ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pledged to purge conflicts of interest from the government agencies that fall under Health and Human Services. In his confirmation hearings, he took aim at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee on vaccines. He cited an old government report that 97% of CDC advisers had conflicts of interest. Public health advocates think Kennedy might be laying the groundwork to kick members off the vaccine committee. NPR's Pien Huang has looked into Kennedy's claim.
PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: The claim dates back to a 50-page report from late 2009. It's from the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services. It audited ethics paperwork filed in 2007, and it covers all 17 CDC advisory committees at the time, which gave guidance on topics from smoking to improving clinical labs. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices was one of them. Dr. Dale Morse chaired that committee from 2007 to 2009.
DALE MORSE: Based on my other presence on other committees, I would think that ACIP would have been the most complete.
HUANG: That's Morse's impression, but the report doesn't mention specific committees. What it does say, looking at all the committees, is that 97% of these long financial disclosure forms that people submitted had some kind of error or omission on them. Morse, now retired from CDC's Food Safety Unit, remembers those forms.
MORSE: It was like doing your taxes but worse. You had to actually list every single category that was listed in that portfolio.
HUANG: The errors and omissions include things like people putting the right information in the wrong part of the form, or reviewers forgetting to initial or date the pages. The report also faulted CDC for not identifying potential conflicts of interest for 58% of committee members. The agency said then that it would go beyond the form to collect information on conflicts but that the report overstated the problem. Dr. Carol Baker chaired the vaccine advisory committee after Morse, from 2009 to 2012.
CAROL BAKER: I believe that the report is accurate, but when you get down there to things that might have been a problem, it's down to 3%.
HUANG: That 3% represents the proportion of all CDC committee members who voted on issues they were supposed to recuse themselves from in 2007. That is a problem, and the Office of Inspector General investigated these cases. But they determined that these were not criminal violations but mistakes, stemming from CDC's lack of oversight at the time. Baker, a vaccine researcher who recently retired from UTHealth Houston Medical School, says on the vaccine advisory committee, the rules were strict. She saw it firsthand.
BAKER: My first meeting - first day, new voting member - this was 2006.
HUANG: She remembers it clearly. About an hour or two into the public meeting, a CDC staffer came into the room and demanded that Baker leave with her immediately.
BAKER: She said, I'm from legal - Dr. Baker has a serious conflict, and she's been asked to leave. Well, this was a clerical error.
HUANG: They sorted it out. She stayed and went on to serve for six years. But the fact that she was almost kicked out of her first meeting because CDC staff thought there was a conflict of interest, Baker says they took these things very seriously. That rigor extended to every public meeting.
BAKER: At the beginning of the meeting, when everybody's saying who they are, they say, no conflicts. And every time there's a vote, they have to say no conflicts.
HUANG: Or in those cases when members have a conflict, they recuse themselves from the discussion and the vote. These public meeting declarations are now compiled on a list on the CDC website, an initiative of Kennedy's to increase transparency. Dr. Tom Frieden was CDC director when the report came out. He signed the agency's response letter at the time, agreeing with most of its findings.
TOM FRIEDEN: So it is important to avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety. It is important that any potential conflict of interest that may unduly influence a recommendation be investigated.
HUANG: But he says now, Kennedy is misusing the report, claiming it shows conflicts of interest in a specific committee when it does not. Frieden calls it classic misinformation.
FRIEDEN: Right now, all we're getting is a total misrepresentation of a 20-year-old report about a process that was already being improved before that report was issued.
HUANG: In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said Kennedy is committed to ensuring radical transparency across HHS. Pien Huang, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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