After anti-vaccine advocate and US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 experts who sat on a revered federal vaccine panel and restocked it with eight dubious members, a growing chorus of lawmakers, health experts, and public advocates are calling for a pivotal meeting scheduled for Wednesday to be scrapped and for the panel to be "dissolved" and remade with qualified members.
On June 9, Kennedy unilaterally cleaned out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP). Though vetting for the committee has historically taken up to two years, Kenney announced the eight new members two days later. Some of the members are clear anti-vaccine activists, others have espoused contrarian or anti-public health perspectives, and some also have little to no relevant expertise for being on ACIP.
"[T]he reconstituted ACIP is a farce," Robert Steinbrook, a director at consumer rights watchdog Public Citizen, said in a statement. "Rather than further sullying the ACIP and undermining public confidence in vaccines, this week’s meeting should be rescheduled after the Senate has confirmed a new CDC Director who can both appoint an authoritative and representative committee and be able to approve the panel’s recommendations."
Republican Senator Bill Cassidy—a medical doctor who champions vaccines yet provided critical support for Kennedy's confirmation as health secretary despite personal concerns—was among the notable figures calling for ACIP's meeting to be canceled for now.
In one of his most critical statements against Kennedy since his confirmation, Cassidy wrote on social media late Monday that many of the new ACIP members "do not have significant experience studying microbiology, epidemiology or immunology. In particular, some lack experience studying new technologies such as mRNA vaccines, and may even have a preconceived bias against them."
"The meeting should be delayed until the panel is fully staffed with more robust and balanced representation—as required by law—including those with more direct relevant expertise," Cassidy wrote.
“Corrupted”
Vaccine and infectious disease expert Peter Hotez, a dean at Baylor College of Medicine, responded to Cassidy, adding, "Honestly in its current form, the ACIP is mostly devoid of any meaningful expertise in vaccines or infectious diseases. It is organized to pursue a pseudoscience agenda. It’s a waste of taxpayer dollars and should be dissolved. Perhaps down the line it could be resurrected."
One of the CDC's leading vaccine experts, Fiona Havers—who recently resigned from the agency in protest—went further to say the CDC's vaccine processes have been "corrupted in a way that I haven’t seen before."
"If it isn’t stopped, and some of this isn’t reversed, like, immediately, a lot of Americans are going to die as a result of vaccine-preventable diseases," she told The New York Times.
Meanwhile, Kennedy's anti-vaccine agenda appears to be moving forward undeterred. On Tuesday, the CDC released the final agenda for the ACIP meeting starting tomorrow. Kennedy had already altered the agenda to add discussions of two long-standing vaccines: certain flu vaccines that use the mercury-based preservative thimerosal and certain measles vaccines. There is no controversy over these vaccines among experts, but they have long been the target of misinformation and fearmongering by anti-vaccine advocates, including Kennedy.
According to the final ACIP agenda, the meeting will also now include a presentation and recommendations on flu vaccines from Lyn Redwood. She is a nurse with no expertise in vaccinations, infectious diseases, or any other relevant field for ACIP. Rather, she was the president of Kennedy's rabid anti-vaccine organization Children's Health Defense and promotes the debunked falsehood that thimerosal-containing vaccines cause autism.
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