One of the new members of a critical federal vaccine advisory board has argued for decades that vaccines caused her son’s autism – a connection that years of large-scale studies and reviews refute.
Registered nurse Vicky Pebsworth is one of eight new members to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (Acip), all hand-picked by the vaccine skeptic and Donald Trump’s health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.
“She’s probably been anti-vax longer than RFK has,” said Dr David Gorski, a Wayne State University School of Medicine professor, who is considered an expert on the anti-vaccine movement.
Kennedy fired all 17 of the committee’s previous members in June and stacked it with ideological allies. Pebsworth and Kennedy would have probably been known to each other, because their respective non-profits supported one another’s efforts.
“If I had a child who I believed had been harmed by whatever – it doesn’t have to be vaccines – I wouldn’t then trust myself to be on a federal safety commission on that issue,” said Seth Mnookin, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor in science journalism who met and profiled Pebsworth in the mid-2000s.
Pebsworth was also part of a 2020 lawsuit against Covid-19 vaccine mandates that aligns with Kennedy’s agenda. In a declaration to federal court, Pebsworth argued that “increases in the number of vaccines in the CDC schedule may be causally related to increases in the rates of chronic illness”, an assertion that appears to be based on a debunked study, but has long been a talking point of anti-vaccine activists.
“They’re the oldest prominent organization,” said Mnookin, whose book is called The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear. The information center represents “the start of the modern-day anti-vaccine movement in the US”, said Mnookin.
Pebsworth joined Acip from the National Vaccine Information Center, where she has served as volunteer research director since 2006, according to a résumé filed in the same case. The Guardian sent a list of questions and an interview request to Pebsworth, but did not receive a response.
The National Vaccine Information Center started in Virginia as Dissatisfied Parents Together in 1982, before changing its name in 1995. The group went on to receive major funding support from Dr Joseph Mercola, once described as “the most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation online”.
Like other new members of Acip, Pebsworth comes to the role with medical credentials; she has a doctorate degree in nursing, taught college research courses and served as a consumer representative on federal panels.
For decades, she has publicly argued that her son, Sam, was injured by the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine in 1998 – despite evidence showing there is no connection between vaccines and autism.
Pebsworth organized conferences about alternative treatments for autism as early as 2001, including one in Michigan where then-doctor Andrew Wakefield spoke and where she told a reporter she had placed her son on a restrictive diet and administered chelation therapy – a treatment for heavy metal poisoning. Neither has been found to effectively treat autism.
“Back then in the early 2000s or the late 1990s, there were two main flavors of the anti-vax,” said Gorski.
In Britain, Wakefield’s paper in the Lancet proposed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. His paper would be retracted in 2010 amid evidence of fraud and conflicts of interest.
“But then there was the American flavor with mercury and thimerosal, which had been used in several childhood vaccines as a preservative,” said Gorski. “Back in the day we used to call them the ‘mercury militias’, but others used to call it the ‘mercury moms’.”
Thimerosal is a vaccine preservative that has been used since before the second world war. Its safety is considered settled science and yet it has been the subject of misinformation for decades.
A galvanizing moment for the anti-vaccine movement came in 2015, when one of the worst measles outbreaks in years tore through Disneyland in California. The outbreak prompted lawmakers to tighten vaccine requirements for schools, drawing parents into the fray and providing a platform for anti-vaccine groups.
“I used to call anti-vax the pseudoscience that spanned the political spectrum – you could find leftwing anti-vaxxers, rightwing anti-vaxxers,” said Gorski. “But now it’s really, really built into the right,” he said. “You can’t deny that any more. It’s become part of rightwing ideology.”
In 2017, Pebsworth testified before a Virginia house subcommittee against a school mandate for a meningitis vaccine. In 2020, as Americans anxiously waited for a Covid-19 vaccine, she warned Americans could face unknown consequences from the vaccines. Pebsworth later testified in 2021 before the University of Hawaii’s board of regents, arguing against Covid-19 vaccines.
In most public testimony, Pebsworth identifies herself not only as the volunteer research director for the National Vaccine Information Center, but also as “the mother of a child injured by his 15-month well-baby shots in 1998”.
“Groups like hers and probably even more prominently the Informed Consent Action Network have seen that most vaccine policy is at the state level,” said an expert in state vaccine law who declined to go on the record for fear of retaliation from the Department of Health and Human Services.
“They have a list of model legislation they encourage supporters to try to get introduced,” the expert said. At the same time, the groups have failed to accomplish their “big swings”: getting schools to drop vaccine mandates.
The expert continued: “My sense is that legislators know they’re hearing from a very vocal minority. Landslide majorities still support requirements. It’s lower than it was before the pandemic, but the public still understands the needs for these laws.”
By 2017, Trump was weighing whether this vocal group could become part of his coalition. Before his first inauguration in early January 2017, Trump publicly said he was considering Kennedy to head a new committee on vaccines and autism.
Only days before she was appointed to ACIP, Pebsworth and the founder of the National Vaccine Information Center argued against Covid-19 vaccines, stating in part: “FDA should not be recommending mRNA Covid-19 shots for anyone until adequate scientific evidence demonstrates safety and effectiveness for both the healthy and those who are elderly or chronically ill.” More than 270 million Americans have received Covid-19 vaccines, and the federal government has closely monitored for rare events.
That old trope of thimerosal played a leading role in the first meeting of Kennedy’s reconstituted Acip panel. Committee members heard a presentation against thimerosal from Lyn Redwood, the former president of the World Mercury Project, which would become Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense. A report on thimerosal’s safety by career CDC scientists was pulled from the meeting by Kennedy’s office.
Ultimately, members recommended against seasonal influenza vaccines that contain thimerosal in a decision that shocked medical and scientific communities. Pebsworth abstained, arguing she wanted to vote separately on whether to recommend influenza vaccines.
Pebsworth later said she wanted to vote separately on whether to recommend seasonal flu vaccines. She did not respond to questions from the Guardian about how she would have voted on flu shots, if she had the chance.