AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced plans today to expand the federal government's efforts to study vaccine safety. NPR health correspondent Rob Stein joins us now to talk about all of this. Hi, Rob.
ROB STEIN, BYLINE: Hey there, Ailsa.
CHANG: Hey. OK, so Kennedy has been raising questions about vaccine safety for years. So what is this latest action all about?
STEIN: Yeah. So on Monday, Kennedy visited the National Institutes of Health to open a new clinic focused on studying possible vaccine-related injuries. One of the things that's noteworthy about that is that this was all done very quietly. The NIH took the unusual step of ordering thousands of employees on the sprawling NIH campus to work from home that day, and there was no public announcement until today. In a press release, Kennedy's office acknowledged the new clinic, along with other steps to learn more about vaccine complications. They also released a video.
CHANG: Yeah. Can we listen to some of what Kennedy said on that video? - because, you know, he's a little hard to understand, but people should listen to this. There's some music playing in the background, which is why he's hard to understand.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ROBERT F KENNEDY JR: For many years, moms and children with vaccine injuries, the parents of those children, people who suffered injuries themselves, have been marginalized, vilified, demonized and gaslighted. And they have not received the medical attention they need, and we have not done the studies that need to be done to understand who's vulnerable to those kind of injuries.
STEIN: And, you know, Ailsa, while today's announcement provided a few details about all that, NPR obtained an internal memo outlining some of what this new clinic may do.
CHANG: Wow. OK, what did you learn from that internal memo?
STEIN: So the NIH will launch what's known as an observational study that will follow people who have been vaccinated for a range of possible complications and their potential causes. The NIH may also study the recommended vaccine schedules and try to develop treatments for people who have been injured by vaccines.
CHANG: What's been the reaction to this?
STEIN: Vaccine experts say, you know, they support research about the safety of vaccines. But they stress that there's overwhelming evidence already that the benefits of vaccines far outweigh any risks for most people, and any complications are, you know, very rare. Here's Michael Osterholm. He runs the Vaccine Integrity Project at the University of Minnesota.
MICHAEL OSTERHOLM: The issue really isn't whether we should study vaccine safety - of course we should. But we already have systems in place that are constantly monitoring thousands and thousands and thousands to determine, are there any adverse events associated with vaccination?
STEIN: So Osterholm and others fear this is really an attempt to kind of gin up data that would appear to confirm Kennedy's long-held but long-debunked claims that vaccines cause autism and other serious complications. Kennedy is also proposing a way to reimburse doctors for reporting vaccine complications, requiring electronic health records to track them and modernizing a government system for monitoring vaccine safety.
CHANG: Well, these are not the only changes that Kennedy has been making around vaccine policy, right?
STEIN: Yeah.
CHANG: Like, he attempted to cut the number of vaccines that children routinely get and space them out more, right?
STEIN: That's absolutely right. And he's also been quietly making moves that could make it easier for people to get compensated for complications blamed on vaccines. He's delayed shipment of COVID-19 vaccines for kids and floated changes to how the federal government recommends vaccines, which could make it harder for people to get vaccinated and get the vaccines paid for. But one thing neither Kennedy nor anyone else in this administration has been doing is actively promoting vaccination. You know, this is happening as the U.S. is fighting an unprecedented outbreak of measles. The flu is coming back, and other infectious diseases are looming.
CHANG: That is NPR's Rob Stein. Thank you, Rob.
STEIN: You bet, Ailsa. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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