RFK JR.’s Picks for CDC vaccine advisers will come together this week in the midst of controversy

An influential committee that helps to create federal vaccine policy and recommendations for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention starts a two -day meeting in Atlanta on Wednesday.

The advisory committee for immunization practices or ACIP often meets in the dark, but was thrown into the spotlight two weeks ago when health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. All 17 sitting members of the panel fired and replaced them with a smaller selection of his own selection.

The committee comes over objections from senators Bill Cassidy, R-La., And Patty Murray, D-Wash., Chairman and former chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, both of which have called to The meeting that is postponed about concern about the new committee members.

The committee usually meets three times a year in public meetings to discuss and vote on how vaccines, approved by the Food and Drug Administration, must be used to protect public health.

The run -up to this week’s meeting has been chaotic and controversial, according to various current and former CDC employees who were involved in preparing it.

It will be closely viewed by those who are worried about the direction of the vaccine policy under Kennedy. “It will be difficult to look away,” says Jason SchwartzAssistantial teacher at the Yale School of Public Health. “We will see a lot about what this next chapter looks like for vaccine policy.”

The Ministry of Health and Human Services did not respond to NPR’s request to comment on this story.

Fears for politicization

Kennedy’s shoots and replaces the entire series of advisers shifts the fundamental goal of the group, says Schwartz.

“This has been an apolitical group of civil servants, volunteers from the scientific and medical community who have completed their conditions, regardless of changes in political administration and in CDC leadership,” he says. “That we think of ‘Biden Acip -members’ and ‘Trump Acip -members’, that this is seen – such as the Supreme Court – in terms of whom a majority has, is unprecedented in the history of the committee.”

The ACIP has played a key role in the American vaccine policy since it was formed in the sixties. At that timeNew vaccines for measles and polio had recently come online, and national health leaders thought the need for a normal panel of experts to determine how to use these and other products best to protect the public.

So they brought specialists together about medicine, public health and health health to weigh and discuss available evidence.

Now the Commission makes recommendations that, with the approval of the CDC director, become a policy. Commission members help determine the national vaccine schedule to which the state and local jurisdictions and doctors trust. Their voices influence which vaccines insurers will cover and the federal government will pay for children with a low income.

A break with precedent

At the end of May, Kennedy announced That he changed the vaccine schedule without the input of ACIP-a infringement in the transparent, consensus-powered way in which the schedule had been made for decades.

He ordered the CDC to remove the recommendation that children and pregnant women receive routine COVID-19 vaccines.

“None of CDC who works on the vaccine policy was involved in that process. Nobody knew that was coming,” says Dr. Fiona Havers, a former senior CDC officer who left the agency in June. “For RFK Jr. to unilaterally dictate to CDC what the vaccine recommendation should be, was shocking.”

For Havers, who led the team that analyzed hospital data for COVID and RSV and was previously planned to present during this week’s meeting, Kennedy’s subsequent resignation of each member of the ACIP committee was the last drop.

“I knew I was ready at the time,” she says. “For my own scientific and personal integrity, I did not feel that I could present this committee and help them legitimize.”

New members with a record of questions about vaccines

Many of the eight new members of the panel have no deep, current expertise in vaccines. Some have become known in recent years by spreading false claims about them.

RETSEF LEVI, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has for example said on social media That Covid -vaccines kill young people and must be stopped. Dr. Robert Malone, who had worked on early research into MRNA technology, but is now critical about mrna -vaccines, has suggested that Covid -vaccines can cause cancer. None of these claims is true.

Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and biostatistician formerly in Harvard who wants to serve as the new ACIP chairwas paid to serve as expert witnesses in a lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company Merck, as Malone has.

Vaccin supporters are ensuring that this panel can be rejected for vaccines and discourage their use.

“I don’t feel that I can now trust ACIP’s information and recommendations,” says Dr. Alexandra Cvijanovich, a pediatrician in Albuquerque, NM, and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The mixed messages from the HHS guided by Kennedy is confusing for patients, she adds.

“People who have always been familiar with vaccines, they are now starting to guess,” she says. “And then people who have had full confidence in our vaccine system are now afraid that it was taken apart with the dissolution of the original ACIP committee.” Parents asked her about the accessibility and safety of future vaccines, she says.

Meeting agenda -items increase flags

In the past, the public meetings of ACIP were reassuringly predictable. Commission members go through data presentations, ask thoughtful questions and voices when asked. It tends to go smoothly because it takes months to years from work behind the scenes – by committee members, CDC employees and other stakeholders – before they present a definitive analysis and put a product to the vote.

Some topics were dropped from the agenda for this week’s meeting, such as discussions On vaccines that protect against cervical cancer and pneumonia. The abrupt resignation of the previous committee made it impossible for the related working groups – who cannot meet without active ACIP members – to complete their work, according to the current CDC employees who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the agency.

Instead, those subjects are immersed for a few long -term priorities for people who question vaccines.

There is a voice Planned above ThimerosalA preservative used in flu vaccines. In the mid -1990s there were theories that it could be a cause of autism in children.

Who has a claim long -mirror. Nevertheless, manufacturers have voluntarily removed it from vaccines for children.

Are Rarely used today And there has not been much new research into it for years A CDC briefing Placed in the ACIP meeting material prior to the meeting.

Nevertheless, the group will be asked to vote on a recommendation on the subject, after revising a presentation by Lyn RedwoodA registered nurse and former president of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine interest group who used Kennedy.

The recording of the MMRV (measles, mumps, rubella and varicella, aka chicken smallpox) vaccine on the agenda also appears as a surprise Vaccine policy experts In the Vaccinintegrity project, an initiative housed at the University of Minnesota that works Protection of vaccine policy And access.

Years ago there were indications that the MMRV vaccine was associated with attacks during fever in some young children. The committee I tackled it then By recommending that young children are individually vaccinated for chickenpox – a policy that has not changed in more than 15 years.

“It is possible that there are new data, but they have not seen CDC experts with decades of experience,” says a briefing of the vaccine integrity project. Yet it is under discussion during this meeting.