Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s newly remade federal vaccine advisory panel will examine the cumulative effect of the childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule, the panel’s chair said Wednesday.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will also weigh recommendations for vaccines that have long been on the market, including those for measles and hepatitis B.
Martin Kulldorff made the announcement at the start of the first meeting of the ACIP since Kennedy dismissed all 17 previous members less than two weeks ago, accusing them of conflicts of interest.
Kennedy appointed a new group of eight members two days later. One withdrew just before Wednesday’s meeting during a review of his financial holdings, leaving seven members to vote on vaccine recommendations during the meeting.
“Secretary Kennedy has given this committee a clear mandate to use evidence-based medicine. We’re making vaccine recommendations and that is what we will do. Vaccines are not all good or bad,” Kulldorff said Wednesday.
The HHS chief, who co-founded the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense and served as its chair before being confirmed to lead the department, has long called for an investigation into childhood shots, saying they have been inadequately studied.
The review will be undertaken by two new ACIP work groups, Kulldorff said, though it’s not clear if they have been staffed yet. One group will be focused on the childhood and adolescent vaccine schedules, and the other will focus on shots that have been approved for seven or more years.
He specifically mentioned the recommendation for giving newborns the hepatitis B vaccine as well as the combination measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) and chickenpox shots.
The panel chair added that the group will also consider religious objections to MMR vaccines derived from fetal cell lines and may look at an MMR vaccine approved in Japan.
“The number of vaccines that our children and adolescents receive today exceeds what children in most other developed nations receive, and what most of us in this room received when we were children,” Kulldorff said.
He added that it is also important “to evaluate the cumulative effect of the recommended vaccine schedule. This includes interaction effects between different vaccines, the total number of vaccines, cumulative amounts of vaccine ingredients and the relative timing of different vaccines.”
For decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) independent advisory panel recommended which shots Americans should get and when.
The Affordable Care Act requires all insurance companies to cover, for free, the vaccines recommended by the panel. Those recommendations also help states decide which shots should be mandated for schoolchildren.
Kennedy’s shake-up is throwing that system into chaos. Outside physician and public health groups have been pressuring insurance companies to continue covering vaccines, no matter what ACIP does.
“Part of the role of ACIP is to look at vaccines across the lifespan,” said Chrissie Juliano, executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition. “I think the important thing to note is we need to reevaluate vaccine recommendations based on whether science has changed, not based on whether the people who sit on a committee change, or in [an] administration changes. And I think that’s where we start to lose the public’s trust.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) announced Wednesday that it would no longer take part in ACIP hearings.
“We won’t lend our name or our expertise to a system that is being politicized at the expense of children’s health,” AAP President Susan Kressly said in a video posted on the social platform X.
Ahead of the meeting, the insurance industry trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans issued a statement that its plans are “committed to ongoing coverage of vaccines to ensure access and affordability for this respiratory virus season.”
“We encourage all Americans to talk to their health care provider about vaccines,” the group wrote.
As the meeting kicked off, President Trump’s nominee to lead the CDC, Susan Monarez, was on Capitol Hill testifying in front of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee during a confirmation hearing.
Monarez said she does not see a causal link between vaccines and autism, and told Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) she hopes experts will step up and volunteer to fill the panel’s remaining slots.
“These are not easy positions to fill. It takes a lot of time and commitment from some of these highly trained technical experts to want to participate,” Monarez said. “They need to have a depth and a breadth of technical experience to be able to understand immunological processes, to understand statistical analysis.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), chair of the HELP Committee, lamented the “rushed” meeting with a diminished panel.
“Given that there is no confirmed CDC director, along with an ACIP panel which has very few members, many of whom lack broad vaccine and … immunological expertise, there are concerns about the rushed nature of this process,” Cassidy said.
The Louisiana Republican also expressed concern that Thursday’s ACIP schedule will feature a presentation on thimerosal given by Lyn Redwood, a longtime anti-vaccine activist. Redwood is president emerita of Children’s Health Defense.
Thimerosal is a preservative used in some influenza vaccines, and anti-vaccine leaders have long linked it to autism in children, a claim that’s been debunked.
“I will note that there are people who are critics of thimerosal who’ve been asked to testify, but no one speaking of the substantial evidence that in the amounts used in vaccines, thimerosal is safe,” the senator said.
Prior to the meeting, a document was posted to ACIP’s website summarizing that all available evidence shows thimerosal is safe and is not linked to autism or other neurological issues. That document was no longer available on Wednesday.
“I will say going forward, if the ACIP hearing today is being used to sow distrust, I would ask as you go forward that you would make sure that there really was a balanced perspective,” Cassidy said.
