As vaccine orthodoxy crumbles, cancel culture allegedly hits federal immunization advisory panel

Can medical professionals work with the Trump administration and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Department of Health and Human Services without risking their careers, even as articles of faith in public health fail under the evidence?

It's an open question after pediatric cardiologist Kirk Milhoan allegedly lost his practice "solely because" he now chairs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which has reoriented its recommendations around individual decisionmaking since Kennedy remade the panel.

The committee voted last week to stop recommending the hepatitis B shot at birth and instead wait two months to inoculate babies born to mothers who test negative for the virus. 

President Trump cheered the move and directed HHS to speed up its review of the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule, comparing it with peer, developed countries and the scientific evidence that informs the practices.

ACIP Vice Chairman Robert Malone identified Driscoll Children's Hospital in Texas as having removed Milhoan, saying he "directly confirmed" with Milhoan, whose wife, Kimberly, made the claim in an essay Thursday while both were at a Hong Kong medical conference.

Just the News heard the same employer from an HHS source in contact with the Independent Medical Alliance, which reached its member Milhoan at the conference. Global Health Project President Kat Lindley, a "friend and colleague," confirmed it as well.

DeTar Healthcare System identifies Milhoan's location as Driscoll Physicians Group, which is part of the hospital. Just the News called the listed number to ask whether Milhoan was still on staff, and was forwarded to the voicemail for someone in the pediatric intensive care unit.

"Pretty clear message : if you work with the Trump / RFK administration, they will attempt to destroy you professionally," Philadelphia cardiologist Anish Koka wrote on X after Kimberly Milhoan said husband Kirk was suddenly removed following an "overwhelming number of calls" to his practice that demanded his firing based on less than two weeks as ACIP chair.

"The Pharma cartel has a long reach" is how Human Genome Project participant Kevin McKernan, whose research concluded Pfizer and Moderna vaccines had DNA contamination exceeding U.S. and Europe regulatory limits, explained Milhoan's alleged purge.

"An evidence-based 2 month delay in the hep B vaccine is grounds for firing!?" exclaimed autism researcher Toby Rogers, who sought retraction of a CDC-authored paper that allegedly hid contrary evidence to rule out a vaccine-autism link and testified in Congress this fall.

Current HHS leaders also faced professional consequences when they challenged emerging COVID orthodoxy as university scientists in 2020.

Then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins privately plotted on how to marginalize and discredit Martin Kulldorff, whom Milhoan replaced as ACIP chair when Kulldorff took a senior HHS role, and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya as "fringe epidemiologists" when they called COVID lockdown policies unscientific and harmful.

Stanford University allegedly subjected Bhattacharya to a "Star Chamber" to restrict his research that showed COVID had already spread widely before lockdowns, faculty sought to purge his colleague and President Trump adviser Scott Atlas, and Harvard fired Kulldorff for refusing vaccination on the basis of his natural immunity and "immune deficiency."

Kimberly Milhoan defended her husband as "a vaccine advocate throughout his career" who "believed, and recommended, that in most cases the benefit outweighed the risk associated with vaccines," even warning her about speaking publicly about the novel mechanism in mRNA vaccines because it might contribute to broader vaccine hesitancy.

"He is swayed by data, the scientific method, and clinical experience, founded on principles of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pathophysiology, and pharmacology," she wrote. "He has always made me a better clinician because I could never get by with sloppy or incomplete thinking."

Milhoan even fretted to a fellow ACIP member that he felt they were “puppets on a string as opposed to really being” an "independent advisory" panel, according to a transcript viewed by The Wall Street Journal from a "private Zoom call" accessible to non-voting members.

He was talking about "pressures from many organizations: federal, industry, medical organizations that are trying to influence by ad hominem attacks, when we are trying to look at and ask for data," Milhoan explained to the Journal.

Idea that COVID vaccines killed kids 'not far-fetched,' but 'mRNAs are still great'

The incident came against the backdrop of a remarkable turnaround in federal vaccine policy that started with regulators resisting the Biden administration's rush to authorize COVID-19 boosters – circumventing its own advisers – and fully approve COVID vaccines, apparently to enable a federal mandate, but also a cultural shift.

The Food and Drug Administration is now investigating deaths "across multiple age groups" potentially linked to COVID vaccination after Commissioner Marty Makary opened an this fall investigation of children's deaths. 

His vaccines chief, Vinay Prasad, recently told staff the FDA would strengthen vaccine approval requirements in light of 10 confirmed deaths in children due to COVID vaccines.

Similar to how a "Saturday Night Live" sketch gave permission to the COVID faithful to question the evidence behind mask mandates in 2022, an essay in the elite American magazine The Atlantic urged "experts" not to reject out of hand the idea that COVID vaccines "may" have killed kids, even if Prasad's tally "may well turn out to be inflated."

"The idea that mRNA-based shots have, tragically, killed a very small number of children is not far-fetched" yet "authorities demand an impossibly high level of evidence" only when vaccines might be involved in routine "cause-of-death determinations," pathology and laboratory medicine physician Benjamin Mazer wrote this week.

The Atlantic "notably avoids arguing that children should ever have gotten Covid vaccines" and is "now test-marketing a new argument: sure, kids died, but so what, the mRNAs are still great?" former New York Times drug industry reporter Alex Berenson wrote. He previously flagged a child's death in Moderna's COVID booster trial, undisclosed to U.S. regulators.

No-exception vaccine mandates may be on the way out, with the Supreme Court this week ordering a federal appeals court to reconsider a New York school immunization law that bans religious exemptions, in light of the high court's ruling this summer for parents against a no-exceptions school policy that exposes young children to LGBTQ storybooks.

"By vacating the dismissal, the Supreme Court signaled that Mahmoud applies to vaccine cases," attorney Sujata Gibson told Children's Health Defense, the group founded by Kennedy. That recent precedent "provides incredibly broad protection to parental religious rights infringed by school policies."

HHS also said it's investigating a "Midwestern school" that allegedly "illegally vaccinated a child with a federally provided vaccine without the parents’ consent by ignoring a religious exemption submitted under a state law."