Just two days after retiring the entirety of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel, US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has appointed several prominent critics of the government’s Covid-19 response to that committee.
He announced eight new members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, on Wednesday.
Kennedy had said Monday that the previous 17-member panel that makes recommendations on who should get vaccines and when was rife with conflicts of interest and that he would appoint new “highly credentialed” experts in time for the panel’s June 25 meeting, at which the members are expected to discuss guidance for Covid-19 and HPV shots, among others.
In a statement Wednesday, Kennedy said the reassembled panel will demand “definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations” but will review data for the current vaccine schedule, as well.
The eight new ACIP members include Dr. Robert Malone, a biochemist who made early innovations in the field of messenger RNA but in more recent years has been a vocal critic of mRNA technology in Covid-19 vaccines.
The CDC recently narrowed its recommendations for mRNA Covid-19 shots, but some advocates in the Make America Healthy Again movement have pressed Kennedy to go further and bar the vaccines entirely.
Another new member is Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist who co-authored an October 2020 strategy on herd immunity known as the Great Barrington Declaration with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, now director of the US National Institutes of Health.
Kennedy also chose Dr. James Pagano, an emergency medicine physician he described as a “strong advocate for evidence-based medicine” who has served on hospital committees and medical executive boards.
Dr. Retsef Levi, an MIT professor who has published studies on mRNA vaccines and cardiovascular events, is also joining the panel. Levi is a professor of operations management.
Several of the new members have served in federal health agencies previously, including Dr. Joseph Hibbeln, a former acting chief of the NIH’s section on nutritional neurosciences.
Dr. Cody Meissner, a Dartmouth professor of pediatrics who also signed the Great Barrington Declaration, has previously served on ACIP and on the US Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.
Dr. Vicky Pebsworth, the Pacific region director of the National Association of Catholic Nurses, also served on the FDA vaccine committee. Pebsworth has questioned vaccine safety, citing her son’s “serious, long-term health problems” after vaccinations at 15 months, and served on the board of the nonprofit National Vaccine Information Center, which has suggested links between vaccines and autism.
Dr. Michael Ross, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University, has previously served on the CDC’s Advisory Committee for the Prevention of Breast and Cervical Cancer. Kennedy also nodded in his statement to Ross’ “continued service on biotech and healthcare boards.”
The private equity company Havencrest, in which Ross is an operating partner, describes him on its site as a “serial CEO” who has served on the boards of several biotechnology companies.
Rebuilding ACIP
ACIP, established in 1964, plays a quiet but significant role in American vaccine policy. The panel is typically an assembly of pediatricians, immunologists, researchers and patient advocates, and it is tasked with reviewing vaccine safety and efficacy and voting on who should receive which vaccines. Its recommendations shape insurers’ coverage of vaccines and physicians’ recommendations to their patients.
Kennedy has promised that a “clean sweep” of federal vaccine advisers will restore public trust in the medical establishment and in vaccines.
He argued in several public comments this week that the panel was rife with conflicts of interest and has served as a “rubber stamp” for vaccine manufacturers for years. ACIP members have historically stated disclosures and conflicts of interest at the start of meetings and make federal filings about stock holdings and research funding. ACIP also recently published members’ conflicts and disclosures from 2000 through 2024 online.
The secretary has also said that several previous ACIP members “were last-minute appointees of the Biden administration” and that without dismissing the panel, the Trump administration would not be able to add new members until 2028.
Biden officials appointed eight members to ACIP in the final months of his administration. Panelists typically serve for four years.
Kennedy wrote on X Tuesday that none of the new ACIP members would be “ideological anti-vaxxers.”
“They will be highly credentialed physicians and scientists who will make extremely consequential public health determinations by applying evidence-based decision-making with objectivity and common sense,” he said.
Although the secretary of Health and Human Services has the authority to remove and appoint new members to advisory boards, Kennedy’s complete overhaul and speedy appointment of new members earned swift rebukes from physicians, nurses and some former health officials.
The American Medical Association, which is meeting in Chicago this week, adopted a resolution calling for Kennedy to reverse the decision to remove the previous ACIP members, particularly in the current climate around public health in the U.S.
“With an ongoing measles outbreak and routine child vaccination rates declining, this move will further fuel the spread of vaccine-preventable illnesses,” AMA President Dr. Bruce Scott said in a statement.
Vetting the new panel
“We’ve taken a giant step backwards,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an outside adviser on vaccines to the US Food and Drug Administration. “We had on that committee, before the purge, the kind of expertise and experience and institutional memory from which we benefited. We don’t have that anymore.
“You have two anti-vaccine activists in that group,” Offit said. “Robert Malone, who testified in front of Congress that mRNA vaccines cause cancer, and you have Vicky Pebsworth, who is a member of the anti-vaccine group the National Vaccine Information Center.”
A suggestion that the new advisory committee will review the existing immunization schedule “could mean that everything’s in play,” he said. “Every vaccine that’s on the current schedule is in play. Who knows what they could do? They could say, ‘I think that these other vaccines need to be tested in the right way, because they haven’t been tested in the right way before, and we’re going to suspend their use until they’re tested the right way.’ The sky’s the limit. It’s chaos. One can only imagine how bad it could be.”
Offit was previously a member of ACIP and said the review of a new candidate before their appointment, including their conflicts of interest, typically takes at least two to three months.
“You have to fill out a lot of forms, and people look very carefully,” he said. “One, to see whether you have the expertise; two, to see whether or not there’s any undue connections, that you are completely independent of the pharmaceutical industry and completely independent of the government.
Two just-dismissed ACIP members noted that their application and review processes took much longer: from a year and a half to more than two years, although one pointed out that it’s possible the process could be faster if an HHS secretary were in a hurry.
Wall Street reacts
The investment community following biopharma stocks also reacted with unease to the new slate.
“We are particularly concerned by the appointments of vaccine critics like Drs. Malone and Kulldorf, and Vicky Pebsworth,” said Evan Seigerman, an analyst with the financial firm BMO Capital Markets, noting that Malone “has contributed to Covid-19 conspiracies and vaccine critique,” Kulldorf “was against Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates” and Pebsworth’s National Vaccine Information Center has been “widely criticized for spreading vaccine misinformation.”
Seigerman added, though, that “while the appointment of known vaccine dissidents is alarming, such voices do not appear to dominate the committee.”
He pointed out that the biggest fallout from the committee changes could be to insurance coverage of vaccines, noting that “ACIP’s role in determining the annual US vaccine schedule is typically what then drives US insurer coverage decisions.”