NIAID Vaccinology and Immunology Center will study patients with long-term harm from infections and from vaccines, NIH and Diana Zuckerman explain to STAT.
By Chelsea Cirruzzo, STAT News, October 26, 2026
WASHINGTON — Earlier this month at a private event, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other top federal health officials announced a new National Institutes of Health center that would focus on patients with vaccine injuries, drawing fresh scientific firepower to an issue that’s long been central for the health secretary.
Yet days later, two leaders at the NIH said the center would also focus on long-term symptoms that people experience after an infection, a phenomenon most recently amplified among those experiencing long-term symptoms post-Covid.
In fact, one senior NIH official, who asked not to be identified to speak freely, said that for people with long Covid symptoms, it can be hard to separate out whether those symptoms began because of a vaccine or an infection, as many people have experienced both. The immunological response mechanism is similar, they said, which means the treatment is similar.
The reality, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and acting top infectious disease expert John Powers wrote in a statement on Oct. 19, is that “many infections can cause long-term symptoms often indistinguishable from adverse events after vaccination.”
The goal of the center, the senior official said, is to get to the bottom of why some people’s immune systems have more outsized responses than others, and to ultimately learn more about diseases as well as how to make vaccines more safe and effective.
It’s a much broader focus than the one outlined by Kennedy in the afternoon event, which included emotional accounts of suspected vaccine injuries from patients.
“Vaccine injury is an invisible disease and it is purposely invisible,” Kennedy said at the meeting, according to a video he posted online.
“For many years, [people with vaccine injuries and their families] have been marginalized, vilified, demonized, and gaslighted,” Kennedy said in the video.
The center’s launch comes against the backdrop of a campaign by Kennedy to upend vaccine policy and cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Kennedy has spoken extensively about the need to study the side effect profiles of certain vaccines and, at times, has repeated misinformation, including linking vaccines to autism and calling the Covid-19 vaccine lethal.
Kennedy’s long-held views on vaccinations led the board which oversees the NIH’s research hospital to unanimously support a statement expressing concerns that Kennedy had already reached a conclusion about vaccine safety, despite promising to study it, the New York Times first reported.
“If this research finds evidence of harm, many will dismiss it as the work of a secretary who has long argued that vaccines are dangerous,” Jack Leslie, the board’s chair, is reported as saying at a meeting last Friday. “If it finds none, patients will be told that the clinic was a sham. Either way, they are left with answers no one trusts — and science only helps patients when the public believes it.”
The NIH press office that works with the clinical board did not provide the statement when contacted by STAT.
The senior official who spoke with STAT said the job of the NIH is to disseminate research and not to influence what people do.
“We don’t make policy. We don’t set policy,” they said, adding that this study is about making “personalized medicine,” or developing appropriate treatments, including vaccines, for all patients.
“We have an entire adjuvant program here to develop safer and more effective adjuvants for vaccines. We wouldn’t have that if we thought that vaccines weren’t helping people, right?” they said.
Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research which scrutinizes the safety and effectiveness of medical products, including vaccines, said people shouldn’t be too quick to reject the initiative. Zuckerman knows Powers personally and professionally and has co-written articles with him about antibiotic resistance.
“My hope is that this can be a combination of what are clearly RFK’s priorities of looking at patients who’ve been harmed and Dr. Powers and the more traditional NIH and [National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease] priorities of doing research that helps us understand how better to help people,” she said. “[U]ltimately, that’s the research that helps us understand how diseases develop and how best to treat them.”
According to the statement by Powers and Bhattacharya, the center itself is actually a new research study within NIAID that plans to enroll several hundred participants who have vaccine injuries or post-infection symptoms, who will have scheduled research visits. NIH is planning to begin enrollment by the end of the year.
There is no clinical element to the center, the official told STAT, meaning patients won’t be receiving care there nor will they be able to come in to the center to be treated, though NIH researchers hope to be able to connect study enrollees to treatment in their communities.
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Earlier this year, Powers, Bhattacharya, and prior NIAID director Jeffery Taubenberger, who stepped down in May, authored a paper outlining a “new vision” for NIAID. In addition to proposing a transition away from biodefense research, the paper says NIAID will foster better research on immunology and the “complexities of immune responses,” which can be impacted or altered by infections or medicines.
In the Oct. 19 statement from Powers and Bhattacharya, they describe the center as being devoted to understanding symptoms and pathology of diseases and identifying what might make some people more susceptible to lasting effects from certain infections or vaccines.
Zuckerman said the communication out of the HHS has, at times, been shrouded in secrecy. The October event on the NIH’s Bethesda, Md., campus was held with little prior fanfare: Press were not admitted, despite a number of news outlets reporting on the announcement beforehand, and at least some of the participants were given a week’s notice to come to town. NIH employees were given the option to telework that day for security reasons.
HHS did not provide any details on the planned event before it happened, but sent a press release a few days later.
One participant at the meeting told STAT that the secretary and other top officials, including Bhattacharya, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Erica Schwartz, and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz largely avoided controversial topics like vaccines and autism, and instead focused on compassion for people injured by vaccines.
“There wasn’t a dry eye in the room,” Brianne Dressen, co-founder of the nonprofit vaccine injury advocacy group React19, told STAT after she and two others discussed vaccine injuries they’d sustained.
But the guest list did include some participants with more vaccine skeptical beliefs, including pediatrician Elizabeth Mumper, who was chosen by Kennedy as a member of the HHS Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee. In Mumper’s prepared remarks, republished by the Brownstone Institute, she explicitly drew a connection between vaccines and autism and called for the discontinuation of messenger RNA vaccines in children. Kennedy has already taken steps to limit research on mRNA vaccines.
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Mumper did not respond to requests for comment. Researchers have spent significant effort examining the potential of a link between vaccines and autism, and have not found one.
STAT has requested a list of guests, but was not provided one.
Vaccine injuries are a real phenomena, though rare, and can range from neurological impacts to allergic reactions to heart-related episodes, such as myocarditis.
Dressen was diagnosed with post-vaccine myopia after participating in a Covid vaccine clinical trial and treated at the NIH with intravenous immunoglobulin, which can calm an overactive immune system, she told STAT.
Dressen said that React19 met in-person with Kennedy several months ago to advocate for better research into clinical care for people with vaccine injuries as well as to promote compensation for doctors who provide such care. At the time, Dressen said Kennedy was receptive and said that the group’s requests were in line with initiatives HHS was working on. Later, she was asked to come to Bethesda for the event and bring along others who could speak to their vaccine injuries.
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It follows extensive action by the White House to double down on the reevaluation of existing vaccines, including by attempting to remake the childhood vaccine schedule to reduce the number of shots recommended, which is being litigated in court.
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