© Ken Cedeno/ReutersU.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies before the Senate Committee on Appropriations hearing on the Dept of Health and Human Services budget • Capitol Hill • May 20, 2025
"A clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science," Kennedy said in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on Monday.
Kennedy is removing all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The group reviews vaccine data and makes recommendations that determine who is eligible for shots and whether insurers should cover them, among other efforts.
ACIP members are independent medical and public experts who make recommendations based on rigorous scientific review and evidence. The CDC director has to sign off on those recommendations for them to become official policy.
It is unclear who Kennedy will appoint to the new group. In a release, HHS said ACIP will still hold a planned meeting from June 25 to 27 to make recommendations. A person familiar with the matter told CNBC that new members will run that meeting.
The advisor overhaul is the latest move by Kennedy - a prominent vaccine skeptic - to change and potentially undermine vaccinations in the U.S. since he took the helm at HHS. Under Kennedy, HHS stopped recommending routine Covid-19 vaccines for healthy children and healthy pregnant women and canceled programs intended to discover new vaccines to prevent future pandemics, among other changes.
Kennedy said Monday HHS will put "the restoration of public trust above any pro- or antivaccine agenda."
Kennedy added some of the members on the committee were last-minute appointees of the Biden administration and noted that, without ousting advisors from the current group, the Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028.
Kennedy claimed that the panel has been "plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine."
But all HHS agencies and their advisory panels have had rigorous policies for conflicts of interest, and there have been no related issues for years. All members of federal vaccine advisory committees are already required to comply with regulations around disclosing potential conflicts of interest.
The announcement comes days after pediatric infectious disease expert Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos resigned as co-leader of ACIP due to the belief she is "no longer able to help the most vulnerable members" of the U.S. population.
Health policy experts previously told CNBC that a shake-up of the advisory committee could produce politicized recommendations that highlight the harms rather than the benefits of shots. Those recommendations could also create greater distrust in the CDC and Trump administration among scientists and public health experts.
ACIP has also scrutinized vaccine products in the past, in contrast to what Kennedy and other Trump administration figures have argued. In certain instances, the group has recommended more restricted use of vaccines than their approval under the Food and Drug Administration would permit.
For example, the FDA approved Merck's HPV vaccine for use in women and men ages 9 to 45. But the CDC only recommends its use in patients ages 9 to 26, because there is a lower public health benefit of the vaccine in those ages 27 to 45.
Reader Comments
It's like they've learned nothing regarding medical overreach, government agency capture by pharmaceutical industry, and plain ole human greed.
Especially as shown through the Covid-19-episode lens.
At least now we can see the bullshit clearer.
btw, what's wrong with highlighting the harms of vaccines?
Quote: "plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine." The journalist could have dug into this and didn't.
I wonder if that would be because she helped kill them?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. himself has shown that he can do absolutely nothing about the broken and corrupt to the bone health system. He can NOT remove a single vaccine from the vaccine schedule. Instead he promises to do more "rigorous scientific research" into some of the vaccines. How much more evidence to you really need to see that vaccines do a lot of harm?
But who cares, let's tackle some food dyes instead. These food dyes are so damn dangerous that they are definitely behind the autism epidemic. How about removing this death shot from the schedule altogether?
How about making your damn vaccine schedule just a recommendation and not a mandate? This will make a huge difference cause then Big Pharma will be toothless with all their lobbying on the vaccine front. Public trust in health system is dead. And I sincerely hope it will never ever come back.
People don't need you damn trust, they just need a freedom of choice.