By Emily Mangiaracina
Lifesite News
August 23, 2025
Robert F. Kennedy. Jr. called out the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) for recommending vaccines - including the dangerous COVID shots - created by its top corporate supporters without disclosing its conflicts of interest.
The AAP recently made headlines for releasing its own recommended childhood vaccine schedule independent of the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which was recently overhauled by Kennedy, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The notable difference between the two schedules is that the AAP is recommending COVID shots for healthy children, whereas the CDC is no longer recommending these experimental mRNA shots for healthy children and pregnant women.
Kennedy shared on Tuesday a screenshot from the AAP's webpage showing some of its top donors are Merck, Moderna, Pfizer, and Sanofi, major vaccine manufacturers. Other vaccine makers, like GlaxoSmithKline, make considerable donations to the AAP as well.
This is a screenshot from American Academy of Pediatrics' webpage, thanking the organization's top corporate donors. These four companies make virtually every vaccine on the CDC recommended childhood vaccine schedule. AAP is angry that CDC has eliminated corporate influence in... pic.twitter.com/WtWe6vnUrw- Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) August 19, 2025
The four first companies listed, Kennedy noted, "make virtually every vaccine on the CDC recommended childhood vaccine schedule."
While he acknowledged that the AAP is free to make its own recommendations, he called for it to "follow the lead of HHS and disclose conflicts of interest" so that Americans may consider whether the AAP is serving the "public health interest" or the "commercial ambitions of AAP's Big Pharma benefactors."
Kennedy accused the AAP of anger against the CDC for eradicating "corporate influence in decisions over vaccine recommendations." He referenced his dismissal of all 17 previous members of the CDC's top vaccine advisory panel due to the finding that they were routinely advising on products from pharmaceutical firms with which they had financial ties and had been issued conflict-of-interest waivers from the CDC.
While the CDC vaccine schedule so far remains mostly the same since the appointment of eight new members to the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP), its June 25 meeting has launched new workgroups to study these approved vaccines and the cumulative effect of the child and teen vaccine schedule.
Among other recommendations, the June ACIP meeting advised the removal of thimerosal, a neurotoxic, mercury-containing preservative currently used in flu shots.
In Kennedy's Tuesday X post, he also urged the AAP to clarify that "recommendations that diverge from the CDC's official list are not shielded from liability under the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act."
Kennedy has frequently stressed the importance of ridding U.S. health regulatory agencies of "corporate capture," a term he uses to describe the common phenomenon whereby these regulatory agencies receive significant funding from pharmaceutical companies and subsequently rubber-stamp their products without meaningful review.
This article was originally published on Lifesite News.