Concerned about US vaccine misinformation and access, public health experts start Vaccine Integrity Project

(CNN) — Concerned that the nation’s health leadership is casting unfounded doubt on the safety of well-studied vaccines and may take action to curb their use, a group of public health experts is working to put pieces in place to respond.

The initiative, the Vaccine Integrity Project, will be funded by a foundation backed by Walmart heiress Christy Walton and has a steering committee helmed by former US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg and former National Academy of Medicine President Dr. Harvey Fineberg, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, who is leading the initiative and who serves as director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

The effort will consider what’s needed to safeguard vaccine policy and use in the US, including whether there’s a need for a new independent body to evaluate vaccine safety and effectiveness, Osterholm said ahead of Thursday’s announcement.

“There have been conversations happening for months now across the public health community about, ‘what will we do if US government vaccine information becomes corrupted or the system that helps to ensure their safety and efficacy are compromised?’ “ he said.

The initiative is being formed in response to actions by US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spread mixed messages about the measles vaccine amid a deadly outbreak, accused advisers to federal health agencies of conflicts of interest and pledged to start a major autism study that experts fear will falsely tie the condition to vaccines.

In a statement Thursday, HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon called the project “a self-appointed echo chamber masquerading as oversight.”

“Led by establishment leaders, it’s less about integrity and more about salvaging the credibility of a public health bureaucracy that failed millions during the COVID-19 pandemic,” he said. He added that Kennedy and NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya “will continue to prioritize open scientific debate and Gold Standard of Science to inform decision making.”

The Vaccine Integrity Project’s first move will be to hold a series of information-gathering sessions, pulling together experts from local public health departments, medical associations, academia, public policy, industry and others.

The initial goal is to determine “what is important to have going forward if, in fact, there should be compromise by the federal government in terms of our vaccine enterprise,” Osterholm said. “We can’t say at this point that that’s happened, but we don’t want to wait until the moment it might happen, and we have enough signals that that is.”

He pointed to Kennedy’s vaccine comments, as well as moves like some Minnesota state legislators’ introduction of a bill this week “to declare that mRNA vaccine technology is a weapon of mass destruction and that it should be immediately taken off the market and anyone using it would be liable for criminal activity.”

“Who’s going to respond to that?” Osterholm asked. “Is anybody at the federal government level going to respond to activities like that? That’s a question I think we are left, at this point, unanswered.”

Hamburg and Fineberg wrote in an opinion piece about the project in the health publication STAT on Thursday that “the stakes are too high for us to sit back and watch. We cannot allow vaccine-preventable conditions, such as measles and whooping cough, to become regularly occurring outbreaks here in the US again, causing needless suffering and death.”

They added that, “given [Kennedy’s] history as the leader of an anti-vaccine organization, it is only prudent to anticipate ways the secretary could in the future exert his authority to reduce vaccine accessibility and discourage lifesaving immunizations.”

The “initial feedback phase,” as Osterholm called it, will start this month and last until early August.

“We don’t know what’s this is going to look like at the end, but we’ll only find out by listening to all of these groups,” Osterholm said. “At the end of that process, hopefully we can all look at it and come to a similar conclusion, that this is what’s necessary or not necessary to protect the vaccine enterprise.”

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