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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken the extraordinary step of firing the expert panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on immunizations, saying the action is needed to restore faith in vaccines.
“A clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science,” Kennedy said in an op-ed published Monday afternoon in the Wall Street Journal.
Proponents of vaccines have feared Kennedy, who is openly skeptical of vaccines and has long been critical of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, might take such a step. ACIP studies vaccines in the regulatory pipeline and ones that have recently been licensed by the Food and Drug Administration, advising the CDC on who they should be offered to once they have been approved.
Appointing replacement members to the advisory panel would give Kennedy broad latitude to reshape the government’s childhood immunization schedule and other vaccines advice. New members haven’t yet been named, but it would appear they may have been selected, because a statement from Kennedy’s department said that a meeting scheduled for late June will take place. In normal times, ACIP candidates go through a vetting process that can take upwards of a year.
“We have just demonstrated that politics will overrun science in this administration. It scares me to think of what’s ahead,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
One of the fired members of the committee, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, was floored by the move. The committee members were not informed in advance, the individual said. Later in the day, they received an unsigned email informing them of their immediate termination. “We appreciate your prior service and commitment,” it concluded.
The committee member predicted upheaval in vaccination policy going forward.
“Providers are no longer going to follow the CDC [vaccination] schedule,” the individual predicted. “The CDC has lost credibility in the vaccination space. … It adds a lot of uncertainty for care for children and adults.”
Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the Republican chair of the Senate’s health committee, expressed grave concerns about Kennedy’s anti-vaccine positions during his confirmation hearing, before ultimately voting to confirm him. He said on the social media site X that he’d spoken with Kennedy on Monday and is working to ensure the panel won’t be filled with people “who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion.”
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) called the decision to purge ACIP “excessive.”
“I think these vaccines and other advisory committees are very helpful to the public in providing guidance,” she said. “So to cancel all of the people … that raises serious questions.”
The ACIP meets three times a year — more often during emergencies like the Covid-19 pandemic — to review data on vaccines and recommend how they should be used. Their recommendations must be approved by the CDC director — the position is currently unfilled — or the HHS secretary to go into practice. Kennedy has not signed on to three recommendations the ACIP made at its last meeting in April.
Richard Hughes, a lawyer with the firm Epstein Becker Green, warned that vaccination policy that is science-based appears to be on the verge of becoming a thing of the past.
“This upends 64 years of thoughtful, evidence-based decision-making,” Hughes, who once worked at the vaccine manufacturer Moderna, told STAT in an email. “At a minimum, it means the involvement of new members will introduce misinformation into what has been a science-based forum.”
Bruce Gellin, a former director of the HHS National Vaccine Program Office, shared that concern.
“What we learned in Epidemiology 101 about confirmation bias was better said by John Steinbeck in “The Winter of Our Discontent” — ‘You know how advice is — you only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway,’” Gellin said. “All eyes will be on the advice the new advisory committee members provide.”
Paul Offit, a former member of the committee and one of the developers of a vaccine that protects against rotavirus infection, said the committee’s work over decades has markedly improved the health of children and adults in this country. “They should be given an award, not fired,” said Offit, an infectious diseases pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
“RFK Jr. has for 20 years shown you who he is. And nothing has happened since he’s been secretary of HHS to make you feel any differently,” Offit added.
Many public health officials expressed deep concern about what ACIP will become and what the decision will mean for the credibility of vaccine recommendations that emerge from the CDC. Tom Frieden, a former director of the CDC, was among them. “We’ll look back at this as a grave mistake that sacrificed decades of scientific rigor, undermined public trust, and opened the door for fringe theories rather than facts to guide the recommendations that doctors rely on to protect patients,” he said in a statement.
The step followed reporting from STAT on Sunday that revealed that four members of the 19-person panel had received termination notices because their special government employee contracts had lapsed.
Kennedy’s move appears to fly in the face of commitments he made to Cassidy when being confirmed to lead HHS. At the time, Kennedy promised to maintain ACIP recommendations without creating a new safety system, Cassidy said then.
“If confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes,” Cassidy said in a floor speech.
Asked by a reporter on Monday about this commitment, Cassidy responded that Kennedy promised not to touch “the process” of vaccine approval.
Writing in the Journal, Kennedy argued that he was acting to restore confidence in America’s public health leadership, saying the Biden administration stacked the committee, and portraying the group as a rubber stamp for approvals riddled with conflicts of interest.
The Biden administration approved eight new candidates to the committee just before leaving office, with some former officials saying the move was intended to keep the Trump administration from removing mainstream scientific expertise. The HHS statement about Kennedy’s decision cited that aim as a reason for firing all sitting members.
And though some outside experts say ACIP could have stronger conflict of interest policies, they have said Kennedy’s assessment is incomplete at best. In announcing the ACIP firings, Kennedy said the committee members aren’t necessarily corrupt. “The problem is their immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy,” he wrote.
Kennedy’s critics have pointed to the conflicts he brings to the discussion about vaccines. He’s spent years leading a nonprofit that argued — without evidence — that vaccines are linked to autism, signed book deals to question the safety and efficacy of shots, and received fees for referring plaintiffs who say they were injured by vaccines. (Kennedy pledged to withdraw from his previous business dealings when taking the helm of HHS, though he refused to promise to not sue vaccine manufacturers after his tenure.)
His history could make boosting trust in the CDC difficult. Even Kennedy’s allies have acknowledged that trust can only be restored if the vast majority of Americans — including those who disagree with him — believe the systems are not being changed for political reasons. The move to remake ACIP will weaken trust in the system, public health leaders said.
The president of the American Medical Association, Bruce Scott, said the action “undermines that trust and upends a transparent process that has saved countless lives. With an ongoing measles outbreak and routine child vaccination rates declining, this move will further fuel the spread of vaccine-preventable illnesses.”
The MAHA PAC run by Kennedy allies, which is pouring money into state races and issues, posted on X, “The MAHA Revolution is finally here. … The truth about vaccines is about to be EXPOSED.”
Children’s Health Defense, the vaccine-criticizing nonprofit Kennedy founded, and the anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny were similarly upbeat about the news. “This is unprecedented. And long overdue. The foundation is shaking. Keep your eyes open,” Tenpenny posted on X, alongside a link to a news article.
“Hope the good news continues,” CHD responded. The group has for years alleged that conflicts of interest, such as grant funding from companies that make vaccines, skewed ACIP recommendations toward approving certain shots. Tenpenny, an osteopathic physician who had her license revoked, then reinstated, during the pandemic, has been named in at least one of Kennedy’s books as a hero for “medical freedom.” She, like others, pushed back on vaccination mandates and alleged Covid vaccines make people magnetic. (They do not.)
Critics of Kennedy’s aggressive anti-vaccines stands have been readying themselves for something of this nature. Osterholm’s center, CIDRAP, recently launched what it has called the Vaccine Integrity Project, led by high-level figures including former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Margaret Hamburg, and Harvey Fineberg, a former president of the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine).
“We take up the Vaccine Integrity Project as a precautionary step,” the two wrote in an opinion piece published in STAT in April. “Should ACIP or FDA processes or scientific evaluation become compromised, America cannot afford to be left without any organized systems to ensure that evidence grounded in science continues to guide decisions about the use of vaccines.”
Isabella Cueto and John Wilkerson contributed reporting.
