Vaccine Skeptic Sean Kaufman Should Be Disqualified From Critical Health Post
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Sean Kaufman, the nominee for U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), sought to mislead members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee about his prior statements doubting vaccines in his confirmation hearing last week. The committee will vote on his nomination this Thursday, July 23rd.
Investments made by ASPR and its sub-agency the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) were vitally important to the rapid development of mRNA vaccines credited with saving millions of lives during the COVID pandemic. Kaufman has said without evidence that the vaccines caused “excessive death and injury” and that he would rather die than vaccinate his children with these vaccines. At his HELP confirmation hearing Kaufman defended the Trump administration’s dangerous decision to cancel $500 million in mRNA research that was being managed by BARDA. Kaufman also has spread the baseless claim that infant vaccines cause autism.
Peter Maybarduk, Access to Medicines Director for Public Citizen, issued the following statement:
“Putting a vaccine skeptic in charge of our nation’s health security R&D is an incredibly reckless move, even by the deadly standards of the Trump administration, that could cost many lives in the next pandemic. If Kaufman’s ideas had reigned in the years before COVID, likely millions more people would have died and the economy would have suffered trillions of dollars more in damage. Appreciating the weight of this responsibility for health security is the first basic criteria of the ASPR job. There is no room for hedging or compromise. The Senate must reject Kaufman’s nomination.”
Additional Context:
Under Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., BARDA also canceled $766 million in contracts to develop pandemic flu vaccines, including vaccines for H5N1 bird flu. The current Ebola outbreak is one of the largest on record. There are no approved therapeutics or vaccines for the current strain. But ASPR and BARDA investments, both longstanding and rapidly initiated, in therapeutics and vaccines could help prevent suffering and curtail the outbreak.