The Secretary of Health and Social Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will demand that new vaccines undergo placebo tests, marking what a spokesperson for the department called “a radical gap in past practices”.
The change of policy would oblige vaccines, in order to be approved for human use, to undergo studies in which half of the individuals of a study receive a placebo – generally a saline solution – to compare results with the vaccine.
Placebo controlled trials are already used to test new drugs or vaccines for safety and efficiency, but some experts consider that it is contrary to ethics to conduct such trials when a vaccine or treatment is already considered safe and effective. For example, they say, giving half of the children in a placebo a placebo for the measles vaccine when an already proven vaccine existed these participants unnecessarily at risk for the virus.
We still do not know what HHS considers as a “new” vaccine and if it includes flu and coastal vaccines, which are updated on an annual basis to better protect against strains currently in circulation.
“The FDA commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary, said that important updates of existing vaccines – such as those dealing with changes in seasonal tension or antigen drift – can be considered” new products “requiring an additional clinical evaluation,” said the spokesperson for Department ABC News.
The secretary of health and social services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during a press conference on the intention of the FDA to remove the use of oil -based synthetic dyes in the country’s food supply in Washington, April 22, 2025.
Oliver Contreras / AFP via Getty Images
But the spokesperson said that the annual flu on the flu may not be affected by politics, calling it “tried and tested for more than 80 years”.
Rather, it appears that politics could have an impact on the deployment of future coated vaccines, which are updated each year.
When he was asked to develop what the ministry considers a “new” vaccine, the spokesman said that federal health agencies would follow “the Order of Sciences”.
Kennedy has long questioned the safety of vaccines and argued that on placebo tests are necessary to ensure that vaccines do no harm than good.
Even if thousands of people were dying during the Emergency of Public Health COVID-19, vaccines are still studies controlled by placebo with more than 100,000 volunteers from various populations. Experts say that practice is necessary to determine if a vaccine is not only effective, but also safe.
A health worker keeps surgical gloves pulling a COVVI-19 vaccine liquid from a bottle to vaccinate a patient.
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Many infant vaccines were initially tested with placebo tests. Others have been available for decades, providing data from millions of people showing that these vaccines are extremely safe and effective.
Once a vaccine for a disease is safe and effective, the future versions of the plan are tested in clinical trials against the fire already approved. Clinical trials are testing if the updated vaccines generate a comparable or better immune response than previous versions of the vaccine.
Even after the vaccines are made available to the public, scientists continue to monitor them for safety. They also examine all reports of side effects or reactions and share these facts with the public.
