A POST BEING shared on Instagram is claiming that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is a vaccine company that sells about $4.6 billion worth of vaccines every year.
The CDC is the national public health agency in the United States.
So, is this social media post correct? Does the CDC sell billions of dollars worth of vaccines each year? Let’s check it out.
The claim
The post claims: “The CDC is not an independent agency. It is a vaccine company. The CDC owns over 20 vaccine patents. It sells $4.6 billion dollars of vaccines every year.”
This quote is attributed to Robert F Kennedy Jr, the son of former Attorney General and Senator Robert Kennedy and a prominent anti-vaccine campaigner who founded the group Children’s Health Defense.
It was posted on Instagram by an account “created to share info from #jekennedyjr”. However, it is unclear whether this account is run by Robert F Kennedy Jr himself.
At the time of writing this, the account had 6,780 followers. The photo had dozens of likes.
In February 2021, Instagram removed Kennedy Jr’s account for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about Covid-19 in violation of its policies on the pandemic. His Facebook account remains active.
The evidence
Let’s take a look at whether the CDC does, in fact, sell $4.6 billion worth of vaccines every year.
The CDC is a US federal agency, under the Department of Health and Human Services. Its main aim is to protect the US from health, safety and security threats, both foreign and within the country.
As part of its work, the agency provides guidance about and reports on public health, as it has done during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Throughout the pandemic, the CDC provided information about topics related to Covid-19, including about vaccines and how to check symptoms.
It also runs federally funded programmes that provides vaccines at no cost to citizens, including children who might not otherwise be vaccinated.
Rather than these selling vaccines, the CDC buys them at a discounted price and provides them to children free-of-charge through the Vaccines for Children (VFC) programme.
The CDC distributes the vaccines it has bought to grantees, such as state health departments and some local public health agencies, which then go on to distribute them to private doctors’ offices and public health clinics that are registered as VFC providers.
Funding for the programme is approved by the Office of Management and Budget and allocated through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to the CDC.
According to the CDC’s budget for 2020, the Vaccines for Children programme was to be allocated $4.761 billion. While it is unclear where the $4.6 billion figure came from in the Instagram post, it is possible that it was based on the CDC’s budget figure for the VFC programme.
The claim made that the CDC sells $4.6 billion worth of vaccines is inaccurate. Rather than selling vaccines, the CDC buys and distributes these vaccines to children.
The Journal’s FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here. For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here. You can read about the team of editors and reporters who work on the factchecks here
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