From PBS NewsHour.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted this week to stop recommending flu vaccines containing the vaccine preservative thimerosal.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has claimed thimerosal is harmful and causes autism, fired the 17 members of the independent group that provides vaccine recommendations to the CDC and replaced them with seven new members, including several vaccine skeptics.

Numerous studies have not found any evidence linking autism and thimerosal, which was removed from most vaccines and all childhood vaccines in 2001.

Anti-vaccine advocates, like Kennedy, question the use of thimerosal because it contains a form of mercury, called ethylmercury. But, ethylmercury is not the same type of mercury found in seafood, called methylmercury, and is easy for the human body to expel. PolitiFact’s Ellen Hine has more.

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