When major events occur, most people rush to Google to find information. Increasingly, the first thing they see is an AI Overview, a feature that already has a reputation for making glaring mistakes. In the wake of a tragic plane crash in India, Google's AI search results are spreading misinformation claiming the incident involved an Airbus plane—it was actually a Boeing 787.

Travelers are more attuned to the airliner models these days after a spate of crashes involving Boeing's 737 lineup several years ago. Searches for airline disasters are sure to skyrocket in the coming days, with reports that more than 200 passengers and crew lost their lives in the Air India Flight 171 crash. The way generative AI operates means some people searching for details may get the wrong impression from Google's results page.

Not all searches get AI answers, but Google has been steadily expanding this feature since it debuted last year. One searcher on Reddit spotted a troubling confabulation when searching for crashes involving Airbus planes. AI Overviews, apparently overwhelmed with results reporting on the Air India crash, stated confidently (and incorrectly) that it was an Airbus A330 that fell out of the sky shortly after takeoff. We've run a few similar searches—some of the AI results say Boeing, some say Airbus, and some include a strange mashup blaming both Airbus and Boeing. It's a mess.

In this search, Google's AI says the crash involved an Airbus A330 instead of a Boeing 787. Credit: /u/stuckintrraffic

But why is Google bringing up the Air India crash at all in the context of Airbus? Unfortunately, it's impossible to predict if you'll get an AI Overview that blames Boeing or Airbus—generative AI is non-deterministic, meaning the output is different every time, even for identical inputs. Our best guess for the underlying cause is that numerous articles on the Air India crash mention Airbus as Boeing's main competitor. AI Overviews is essentially summarizing these results, and the AI goes down the wrong path because it lacks the ability to understand what is true.

Google isn't hiding that its generative AI tools can make mistakes—there's a disclaimer at the bottom of every AI Overview that notes "AI answers may include mistakes." Virtually every AI product has a similar line, but it's not very prominent, and users may simply gloss over that when talking to a robot that seems very confident in its wrongness. Perhaps these warnings aren't sufficient when hallucinations remain so common.

In this case, the AI Overview error could rile up Airbus, which probably doesn't want to be mentioned at all in this context. Meanwhile, it could give a little cover to Boeing, which has suffered its fair share of reputational damage from recent issues with its aircraft.

We've reached out to Google for comment and will update with any statement we receive.

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The Trump administration has upended plans that state governments made to distribute $42 billion in federal broadband funding, forcing state officials to scrap much of the preparation work they did over the previous couple of years.

Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick essentially put the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program on hold earlier this year and last week announced details of a rules overhaul that requires states to change how they distribute money to Internet service providers. To find out how this affects states, we spoke with Andrew Butcher, president of the Maine Connectivity Authority (MCA).

"We had been in position to be making awards this month, but for [the Trump administration's] deliberations and program changes, so it's pretty unfortunate," Butcher told Ars. Established by a 2021 state law, the MCA is a quasi-governmental agency that oversees Maine's BEAD planning and other programs that increase broadband access.

"This is the construction season," Butcher said. "We planned it so that projects would be able to get ready with their pre-construction activities and their construction activities beginning in the summer, so they would have all summer and through the fall and early winter to get in motion." The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a division of the Commerce Department, "has now essentially relegated the process to not even begin pre-construction until late fall, early winter at the earliest," he said.

The Biden administration spent about three years developing rules and procedures for BEAD and then evaluating plans submitted by each US state and territory. Maine has been working on its plans for about two years, Butcher said. The process included analyzing which addresses in Maine are unserved and eligible for funding to subsidize network construction, and inviting ISPs to bid on projects. Maine and other states will have to go through the bidding process with ISPs again due to the overhaul.

Two years of work in two months

The change "undoubtedly creates additional work and effort for Maine and every other state and territory," Butcher said. "So we will execute it as quickly and efficiently as possible, but it kind of jams two years of work into two months." The new timeline is difficult, but "Secretary Lutnick has committed that funds will be awarded and projects started this year. We're going to hold them to that," he said.

Butcher said he was relieved that the BEAD program wasn't canceled entirely. He pointed to President Trump's recent move to kill the separate $2.7 billion grant program created by the Digital Equity Act of 2021.

Maine was supposed to receive $35 million from the Digital Equity Act for several programs that would provide devices, digital skills training, STEM education, telehealth access, and other services. Trump claimed the Digital Equity Act is "racist and illegal."

Butcher said that "for all anyone knows, it was canceled simply because the word 'equity' is in it." He pointed out that the same word appears in the title of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. Given that, "the updated policy guidance for the BEAD program could have been worse," Butcher said.

US eliminates fiber preference

Lutnick and other Republicans didn't like the Biden administration's decision to prioritize the building of fiber networks in BEAD, arguing that fixed wireless and satellite services like Starlink should have an equal shot at obtaining grants. The NTIA said on June 6 that states and territories must conduct "an additional 'Benefit of the Bargain Round' of subgrantee selection that permits all applicants to compete on a level playing field." That will give non-fiber ISPs a better chance to obtain grants.

Senate Democrats accused the Trump administration of forcing states to subsidize Starlink instead of more robust fiber networks.

"States must maintain the flexibility to choose the highest quality broadband options, rather than be forced by bureaucrats in Washington to funnel funds to Elon Musk's Starlink, which lacks the scalability, reliability, and speed of fiber or other terrestrial broadband solutions," Senate Democrats wrote in a May 30 letter to Trump and Lutnick. The letter said that forcing states to scrap their previous work could cause them to "not only miss this year's construction season but next year's as well, delaying broadband deployment by years."

Commerce Secretary slammed cost

Lutnick has pushed for lower per-location costs and made a social media post criticizing Nevada's plans. "The Biden Administration approved their BEAD application with 24 project areas in the state with a PER LOCATION cost of over $100,000 each, incredible," Lutnick wrote. "One location cost over $228,000!! We will stop this absurd spending while delivering the benefit of the bargain by connecting unserved communities with satellite, fixed wireless, and/or fiber: whichever makes the most economic sense."

Lutnick also complained that "Congress set aside $42.45 billion for rural broadband in November 2021. More than three years later, not a single person has been connected to the Internet under the BEAD program."

Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) called Lutnick's complaint disingenuous. "You've been holding up BEAD funding that was already APPROVED for my state since January, and you're complaining no one has been connected yet?" she wrote.

Butcher said he trusts the expertise of Nevada's broadband office to "make the most of the available funding," even if Lutnick thinks the state is spending too much in some areas. "We are talking about facilitating a once-in-a-lifetime level of critical infrastructure investment," Butcher said. "Every place is going to be different."

Butcher said Lutnick is exercising "authority as a central government over the rights and expertise of a state body, which I guess I don't understand how the party's values work anymore, but that to me feels like a pretty strange Republican imposition."

Butcher still expects significant fiber deployment

Overall, Nevada's plan was to use $416 million to connect 43,715 households and businesses. Maine was to receive about $272 million, which Butcher said would "provide deployment to about 25,000 unserved households and businesses" and about 3,500 community anchor institutions. Anchor institutions under the BEAD program can include places like schools, libraries, hospitals and other health facilities, public safety facilities, public housing, and community centers.

"With our available funding, we really don't have the ability to consider a cost per passing anywhere near" the $228,000 example cited by Lutnick, Butcher said. "We have to be resourceful and efficient in the decision-making... to squeeze the value out of that as much as possible."

Fiber is Butcher's first choice, and he said he is not convinced that the Trump administration's new guidelines will significantly reduce the amount of fiber deployment that ultimately happens once BEAD funds are finally spent.

"The introduction of more of a preference or bias towards the cheapest deployment option... actually may very well drive competition and further incentivize fiber providers to be more aggressive" in their bids for projects, he said.

Still, he said the cost of laying fiber lines in certain locations means that wireless and satellite networks have their place. "There are some places where fiber is a prohibitive cost. Maine is a big place without a lot of people," Butcher said.

Starlink not the first choice

When the government gives money to a fiber ISP to subsidize deployment, it's easy to see the results: The provider is required under the terms of the grant to install fiber at homes and businesses that weren't previously served. The benefits aren't as immediately clear with Starlink, which is already deploying satellites that can serve most of the country.

But residents can benefit from deals between Starlink and local governments by gaining access to equipment and higher levels of service. Maine already partnered with Starlink last year to coordinate bulk purchases of equipment for Internet users and guarantee service availability.

Starlink availability and speed varies by region. But with last year's deal between Maine and Starlink, "we've been able to establish a network reservation to ensure a higher standard of service performance," Butcher said. He called Starlink a great option for remote areas but said that satellite is "far from the policy standard that we should be looking to" for every location in Maine.

Despite the BEAD holdup and Digital Equity Act cancellation, the MCA has been distributing other funds. "Over the last three years, MCA has facilitated over $250 million in public and private investments to address about 86,000 unserved locations," Butcher said.

With the BEAD changes, Butcher said the MCA is ready to do the work needed to obtain the funding. "I think in the context of our DOGE environment, it's important to note that teams like the MCA team are ready to rise to the moment and to do really hard work. But this is the kind of thing that absolutely grinds people down," Butcher said. "It's not just MCA, it's this entire network of Internet service providers, their subcontractors, workforce training providers, community volunteer broadband committees. These investments are reflective of an entire ecosystem which doesn't just entail pole-in-the-ground and attaching wires to the pole and equipment to that. It is a robust set of public-private partnerships."

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Amazon forced all Prime Video subscribers onto a new ad-based subscription tier in January 2024 unless users paid more for their subscription type. Now, the tech giant is reportedly showing twice as many ads to subscribers as it did when it started selling ad-based streaming subscriptions.

Currently, anyone who signs up for Amazon Prime (which is $15 per month or $139 per year) gets Prime Video with ads. If they don’t want to see commercials, they have to pay an extra $3 per month. One can also subscribe to Prime Video alone for $9 per month with ads or $12 per month without ads.

When Amazon originally announced the ad tier, it said it would deliver “meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers." Based on “six ad buyers and documents” ad trade publication AdWeek reported viewing, Amazon has determined the average is four to six minutes of advertisements per hour.

“Prime Video ad load has gradually increased to four to six minutes per hour,” an Amazon representative said via email to an ad buyer this month, AdWeek reported.

That would mean that Prime Video subscribers are spending significantly more time sitting through ads than they did at the launch of Prime Video with ads. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) at the time, which cited an Amazon presentation it said it reviewed, "the average ad load at launch was two to three-and-a-half minutes.” However, when reached for comment, an Amazon Ads representative told Ars Technica that the WSJ didn’t confirm that figure directly with Amazon.

Amazon’s Ads spokesperson, however, declined to specify to Ars how many ads Amazon typically shows to Prime Videos subscribers today or in the past.

Instead, they shared a statement saying:

We remain focused on prioritizing ad innovation over volume. While demand continues to grow, our commitment is to improving ad experiences rather than simply increasing the number of ads shown. Since the beginning of this year alone, we've announced multiple capabilities, including Brand+, Complete TV, and new ad formats—all designed to deliver industry-leading relevancy and enhanced customer experiences. We will continue to invest in this important work, creating meaningful innovations that benefit both customers and advertisers alike.

Kendra Tang, programmatic supervisor at ad firm Rain the Growth Agency, told AdWeek that Amazon "told us the ad load would be increasing” and that she’s seen more ad opportunities made available in Amazon’s ad system.

Further evidence of Amazon's interest in more Prime Video ads came via an October 2024 Financial Times report, where Kelly Day, VP of Prime Video International, said that Prime Video’s ad load will “ramp up a little bit more into 2025."

Prime Video claims 200 million subscribers, but many of these subscribers are acquired through Prime subscriptions and may not use Prime Video frequently or at all. Prime Video says that 150 million of its users are ad subscribers, with 130 million of them being in the US. This could help explain Prime Video's increasing ad load. Advertisers aren’t getting as many eyeballs as expected from those subscriber counts.

"They have more subscribers than any other ad-supported streamer, but many weren’t watching enough for that to matter," Doug Paladino, programmatic director at ad firm PMG, told AdWeek. "More ad load helps bring that back into balance."

Still “middle tier”

Even at four to six minutes per hour, Prime Video is in the “middle tier” in terms of ad frequency, according to Paladino. For comparison, Netflix shows four to five minutes of ads per hour, PC World says. Max claims “about 4 minutes” of ads hourly, and in testing from The Streamable, Peacock shows five to seven minutes of ads every hour. Linear TV shows 13 to 16 minutes of ads hourly, AdWeek noted.

With 2025 only about halfway through, time remains for Prime Video to continue that ad "ramp up" that it promised for the year. With Amazon previously stating that ads haven't driven away subscribers, it has wiggle room to push subscribers' limits and appeal to advertisers more.

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The world’s leading artificial intelligence companies are stepping up efforts to deal with a growing problem of chatbots telling people what they want to hear.

OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic are all working on reining in sycophantic behavior by their generative AI products that offer over-flattering responses to users.

The issue, stemming from how the large language models are trained, has come into focus at a time when more and more people have adopted the chatbots not only at work as research assistants, but in their personal lives as therapists and social companions.

Experts warn that the agreeable nature of chatbots can lead them to offering answers that reinforce some of their human users’ poor decisions. Others suggest that people with mental illness are particularly vulnerable, following reports that some have died by suicide after interacting with chatbots.

“You think you are talking to an objective confidant or guide, but actually what you are looking into is some kind of distorted mirror—that mirrors back your own beliefs,” said Matthew Nour, a psychiatrist and researcher in neuroscience and AI at Oxford University.

Industry insiders also warn that AI companies have perverse incentives, with some groups integrating advertisements into their products in the search for revenue streams.

“The more you feel that you can share anything, you are also going to share some information that is going to be useful for potential advertisers,” Giada Pistilli, principal ethicist at Hugging Face, an open source AI company.

She added that AI companies with business models based on paid subscriptions stand to benefit from chatbots that people want to continue talking to—and paying for.

AI language models do not “think” in the way humans do because they work by generating the next likely word in the sentence.

The yeasayer effect arises in AI models trained using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)—human “data labellers” rate the answer generated by the model as being either acceptable or not. This data is used to teach the model how to behave.

Because people generally like answers that are flattering and agreeable, such responses are weighted more heavily in training and reflected in the model’s behavior.

“Sycophancy can occur as a byproduct of training the models to be ‘helpful’ and to minimize potentially overtly harmful responses,” said DeepMind, Google’s AI unit.

The challenge that tech companies face is making AI chatbots and assistants helpful and friendly, while not being annoying or addictive.

In late April, OpenAI updated its GPT-4o model to become “more intuitive and effective,” only to roll it back after it started being so excessively fawning that users complained.

The San Francisco-based company said it had focused too much on “short-term feedback, and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time—which led to such sycophantic behavior.”

AI companies are working on preventing this kind of behavior both during training and after launch.

OpenAI said it is tweaking its training techniques to explicitly steer the model away from sycophancy while building more “guardrails” to protect against such responses.

DeepMind said it is conducting specialized evaluations and training for factual accuracy, and is continuously tracking behavior to ensure models provide truthful responses.

Amanda Askell, who works on fine-tuning and AI alignment at Anthropic, said the company uses character training to make models less obsequious. Its researchers ask the company’s chatbot Claude to generate messages that include traits such as “having a backbone” or caring for human wellbeing. The researchers then showed these answers to a second model, which produces responses in line with these traits and ranks them. This essentially uses one version of Claude to train another.

“The ideal behavior that Claude sometimes does is to say: ‘I’m totally happy to listen to that business plan, but actually, the name you came up with for your business is considered a sexual innuendo in the country that you’re trying to open your business in,” Askell said.

The company also prevents sycophantic behaviour before launch by changing how they collect feedback from the thousands of human data annotators used to train AI models.

After the model has been trained, companies can set system prompts, or guidelines, for how the model should behave to minimize sycophantic behavior.

However, working out the best response means delving into the subtleties of how people communicate with one another, such as determining when a direct response is better than a more hedged one.

“[I]s it for the model to not give egregious, unsolicited compliments to the user?” Joanne Jang, head of model behavior at OpenAI, said in a Reddit post. “Or, if the user starts with a really bad writing draft, can the model still tell them it’s a good start and then follow up with constructive feedback?”

Evidence is growing that some users are becoming hooked on using AI.

A study by MIT Media Lab and OpenAI found that a small proportion were becoming addicted. Those who perceived the chatbot as a “friend” also reported lower socialization with other people and higher levels of emotional dependence on a chatbot, as well as other problematic behavior associated with addiction.

“These things set up this perfect storm, where you have a person desperately seeking reassurance and validation paired with a model which inherently has a tendency towards agreeing with the participant,” said Nour from Oxford University.

AI start-ups such as Character.AI that offer chatbots as “companions” have faced criticism for allegedly not doing enough to protect users. Last year, a teenager killed himself after interacting with Character.AI’s chatbot. The teen’s family is suing the company for allegedly causing wrongful death, as well as for negligence and deceptive trade practices.

Character.AI said it does not comment on pending litigation, but added it has “prominent disclaimers in every chat to remind users that a character is not a real person and that everything a character says should be treated as fiction.” The company added it has safeguards to protect under-18s and against discussions of self-harm.

Another concern for Anthropic’s Askell is that AI tools can play with perceptions of reality in subtle ways, such as when offering factually incorrect or biased information as the truth.

“If someone’s being super sycophantic, it’s just very obvious,” Askell said. “It’s more concerning if this is happening in a way that is less noticeable to us [as individual users] and it takes us too long to figure out that the advice that we were given was actually bad.”

© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

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Anti-vaccine advocate and current health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took to social media Wednesday to announce the names of eight people he is appointing to a critical federal vaccine advisory committee—which is currently empty after Kennedy abruptly fired all 17 previous members Monday.

In the past, the vetting process for appointing new members to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) could take years. But Kennedy has taken just two days.

The panel, typically stocked with vaccine, infectious disease, and public health experts, carefully and publicly reviews, analyzes, and debates vaccine data and offers recommendations to the CDC via votes. The CDC typically adopts the recommendations, which set clinical practices nationwide and determine insurance coverage for vaccinations.

Yesterday, Kennedy pledged that none of the new ACIP members would be "ideological anti-vaxxers." However, the list of today's appointees includes Robert Malone, who falsely claims to have invented mRNA vaccines and has spent the past several years spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories about them.

Speaking at an anti-vaccine rally in 2022, Malone spread dangerous falsehoods about mRNA COVID-19 vaccines: "These genetic vaccines can damage your children. They may damage their brains, their heart, their immune system and their ability to have children in the future. Many of these damages cannot be repaired."

Troubling list

Malone aligned with the anti-vaccine crowd during the pandemic and has become a mainstay in conspiratorial circles and an ally to Kennedy. He has claimed that vaccines cause a "form of AIDS," amid other nonsense. He has also meddled with responses to the measles outbreak that erupted in West Texas in January. In April, Malone was the first to publicize news that a second child had died from the highly infectious and serious infection, but he did so to falsely claim that measles wasn't the cause and spread other dangerous misinformation.

In a newsletter post earlier this week, Malone proclaimed: "Some people still believe that the term anti-vaxxer is a pejorative. I do not—I view it as high praise."

Malone is just one of the eight names released today. Another is Martin Kulldorff, one of the co-authors of the widely criticized Great Barrington Declaration, which called for letting COVID-19 spread largely unabated. Health experts called it "unethical."

Vicky Pebsworth is also on the list, as well as on the board of the National Vaccine Information Center, one of the nation’s oldest anti-vaccine groups that promotes the false claim that vaccines cause autism.

Kennedy also appointed Retsef Levi, who has penned articles alleging dangers of COVID-19 vaccines, including a flawed 2022 article that was later corrected and an unpublished article co-authored with COVID-contrarian and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo.

The other four appointees are Joseph R. Hibbeln, a psychiatrist; Cody Meissner, a pediatrician; James Pagano, an emergency medicine physician; and Michael Ross, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology.

The appointments are likely to increase concern that federal vaccine recommendations will be corrupted and lead to Americans losing access to lifesaving vaccines.

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The medical community is bracing for attacks on, and the possible dismantling of, federal recommendations for safe, life-saving childhood vaccinations after health secretary and fervent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abruptly fired all 17 members of a federal vaccine advisory committee Monday.

Outrage has been swift after Kennedy announced the "clean sweep" of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's vaccine advisory panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). He made the announcement in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Open protest erupted at the CDC Tuesday with staff calling for Kennedy's resignation. Staff rallied outside CDC headquarters in Atlanta, objecting to agency firings, cuts to funding and critical programs, scientific censorship, as well as ACIP's ouster.

"I am here today to tell you that the secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has shown himself to be a domestic health threat,” Anna Yousaf, an infectious disease researcher at the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said amid the rally, according to CBS News.

“These attacks against scientific standards and well-established processes culminated yesterday when Secretary Kennedy announced that he is firing all of the members ... of ACIP," Yousaf continued, eliciting 'boos' from the crowd.

“The wrong side of history”

Meanwhile, the American Medical Association, which is currently holding its annual meeting in Chicago, passed an emergency resolution Tuesday calling for Kennedy to immediately reverse the ACIP purge and for the Senate to investigate Kennedy's decision, according to reporting by MedPage Today.

Some AMA delegates expressed concern that the call for a congressional investigation was a "poison pill" that would diminish the impact of the rest of the statement and would fail to reveal any new information. But the concerns were easily quashed.

"We do not want to be on the wrong side of history," said Jason Goldman, who introduced the emergency resolution and who is also president of the American College of Physicians. "The country is burning down. Our infrastructure is burning down. Whether the outcome of this investigation is preordained should not determine our ability and desire to... take a stand, fight for what we believe in, and ask the government to do their job."

Priya Desai, a delegate who spoke on behalf of the medical student section, meanwhile, admonished the AMA for not taking a stand against Kennedy sooner. "We did not speak up back in November with the nomination of RFK [Jr.]... We did not speak up back in January... when he was officially endorsed. Congratulations, this poison pill we have swallowed. It is time for us to act now," she said.

While calling to support and maintain the current ACIP structure and processes, the AMA's emergency resolution also indicated that the association will try to establish an ACIP alternative if CDC's advisory committee becomes corrupted by Kennedy. The AMA will "identify and evaluate alternative evidence-based vaccine advisory structures and invest resources in such initiatives, as necessary," the resolution reads.

“I’m very worried”

In an exclusive interview with Stat, one fired ACIP member, Helen Chu, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Washington, said she and the rest of the board were blindsided by Kennedy's firings. Other fired members told Stat that they could not do interviews with media after their institutions told them to keep a low profile to avoid reprisal from the Trump administration.

Chu told Stat she did not know what ACIP's future will look like—whether the committee will have decision-making authority, whether its discussions will continue to be transparent, or whether its members will continue to be experts. "But it is likely that it will send vaccine recommendations in a completely different direction than where they’ve been for the past 60 years," Chu said.

She noted that some states have already started creating their own vaccine recommendations, which will "create an even more divided country."

"I’m very worried," she added. "ACIP is the model for the rest of the world in terms of how you carefully deliberate and are thoughtful and look at all of the data. ... To disband what is often considered an international gold standard for vaccine policy, and to disband it in this way is just sending a very clear message to the rest of the world. And also sending a clear message to Americans that scientific expertise is no longer of use for making vaccine policy."

Her interview also highlighted the extensive conflicts-of-interest vetting that ACIP members go through. She was a relatively new member of the committee, only voting in one meeting prior to her termination. She had been vetted in a two-year process before that.

A big “nothing”

In Kennedy's op-ed, he claimed that ACIP members are "plagued with persistent conflicts of interest." But independent investigations have found that to be false. An investigation by Science found strict requirements for public disclosures, divestment of financial interests related to vaccines, and for members to recuse themselves from votes where a conflict exists.

Likewise, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, which opposes Kennedy's role as health secretary, also found no evidence to support Kennedy's attack on the now-ousted ACIP members. In a derisive response to Kennedy's op-ed, the board wrote Tuesday that documents on ACIP members' conflicts of interest "show that the members have properly recused themselves from decisions that involve products for which they served as trial investigators, as well as those of their competitors, or if they held stock in companies. In other words, the conflicts of interest were honestly handled." The board concluded Kennedy's claims "proved to be nothing."

Since Kennedy's ACIP purge, significant attention has shifted to Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who sharply criticized Kennedy's anti-vaccine stances but voted to confirm him anyway, saying Kennedy made public promises not to muddle vaccination policy. Those promises included not changing ACIP.

Cassidy told a HuffPost reporter Tuesday that Kennedy did not break that promise by clearing out ACIP. Rather, Kennedy promised he wouldn't change "the process," not that he wouldn't change the committee members. In a social media post Monday, Cassidy indicated that he continues to get reassurances from Kennedy about the promises. "Of course, now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion. I’ve just spoken with Secretary Kennedy, and I’ll continue to talk with him to ensure this is not the case."

“Vindicating his critics”

The Wall Street Journal's editorial board responded directly to Cassidy on this, writing: "That’s nice, but Mr. Kennedy seems more intent on vindicating his critics than pleasing the Senator."

In a social media post late Tuesday, Kennedy only provided more fuel to concern over his meddling in federal vaccine policy. The post was prefaced by saying that he would not appoint "ideological anti-vaxxers" to replace ACIP members. But, he then went on a lengthy tirade accusing ACIP of "malevolent malpractice" and attacking the evidence vaccine experts have used to assess the safety of routine childhood immunizations. Specifically, he squabbled over whether placebo-controlled trials used inert placebos or active controls.

Kennedy, who has no medical or scientific background and rejects germ theory, concluded by tying vaccines to a period in which "chronic diseases in our children exploded." The post, like Kennedy's lengthy history as an anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist, suggest he will continue to sow distrust about safe, life-saving, and thoroughly vetted vaccines, if not directly work to undermine Americans' access to them.

Kennedy says he will announce new ACIP members "in the coming days"—ditching the lengthy vetting process previously in place. The health department put out a news release suggesting that a previously scheduled meeting June 25–27 will still be held.

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