Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday continued his efforts to alter the government structure supporting immunizations, naming vaccine skeptics and doctors with different focus areas to a critical advisory board days after purging the old one.
Kennedy shocked public health advocates and the vaccine industry on Monday by firing the 17 previous members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, or ACIP, which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The panel’s recommendations are crucial for setting inoculation schedules, maintaining federal vaccine assistance programs and shaping private insurance coverage.
Members of the committee generally serve four-year overlapping terms after going through a rigorous and lengthy vetting process, designed to assure they are qualified and free of conflicts of interest. The previous board of 17 was made up of 10 women and seven men with a wide range of experience in infectious disease, epidemiology and public health.
The eight new appointees include Robert Malone, who has made false claims about messenger RNA vaccines for COVID-19 while also saying he helped invent them, and Retsef Levi, who has advocated for ending mRNA vaccinations. The sole female in the group, Vicky Pebsworth, is a board member of the National Vaccine Information Center, a top source of vaccine misinformation.
Two members of the group — Martin Kulldorff and Cody Meissner — have been generally supportive of vaccines but also voiced criticism about COVID-19 policies specifically. Kulldorff was a co-author and Meissner was one of the signatories on the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated in October 2020 for ending COVID-19 isolation policies.
Kulldorff, who has said vaccines are “one of the most significant health inventions in history,” has also been critical of COVID-19 clinical trials and claims of efficacy. Meissner, who previously served on the ACIP, supported the new administration’s decision to stop recommending routine COVID-19 shots for pregnant women and healthy children.
The three other members of the group are Joseph Hibbeln, a psychiatrist who specializes in nutrition, James Pagano, an emergency medicine doctor, and Michael Ross, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology who has served on the CDC’s Advisory Committee for the Prevention of Breast and Cervical Cancer.
In a post on X, Kennedy said the new ACIP members are all “committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations.” He said they will review data for current vaccine schedules as well. The committee is scheduled to hold a meeting from June 25-27.
Kennedy has a long history of supporting fringe theories about vaccines and spreading misinformation. The secretary’s anti-vaccine activism so alarmed Republican Bill Cassidy, the chairman of the Senate health committee, that he only voted to confirm Kennedy after extracting a pledge to maintain the ACIP panel among other promises.
The purge of the panel drew condemnation from top public officials in both Republican and Democratic administrations. The firing and other policy shifts “jeopardize public health” and “threaten to erode trust in our health institutions at a critical time,” Jerome Adams, President Trump’s first surgeon general, wrote on Monday. “We are much less safe today,” former CDC Director Tom Frieden said.
