U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. discusses the findings of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network survey, during a press conference at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 16, 2025.
Elizabeth Frantz | Reuters
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday named eight new members to a crucial government panel of vaccine advisors after firing the entire group just days earlier.
The new members will join the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The group reviews vaccine data and makes recommendations that determine who is eligible for shots and whether insurers should cover them, among other efforts.
The eight new advisors will attend ACIP’s planned meeting on June 25 to 27, Kennedy said in a post on X on Wednesday.
It is unclear now how, taken together, the new advisors will affect vaccine policy and availability in the U.S. But public health experts had expected Kennedy could choose members who share his skepticism of immunization.
Kennedy said his picks include “highly credentialed scientists, leading public-health experts, and some of America’s most accomplished physicians.”
But Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the FDA’s independent panel of vaccine advisers, called some of the new members “anti-vaccine activists.”
“I think the public is not going to be getting the same quality of advice as we had before the purge,” he told CNBC. “I think the people who were on the committee that just got fired had far greater expertise in the areas that you needed expertise than this group.”
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