By Ahmed Aboulenein, Julie Steenhuysen and Michael Erman
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday named eight members to serve on a key panel of vaccine advisers after abruptly firing all 17 sitting members of the independent panel of experts.
They will sit on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices. Eight is the minimum number allowed by law.
Four of the new members have previously worked on committees associated with either the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, or both.
Kennedy named Joseph R. Hibbeln, Martin Kulldorff, Retsef Levi, Robert W. Malone, Cody Meissner, James Pagano, Vicky Pebsworth and Michael A. Ross.
Meissner and Pebsworth have sat on the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, and Meissner also previously served on ACIP.
Kulldorff is an architect of the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for a lighter public health response to COVID-19 in October 2020, and previously served on an ACIP vaccine safety subgroup.
“All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense,” Kennedy said in a post on X.
Kennedy said the new members are committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations.
Kennedy, who has long questioned the safety of vaccines contrary to scientific evidence, alleged that the prior panel members, many of whom were appointed by President Joe Biden, had conflicts of interest, without providing evidence of specific members’ conflicts. He said the move was necessary “to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.”
Committee members said their ACIP work follows rigorous vetting of their financial ties and that they must abstain from votes on any vaccine for which they have a conflict.
Numerous physician groups have expressed concern and suspicion over Kennedy’s unprecedented removal of all the panel’s prior members.
The American Medical Association, the nation’s largest physician group, has called for a Senate investigation into their dismissal, and sent Kennedy a letter calling for an immediate reversal of the changes.
(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago, Michael Erman in New York, and Ahmed Aboulenein in Washington; additional reporting by Jasper Ward in Washington; Editing by Rami Ayyub and Bill Berkrot)
