At a recent meeting of the board that oversees the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center Research Hospital, chair Jack Leslie opened with cheerful introductions and gregarious chatter—then diverted from the agenda of the regularly scheduled meeting. He spent the next six minutes delivering a pointed rebuke of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, warning that his anti-vaccine activities could tarnish the venerable hospital, often called the “house of hope” for patients with rare conditions or those who have exhausted all other options.
Leslie took issue with a recent stunt Kennedy had pulled at the hospital, which involved making a surprise appearance for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open his signature vaccine injury clinic. The ceremony included a panel with people claiming to have been injured by vaccines. They sat behind placards reading “vaccine injured” and spoke with Kennedy and other high-ranking Trump administration officials.
Leslie prefaced his comments by noting that some might prefer he not speak out against Kennedy’s efforts. “But I think that that would be a failing as an advisory board if we were silent,” he said. Leslie also noted that he has no concerns about studying potential injuries from vaccines. “Serious reactions are rare, but real,” he said, and people who believe they’ve been injured should “be taken seriously.”
In fact, the NIH already has a center that studies vaccine injuries, and Kennedy’s splashy new clinic does not come with more funding or clinic space. The hospital’s CEO, Jonathan Green, who sat next to Leslie at the meeting, chimed in to confirm that “the NIH has conducted research on the safety and efficacy of vaccines for decades in the past, and it ongoes.” Green described Kennedy’s vaccine injury clinic as merely a new, individual “protocol” for the hospital.
Political ends
“The space in which this protocol will be conducted, the vaccine evaluation center inside the clinical center, has been in existence for decades,” Green said. Like all protocols, it needs to undergo rigorous scientific and ethical reviews before it’s implemented at the hospital. Green said the protocol is still under review.
None of this was made clear in Kennedy’s ceremony and Leslie condemned the optics of the event, particularly the signs labeling patients “vaccine injured.” Those patients “most come first,” Leslie said. “They deserve our care and respect and they deserve answers.” But Kennedy does them—and the hospital—a disservice, Leslie argued.
“The secretary has spent two decades arguing that vaccines are dangerous,” Leslie said. “Those signs announce the conclusion that the research has not yet reached and that the research exists to test. Think about what that means for those patients. If this research finds evidence of harm, many will dismiss it as the work of a secretary who has long argued that vaccines are dangerous. If it finds none, patients will be told that the clinic was a sham. Either way, they’re left with answers no one trusts, and science only helps patients when the public believes it.”
Leslie said he feared that the stunt sends a political message that will undermine trust that the hospital has worked to earn and maintain for over 70 years.
“The clinical center standing rests on one thing: the confidence of patients, physicians, and the public that the research done here is designed to find the truth, not to confirm a conclusion reached in advance,” he said. “Trust is slow to build and quick to lose. If people come to believe that research at this hospital can be steered toward a politically desired answer, the damage will not stop at vaccines.”
After Leslie’s statement, another member thanked him and made a motion for the board to support the statement. The motion was quickly seconded and, in a voice vote, the board unanimously endorsed the comments.
