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Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced Monday the removal of all 17 sitting members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory committee, introducing a plan to replace them with new members.
The Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) makes recommendations to the CDC regarding the safety, efficacy, and “clinical need” for vaccines.
“Today we are prioritizing the restoration of public trust above any specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda,” Kennedy said in a press release. “The public must know that unbiased science—evaluated through a transparent process and insulated from conflicts of interest—guides the recommendations of our health agencies.”
The statement, released by HHS, cites President Donald Trump’s May 23 executive order, titled “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” as a foundation for the move.
“[T]he new ACIP members will ensure that government scientific activities are informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available,” HHS asserted, underscoring that the Biden administration “appointed all of the 17 sitting ACIP members.”
Since 13 of the ACIP members were appointed by the Biden administration in 2024, “these appointments would have prevented the current administration from choosing a majority of the committee until 2028,” HHS observed.
“The prior administration made a concerted effort to lock in public health ideology and limit the incoming administration’s ability to take the proper actions to restore public trust in vaccines,” the federal health agency said.
Kennedy added that a “clean sweep is necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science.”
“ACIP’s new members will prioritize public health and evidence-based medicine,” he concluded. “The Committee will no longer function as a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas. The entire world once looked to American health regulators for guidance, inspiration, scientific impartiality, and unimpeachable integrity. Public trust has eroded. Only through radical transparency and gold standard science, will we earn it back.”
In an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal Monday, Kennedy confronted the focus on the politically-charged pro- vs. anti-vaccine agendas that he argued prevent the “restoration of public trust” by allowing the “history of conflicts of interest, persecution of dissidents, a lack of curiosity, and skewed science” to be ignored.
“These conflicts of interest persist,” he added. “Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines.”
While Kennedy acknowledged that the ACIP members were not necessarily “corrupt,” per se, the problem, nevertheless, was that they were immersed in “a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy.”
“The public must know that unbiased science guides the recommendations from our health agencies,” the secretary wrote.
ACIP, he also asserted, “has failed to scrutinize vaccine products given to babies and pregnant women,” and, “to make matters worse, the groups that inform ACIP meet behind closed doors, violating the legal and ethical principle of transparency crucial to maintaining public trust.”
Kennedy noted that the new ACIP members “won’t directly work for the vaccine industry. They will exercise independent judgment, refuse to serve as a rubber stamp, and foster a culture of critical inquiry—unafraid to ask hard questions.”
According to HHS, ACIP is expected to convene its next meeting June 25 through June 27 at the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta.