About 90 seconds into his presentation on Covid-19 vaccine safety at a closely watched meeting of advisers to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month, Dr. Bruce Carleton made a startling revelation: The government grant supporting his research had been abruptly terminated.

The statement was surprising for a few reasons. Carleton had been asked to share his findings with a group entirely put in place by US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after Kennedy summarily dismissed all 17 previous experts on the committee, known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices or ACIP, in June. In its first two meetings, the newly composed committee has shown an outsized interest in vaccine safety, in line with Kennedy’s frequent protest that he’s “not anti-vaccine; I am pro-safety.”

Yet Kennedy’s HHS canceled a major CDC grant focused on the subject in March, curtailing Carleton’s work to understand genetic drivers of rare vaccine safety risks.

“They canceled [a grant to study] vaccine safety, and yet now we’re talking about vaccine safety,” Carleton later told CNN.

Carleton’s statement in the meeting was also surprising because, almost immediately, an HHS spokesperson denied that it was true.

“FYI – as you see below, we did not cancel the grant,” HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said in an email to reporters during the ACIP meeting, providing a link to the grant information on the agency’s website.

Nixon noted that the grant’s “period of performance” ended March 25. The website, though, shows a negative subtotal of more than $2 million, suggesting money allocated to the grant that was unspen