The US’s Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday removed all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. They formed a scientific committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on how to use vaccines; RFK Jr. pledged to replace them with his own picks, and this move has attracted criticism from major physicians and public health groups.
Kennedy, who was one of the leading anti-vaccine activists in the US before becoming the nation’s top health official, has not said who he would appoint to the panel, but said it would convene in just two weeks in Atlanta, says AP.
Although it is typically not viewed as a partisan board, the entire current roster of committee members were Biden appointees.
“Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028,” Kennedy wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. “A clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.”
Panel member Noel Brewer, at the University of North Carolina, said he and other committee members received an email late Monday afternoon that said their services on the committee had been terminated but were given no reason.
“I’d assumed I’d continue serving on the committee for my full term,” said Brewer, who joined the panel last summer.
Kennedy said the committee members had too many conflicts of interest. Currently, committee members are required to declare any potential such conflicts, as well as business interests, that arise during their tenure. They also must disclose any possible conflicts at the start of each public meeting.
But Dr. Tom Frieden, president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives and former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Kennedy’s actions were based on false conflict-of-interest claims and set “a dangerous and unprecedented action that makes our families less safe” by potentially reducing vaccine access for millions of people.
“Make no mistake: Politicizing the ACIP as Secretary Kennedy is doing will undermine public trust under the guise of improving it,” he said in a statement. “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.”
The committee had been in a state of flux since Kennedy took over. Its first meeting this year had been delayed when the US Department of Health and Human Services abruptly postponed its February meeting.