When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abruptly fired all 17 members of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) two weeks ago and replaced them with a mix of medical outsiders, vaccine skeptics, and controversial figures, he didn’t just reshape a panel -- he ignited widespread alarm in the public health community. The head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Kennedy described the purge as a “major step towards restoring public trust in vaccines.” But as many of the nation’s most respected infectious disease experts and medical organizations have said, this is not reform — it’s sabotage.
The ACIP has played a pivotal, if often invisible, role in the American healthcare system for more than 60 years. It advises public health officials about who should receive vaccines and when they should be administered. Its recommendations guide immunization schedules and help to determine when vaccinations are covered by insurers. Undermining this committee doesn’t just influence policy; it shapes access to and uptake of vaccines, trust in science, and public health outcomes nationwide.
A Seismic Shift in Vaccine Governance
With Kennedy’s reconstitution of the panel, many experts are warning of grave risks — not only to vaccine policy, but to the health and longevity of Americans. His new appointments came just two days after he dismissed the entire ACIP membership, accusing them of “malevolent malpractice” and alleging systemic corruption and conflicts of interest — claims long rejected by independent ethics reviews. As Dr. Richard Besser, CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and former Acting Director of the CDC wrote on June 10th:
Kennedy has accused ACIP members of serving industry interests over public health. Nothing could be further from the truth. ACIP meetings are live-streamed. All votes and records are fully accessible to the public, and every meeting has a public comment period. Members must disclose conflicts of interest and recuse themselves from votes if any conflicts arise. No voting members can be employed by vaccine manufacturers. A consumer representative is required to serve on the committee, alongside appointees from respected medical organizations such as the American Academy of Family Physicians and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
Ironically, the shortcomings alleged by Kennedy do apply to many of his appointees, who (see below) include a retired emergency-room doctor, critics of COVID-19 vaccines, a psychiatrist with no published research on infectious diseases, and an obstetrician who consults for a dietary supplement company. Some of the others are best known for their outspoken rejection of mainstream medical consensus on vaccines.
Underscoring the ideological bent of his selections, Kennedy had previously dedicated to four of them his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci — a paranoid polemic that posits a vast conspiracy involving public health agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and tech firms.
The reconstitution of the committee “is a disaster for public health,” said Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious diseases physician at NYU Langone. “It has the potential to set us back decades.”
What’s Really at Stake
The implications of this shake-up are far-reaching. Dr. Paul Offit, Director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, a renowned vaccine expert and former ACIP member, warns that if the committee starts voting to scale back vaccine recommendations — especially for established vaccines like those against COVID-19, HPV, and meningococcal disease — insurance companies could stop covering them. “Doctors or pharmacists who give vaccines may feel that they would be liable,” Offit said. “Even those who can pay for vaccines out of pocket might find them harder to get.”
In short, if the ACIP stops recommending a vaccine, access will almost certainly shrink. Pharmacies may stop stocking doses. Providers may hesitate to offer them. And public confidence could plummet.
That possibility looms over the committee’s next meeting on June 25, when they are expected to vote on vaccine guidance for several major infectious diseases. “These are established vaccines, and we’re voting on them?” Offit asked. “The entire childhood and adult immunization schedule is on the table.”
This isn’t hyperbole. If these vaccines — proven over decades of rigorous testing — lose official endorsement, it could erode the national immunization infrastructure at every level.
Who’s Who on the New Committee?
A couple of Kennedy’s appointees have credible medical backgrounds. Some lack the requisite expertise, while others are known primarily for their opposition to mainstream vaccine science and/or for promoting misinformation:
- Dr. Robert Malone, who claims credit for early mRNA vaccine technology, has publicly argued — without credible evidence — that mRNA vaccines harm children’s organs. He has also promoted ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment, despite overwhelming evidence that it is not effective.
- Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard epidemiologist, co-authored the deeply flawed Great Barrington Declaration, which opposed lockdowns and mass vaccination strategies during the pandemic, and advocated what has been termed a “let it rip” strategy to create herd immunity.
- Prof. Retsef Levi, a professor of management at MIT has claimed that mRNA vaccines cause “serious harm including death” among young people — an assertion contradicted by a large body of peer-reviewed evidence.
- Dr. James Pagano, a retired emergency physician, has published little on public health but has questioned the sufficiency of the testing of mRNA vaccines. He has also denounced a study which found that ivermectin was an ineffective COVID treatment, a widely accepted conclusion.
- Dr. Joseph Hibbeln, a former NIH psychiatrist, has published on nutrition and brain health but appears to have no background on infectious diseases or vaccines.
- Dr. Vicky Pebsworth, a nurse and health-policy analyst, volunteers for the National Vaccine Information Center, an organization widely viewed as anti-vaccine. She has publicly criticized COVID vaccine mandates as “unethical and unlawful.”
- Dr. Michael Ross, an obstetrician-gynecologist and pharmaceutical consultant, has advised a supplement company and appears to have limited experience in immunization policy.
- Dr. Cody Meissner has prior experience on federal vaccine panels but he has expressed caution about repeated booster shots for children and, at the height of the COVID pandemic, he opposed masks for children who “struggled” with them. (Sure, why should kids, who were important vectors spreading COVID, be inconvenienced, even if masking would flatten the curve of infections and help to curb the pandemic?)
The new composition of ACIP raises troubling questions about the committee’s direction and Kennedy’s underlying agenda.
Fake Issues, Real Consequences
HHS Secretary Kennedy has repeatedly alleged that past ACIP members failed to demand rigorous placebo-controlled trials before approving vaccines. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of medical ethics, trial design and, ironically, the respective roles of various HHS agencies.
“Many of the vaccine studies did include placebo controls,” Dr. Ratner said, "Unless it was unethical to do so.” Kennedy seems also to be unaware that it is the FDA, not the CDC, that evaluates the methodology of clinical trials and the data from them and issues approvals for vaccines. (And, as a 15-year veteran of the FDA, I can testify that because vaccines are administered to large numbers of healthy people, the Agency is extremely conservative about ensuring that they are safe and effective before they are approved.) The CDC then makes recommendations about who should receive approved vaccines.
Kennedy’s repeated accusations about ACIP members’ conflicts of interest are also misleading. Dr. Arthur Reingold, a longtime epidemiologist at UC Berkeley and former ACIP member, points out that the panel has strict conflict-of-interest rules. “This issue has been radically overblown and unfairly called into question the objectivity of the panel,” he said.
Dr. Offit adds that multiple independent reviews have found no meaningful conflicts among the previous committee members — unlike the new ones, who have conflicts of various kinds, including working as expert witnesses for plaintiffs suing vaccine manufacturers.
Eroding Expertise
What troubles many experts the most is not just who has been appointed, but the expertise and integrity that have been lost. The prior ACIP members represented some of the nation's top experts in immunology, pediatrics, epidemiology, and public health. Professor Robert T. Schooley, M.D., an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Diego, who has served on the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, described the fired ACIP advisers thusly:
The removed ACIP committee was comprised of a highly accomplished group of experts. This 17-member collection of physicians, public health experts, nurses, and behavioral scientists hold 22 graduate degrees. Twelve are senior faculty at highly competitive, science-based universities. Most of the others are in positions of authority in public health agencies or healthcare systems. Collectively they have contributed over 2,200 indexed, peer-reviewed manuscripts to the medical and scientific literature.
They were nominated and vetted through a yearslong process overseen by the CDC and HHS that has been recklessly abandoned by Secretary Kennedy.
Will America Become Sicker?
At its core, this transformation of ACIP is not just a bureaucratic shuffle — it is a radical reorientation of national vaccine policy. By placing vaccine skeptics, ideologues, and non-experts in charge of guiding public immunization strategy, Kennedy is damaging the country’s health. The consequences could be catastrophic: falling vaccine uptake, resurgence of preventable diseases, unnecessary deaths, and an erosion of the public trust he claims to be restoring.
Vaccination is one of the greatest achievements in modern medicine. It has saved hundreds of millions of lives, eradicated smallpox, dramatically reduced the incidence of cervical cancer, and brought diseases like polio and measles to the brink of extinction. Undermining these extraordinary successes because of misguided, sociopathic personal crusades is not reform — it is malfeasance.
If Kennedy’s goal is to promote public health, he is failing dismally. The inevitable outcome was well-summarized in an analysis in Unbiased Science:
What we are witnessing is not a restoration of scientific integrity, but rather its deliberate dismantling through politically motivated appointments and the systematic spread of misinformation. The replacement of evidence-based vaccine policy with ideology-driven decision-making represents a profound threat to public health that will have consequences for generations to come.
Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Glenn Swogger Distinguished Fellow at the American Council on Science and Health. A veteran of the NIH and FDA, he was the founding director of the FDA's Office of Biotechnology.
