Washington — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday said he is removing every member of a government panel that makes vaccine recommendations.
Kennedy said he is “retiring” all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, asserting that it “has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.”
“A clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science,” Kennedy, who is a vaccine skeptic, wrote in an opinion piece published by the Wall Street Journal.
The members of the committee are independent medical and public health experts, who advise and vote on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine recommendations. The CDC sets immunization schedules for both adults and children based on recommendations from ACIP.
Experts and health authorities closely watch the committee’s decisions, since their recommendations are tied to a number of federal policies, including requirements for insurance coverage and liability protections.
Career CDC officials usually select experts to sit on the committee out of the applications it receives, forwarding picks to the secretary to be signed off on.
Kennedy said the Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028 because some of the current members were last-minute appointees of the Biden administration.
“The prior administration made a concerted effort to lock in public health ideology and limit the incoming administration’s ability to take the proper actions to restore public trust in vaccines,” Kennedy said.
It is unclear who is being considered to replace the committee’s members or how they are being selected. A spokesperson for the department did not comment when asked.
The move comes a week after a committee leader, Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, resigned from her role following an order from Kennedy to change the CDC’s guidance on COVID-19 vaccine recommendations.
Outside medical groups voiced disappointment over the move, which bypassed the longstanding advisory committee process and usurped an already-ongoing work group within the panel that had already been weighing how to narrow COVID-19 vaccine recommendations.
Kennedy’s ouster of the committee’s members comes ahead of a meeting of the panel scheduled to start on June 25. The panel was expected to vote on new recommendations for COVID-19 and other vaccines.
Updates voted on from the last committee meeting in April to RSV and meningococcal vaccine recommendations were never adopted by Kennedy.
