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.
His picks include some well-known vaccine critics, including Dr. Robert Malone.
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 CDC director has to sign off on those recommendations for them to become official policy.
The eight new advisors will attend ACIP’s planned meeting on June 25 to 27, Kennedy said in a post on X on Wednesday. Seventeen members previously served on ACIP.
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.
“We all knew this would happen and it’s a national tragedy and a major threat to children’s health and lives,” Lawrence Gostin, professor of public health law at Georgetown University, said in a post on X.
Kennedy said his picks include “highly credentialed scientists, leading public-health experts, and some of America’s most accomplished physicians.” He said they are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense.”
Malone suggested earlier this year, without evidence, that recent deaths from measles among children were due to medical errors rather than the virus itself. Malone bills himself as having played a key role in the creation of mRNA vaccines, but has become a prominent figure in the anti-vaccine movement.
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.”
Offit said he expects recommendations from ACIP to be “less informed” with the new members.
HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on some members holding anti-vaccine views.
Here are Kennedy’s picks:
- Dr. Robert Malone – a physician and vaccine critic who conducted early research on mRNA vaccine technology.
- Dr. Joseph Hibbeln – a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who was formerly the acting chief of the section of nutritional neurosciences in the Laboratory of Membrane Biophysics & Biochemistry at the National Institutes of Health.
- Dr. Martin Kulldorff – a biostatistician and epidemiologist, who was dismissed at Harvard Medical School last year after blasting the university for how it handled the Covid-19 pandemic. He has served on the Food and Drug Administration’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and the CDC’s vaccine safety subgroup of ACIP.
- Retsef Levi – a professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management who has also served as faculty director of the school’s food supply chain analytics and sensing initiative.
- Dr. Cody Meissner – a professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. He has held advisory roles with both the CDC and FDA, and has been a voting member of ACIP and the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee.
- Dr. James Pagano – a board-certified emergency medicine physician who has served on multiple hospital committees.
- Dr. Michael Ross – a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University. He has served on the CDC’s Advisory Committee for the Prevention of Breast and Cervical Cancer.
- Vicky Pebsworth – a nurse with a PhD in public health, who has previously served on FDA vaccine advisory committees.
But Pebsworth is a nurse on the board of The National Vaccine Information Center. That organization has been widely criticized as a leading source of misinformation and fearmongering about immunization.
Meanwhile, Levi slammed mRNA vaccines in a post on X in 2023, which was still pinned to the top of his account Wednesday afternoon.
“The evidence is mounting and indisputable that MRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death, especially among young people,” Levi wrote. “We have to stop giving them immediately!”
Offit said Meissner is the most qualified pick of the group, saying he’s an expert and a “good choice.”
In a Dartmouth article in 2024, Meissner called measles vaccines “very safe and highly effective.”
“Parents need to make sure that their children are getting their vaccinations so cases don’t go up,” he said.
Kennedy previously downplayed the ongoing measles outbreak in the U.S. and has spread unfounded claims that vaccines against the virus contain fetal cells.
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