NEW YORK (AP) — All 17 experts recently dismissed from a government vaccine advisory panel published an essay Monday decrying “destabilizing decisions” made by U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that could lead to more preventable disease spread.
Kennedy last week announced he would “retire” the entire panel that guides U.S. vaccine policy. He also quietly removed Dr. Melinda Wharton — the veteran Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who coordinated the committee’s meetings.
Two days later, he named eight new people to the influential panel. The list included a scientist who criticized COVID-19 vaccines, a leading critic of pandemic-era lockdowns and someone who worked with a group widely considered to be a leading source of vaccine misinformation.
“We are deeply concerned that these destabilizing decisions, made without clear rationale, may roll back the achievements of U.S. immunization policy, impact people’s access to lifesaving vaccines, and ultimately put U.S. families at risk of dangerous and preventable illnesses,” the 17 panelists wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The new committee is scheduled to meet next week. The agenda for that meeting has not yet been posted, but a recent federal notice said votes are expected on vaccinations against flu, COVID-19, HPV, RSV and meningococcal bacteria.
In addition to Wharton’s removal, CDC immunization staff have been cut and agency experts who gather or present data to committee members have resigned.
One, Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, resigned after 12 years at CDC, disclosing her decision early this month in a note to members of a COVID-19 vaccines workgroup. Her decision came after Kennedy decided — without consulting the vaccine advisers — to pull back COVID-19 vaccination recommendations for healthy children and pregnant women.
“My career in public health and vaccinology started with a deep-seated desire to help the most vulnerable members of our population, and that is not something I am able to continue doing in this role,” she wrote in a message viewed by the AP.
Those CDC personnel losses will make it hard for a group of new outside advisers to quickly come up to speed and make fact-based decisions about which vaccines to recommend to the public, the former committee members said.
“The termination of all members and its leadership in a single action undermines the committee’s capacity to operate effectively and efficiently, aside from raising questions about competence,” they wrote.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to the JAMA commentary, but instead pointed to Kennedy’s previous comments on the committee.
Kennedy, a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement before becoming the U.S. government’s top health official, has accused the committee of being too closely aligned with vaccine manufacturers and of rubber-stamping vaccines.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, created in 1964, makes recommendations to the CDC director on how vaccines that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration should be used. CDC directors almost always approve those recommendations, which are widely heeded by doctors and guide vaccination programs.
ACIP policies require members to state past collaborations with vaccine companies and to recuse themselves from votes in which they had a conflict of interest, but Kennedy has dismissed those safeguards as weak.
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