The health secretary recently removed all of the members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has chosen eight new members for the panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines.
The new members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) include Dr. Joseph Hibbeln, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who is former acting chief of the Section on Nutritional Neurosciences at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; Dr. Robert Malone, who helped invent messenger ribonucleic acid technology; and Dr. Cody Meissner, a pediatrics professor at Dartmouth College and former ACIP member, Kennedy announced on June 11.
“All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense. They have each committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations,” he said in a statement.
Malone said on social media platform X that he was honored to be named to the committee. “I will do my best to serve with unbiased objectivity and rigor,” he wrote.
The other new members are:
- Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and biostatistician who helped found Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom and who holds a PhD in operations research.
- Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management who holds a PhD in operations research.
- Dr. James Pagano, an emergency medicine doctor.
- Vicky Pebsworth, who holds a PhD in public health and nursing, and is a regional director of the National Association of Catholic Nurses.
- Dr. Michael Ross, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University.
Kennedy heads the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC’s parent agency. The department on June 9 notified the 17 previous members of their dismissals.
“The Committee will no longer function as a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas,” Kennedy said in a statement at the time.
The ACIP is a panel convened by the CDC to offer advice about vaccines, including childhood and adult immunization schedules.
Members “are knowledgeable in the fields of immunization practices and public health, have expertise in the use of vaccines and other immunobiologic agents in clinical practice or preventive medicine, have expertise with clinical or laboratory vaccine research, or have expertise in assessment of vaccine efficacy and safety,” according to the committee’s charter.
Kennedy told reporters in Washington this week that the new members would be credentialed scientists and doctors “who are going to do evidence-based medicine, who are going to be objective, and who are going to follow the science and make critical public health determinations for our children based upon the best science.”
New Member Offers View
Levi told The Epoch Times that while he believes the outgoing ACIP panelists “applied their best judgment and did it with the very best of intentions and based on very deep expertise,” the secretary’s reforms are based on “a broader sentiment that the process by which we evaluate the safety and benefits of drugs, and specifically vaccines, can be improved and can be more transparent and also more trustworthy by the public.”
He added that he views the role of ACIP members as “giving advice based on their best judgment.”
“The advice might not be uniform, the advice might be nuanced and might be diverse. And then there are decision-makers and policy-makers that take the responsibility, and they will have to make their best judgment based on the opinions that they hear and the data that they see—they will have to make decisions,” he said.
“I think that scientists should stay in the role of analyzing the science and reflecting what the science suggests. And the same scientists should not be the decision-makers.”
Having worked with academics, clinicians, and patients in the health care system across his career, Levi said he hopes to bring his experience with data-driven frameworks for balancing “different types of risks and different types of benefits.”
He said that modern advances should now allow for “the aspect of personalization” in medicine.
“We want to think about those risks and benefits in the personalized context of individual patients or groups of patients that may have different characteristics, different desires, different wishes, different cultures,” Levi said. “And we really want to think about it in a way that will allow them to make the best choices for their own health, together with their physicians.”
Some Members Were Paid by Pharmaceutical Companies
Eight of the members whom Kennedy fired had been paid by pharmaceutical companies in the past, according to an Epoch Times review of disclosures and payment information.
Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, for instance, whose term started in 2024, received $4.6 million in research funding from Pfizer and $39,547 in payments from Pfizer and Merck in recent years. Her conflict of interest disclosures stated that she worked on clinical trials for Pfizer’s meningococcal, COVID-19, and RSV vaccines and that she abstained from related votes.
Other previous members received thousands of dollars from Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Valneva, Merck, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Boehringer Ingelheim.
Most of the funding, but not all, came before the members joined the panel. Dr. Helen Keipp Talbot’s term started in 2018, and she reported receiving $7,500 in research funding and $4,662 in payments from Sanofi in 2019.
An email to Talbot returned an automated message directing requests for comment to a spokesman for Vanderbilt University Medical Center, her employer. The spokesman did not return an inquiry.
Kennedy has criticized members over their ties to pharmaceutical companies.
“The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine. It has never recommended against a vaccine—even those later withdrawn for safety reasons,” he wrote in an op-ed.
The Department of Health also noted that all 17 members were appointed or had their terms renewed during the Biden administration, and that many were set to serve until 2027 or 2028. Keeping them in place would have meant that the Trump administration could appoint only a minority of members until then, limiting its ability “to take the proper actions to restore public trust in vaccines,” the department said in a statement.
Of the new members, Hibbeln reported receiving $338 from pharmaceutical companies in recent years, including from AbbVie; Meissner received less than $150 from Sanofi and another firm; and Pagano reported receiving $90 from in food and beverage payments from two companies.
Criticism and Praise
Some doctors and health groups voiced opposition to the terminations.
The move, along with the recent narrowing of COVID-19 vaccine recommendations, “interferes with the practice of evidence-based medicine and destabilizes a trusted source and its evidence-based process for helping guide decision-making for vaccines to protect the public health in our country,” Dr. Jason Goldman, president of the American College of Physicians and the college’s liaison to the advisory committee, said in a statement.
“The decision to suddenly remove all 17 members of the CDC independent advisory committee in one sweeping move is deeply damaging to confidence in vaccines that have proven to be safe for decades and in the healthcare providers who counsel patients and their families about immunization decisions every day,” Jason Prevelige, president and chair of the board of directors of the American Academy of Physician Associates, stated.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), chairman of the Senate Health Committee, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the top minority member of the panel, also expressed concern about the move.
Others praised the dismissals, including Mary Holland, CEO of Children’s Health Defense, a group that Kennedy chaired before he became health secretary.
“The committee has been riddled with financial conflicts of interest, through research grants, stock portfolios, and patent stakes,” Holland said in a statement. “This change is critical if this committee is to have any future role in advising on vaccines without bias.”
Jan Jekielek contributed to this report.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the amount Pagano reported in payments. The Epoch Times regrets the error.
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