The Secretary of Health and Social Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appointed eight new members on Wednesday in a crucial government panel of vaccine advisers after having dismissed the whole group a few days earlier.
His choices include well -known vaccine reviews, including Dr. Robert Malone.
The new members will join the advisory committee of vaccination practices, or ACIP, which advises the centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The group reviews vaccine data and makes recommendations that are eligible for shots and if insurers should cover them, among other efforts.
The director of the CDC must sign these recommendations to become an official policy.
The eight new advisers will attend the ACIP's planned meeting from June 25 to 27, Kennedy said in an article on X on Wednesday. Seventeen members previously served API.
We do not know how, taken together, the new advisers will affect the policy and availability of vaccines in the United States, but public health experts expected Kennedy to choose members who share his skepticism from immunization.
“We all knew that it would happen and it is a national tragedy and a major threat to the health and life of children,” said Lawrence Gostin, professor of public health law at the University of Georgetown, in an article on X.
Kennedy said that his choices include “very accredited scientists, leading public health experts and some of the most accomplished doctors in the United States”. He said they are attached to medicine based on evidence, standard science and common sense. “”
Malone suggested earlier this year, without evidence, that recent deaths of measles in children were due to medical errors rather than the virus itself. Malone presents himself as having played a key role in the creation of mRNA vaccines, but has become an important figure in the anti-vaccine movement.
Dr. Paul Offer, a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases at the Philadelphia children's hospital and a member of the independent panel of FDA vaccine advisers, called some of the new “anti-Vaccin militant” members.
“I think the public will not get the same quality of advice as we did before the purge,” he told CNBC. “I think that the people who were part of the committee who have just been dismissed had much greater expertise in the fields you needed as an expertise than this group.”
Offer said it expects the ACIP's recommendations to be “less informed” by new members.
HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comments on certain members with anti-vaccine opinions.
Here are Kennedy's choices:
- Dr Robert Malone – A doctor and a vaccine critic that has conducted early research on the technology of mRNA vaccines.
- Dr Joseph Hibbeln – A psychiatrist and neuroscientist who was previously active chief of the section of nutritional neuroscience in the laboratory of membrane biophysics and biochemistry of the National Institutes of Health.
- Dr Martin Kulldorff – a biostatistist and epidemiologist, who was dismissed by the mass general Brigham last year and, consequently, taken from his Harvard Medical School faculty post. He had criticized the university for the way he managed the Pandemic COVID-19. He sat on the advisory committee on the security and risk management of the Food and Drug Administration and the Safety Sub-Group of the CDC of the ACIP.
- Retsef Levi – Professor of operations management at MIT Sloan School of Management who was also director of the faculty of the analysis and detection initiative of the school's food supply chain.
- Dr Cody Meissner – A Professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine of Dartmouth. He held consulting positions with the CDC and the FDA, and was a voting member of the AIPI and the Advisory Committee against the vaccination of the FDA.
- Dr James Pagano – An emergency medical doctor certified for the board of directors who has sat on several hospital committees.
- Dr Michael Ross – Clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at George Washington University and at Virginia Commonwealth University. He sat on the CDC advisory committee for the prevention of breast and cervix cancer.
- Vicky Pebsworth – A nurse with a doctorate in public health, who has already sat on FDA vaccination consultancy committees.
But Pebsworth is a nurse on the National Board of Directors Vaccine Information Center. This organization has been widely criticized as a source of disinformation and fear of immunization.
Meanwhile, Levi criticized the mRNA vaccines in a post on X in 2023, which was still pinned at the top of his account on Wednesday afternoon.
“The evidence is mounted and indisputable according to which mRNA vaccines cause serious damages, including death, especially among young people,” Levi wrote. “We have to stop giving them immediately!”
Offer said Meissner is the most qualified choice of the group, saying that he is an expert and a “good choice”.
In an article by Dartmouth in 2024, Meissner called very safe and very effective “measles” measles vaccines.
“Parents must ensure that their children get their vaccinations so that cases do not go up,” he said.
Kennedy previously minimized the in progress measles epidemic in the United States and has spread the unfounded affirmations that virus vaccines contain fetal cells.
Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect that Kulldorff was also rejected from his post to the general mass Brigham last year.