The Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention killed a marketing campaign selling seasonal flu pictures and canceled a serious convention with virus consultants simply days after outspoken vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. turned the nation’s high well being official.
Beneath Kennedy’s management, the CDC pulled the plug on its “Wild to Delicate initiative” — which was aimed toward encouraging high-risk people to get vaxxed — Wednesday as one in every of worst flu seasons in many years rages, NPR reported.
The adverts used animals as an analogy for the lowered risk of a the flu virus as soon as an individual is vaccinated — utilizing the picture of a kitten versus a lion.
However CDC staffers had been advised in a gathering with Nationwide Middle for Immunization and Respiratory Ailments reps that the marketing campaign wouldn’t proceed, the outlet reported. Details about the marketing campaign was then faraway from CDC’s net web page.
On Thursday, the HHS then ordered the CDC to indefinitely postpone a gathering of its vaccine advisory committee — which Kennedy has criticized prior to now — slated for Feb. 26 and Feb. 28, The Washington Submit reported.
The strikes come lower than every week after Kennedy was sworn in as President Trump’s Secretary of the US Division of Well being and Human Companies.
The HHS denied that the flu shot marketing campaign had been yanked from the web site.
“No, the CDC was not advised to take down the flu vaccination marketing campaign webpage,” Well being and Human Companies mentioned in an announcement, in keeping with the tech information website arstechnica.com
“Sadly, officers contained in the CDC who’re averse to Secretary Kennedy and President Trump’s agenda appear to be deliberately falsifying and misrepresenting steering they obtain,” the assertion mentioned.
An HHS spokesperson additionally advised The Washington Submit that the vaccine convention was “postponed to accommodate public remark upfront of the assembly.”
As of Friday, nonetheless, the convention hadn’t been rescheduled.
