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Molly Ferguson for STAT

Matthew Herper covers medical innovation — both its promise and its perils.

Public health experts are distraught because Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. disbanded and reconstituted a federal panel that advises Americans about which vaccines they should receive. Should they be?

Yes. 

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It is a step many feared Kennedy would take. When Scott Gottlieb, who served as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration in the first Trump administration, went on CNBC last November and took the political risk of opposing Kennedy’s nomination, this was the warning he gave based on Kennedy’s decades of rhetoric questioning the safety of childhood vaccinations:

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