chief medical correspondent, Jonathan LaPook, why the decision was delayed….
“He’s wrong,” said Paul Offit, an infectious diseases expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who was one of the developers of a successful rotavirus vaccine. “He believes falsely that a single protein vaccine can’t effectively prevent a serious mucosal infection and of course it can. We have several examples.”…
Peter Marks, the former head of the FDA’s biologics center, which regulates vaccines, said Kennedy’s idea about single antigen vaccines isn’t based in science…
“This is another example of Kennedy being an ignoramus about vaccination, if not other things as well. And you can quote me on that,” said Stanley Plotkin, a co-developer of the rotavirus vaccine and of the vaccine that protects against rubella. Plotkin is a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.