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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently gutted a key government vaccine panel , saying it was necessary to eliminate what he called "persistent conflicts of interest" on the committee.

But new research from the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics appears to challenge that argument. Conflicts on that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel had been at "historic lows for years" before Kennedy restacked it with new members, some of whom are widely known vaccine critics, the researchers found.

The study, published in the medical journal JAMA on Mo

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