The United States Secretary of Health Robert F Kennedy Jr, skeptical of vaccines, abolished the 17 members of a committee that issues official government recommendations on vaccinations.
Announcing this decision in an editorial of the Wall Street Journal, Kennedy said that conflicts of interest on the Consultative Committee on Vaccination Practices (ACIP) were responsible for undermining confidence in vaccinations.
Kennedy said he wanted to “make sure the American people receive the safest vaccines.”
Doctors and health experts have criticized Kennedy’s long -standing issue on the safety and efficiency of a certain number of vaccines, although during his confirmation audience of the Senate, he said that he “would not take them”.
On Monday, he said that he “retired” all members of the ACIP panel. Eight of the 17 panelists were appointed in January 2025, in the last days of the mandate of President Biden.
Most members practiced doctors and experts attached to the main university medical centers.
After the Food and Drug Administration of the United States (FDA) approves vaccines according to the question of whether the advantages of the shooting prevail over the risks, the ACIP recommends the groups which should have the blows and when, which also determines the Insurance Cover.
Noel Brewer, professor at the Global Public School of Public Health at the Northern Carolina University who sat at the ACIP for a year, described Kennedy’s decision to “normalize”.
“I was amazed, but not surprised,” he told the BBC. “It was deeply disappointing and more than a little overwhelming.”
Kennedy noted that if he had not withdrawn the members of the committee, President Trump would not have been able to appoint a majority on the panel in 2028.
“The committee was prey to conflicts of persistent interests and has become a little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine”. Kennedy wrote.
He said that health authorities and pharmaceutical companies were responsible for a “public confidence crisis” that some try to explain “by blaming the disinformation or the attitudes of anti -science”.
In the editorial, Kennedy cited examples of the 1990s and 2000s and alleged that conflicts of interest persist.
“Most members of the AIPI have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including these marketing vaccines,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
APIP members are required to disclose conflicts of interest, which are Published onlineAnd to challenge themselves to vote on decisions where they can have a conflict.
Dr. Brewer said the panel had “one of the most rigorous conflict of interest procedures for any federal committee”.
The members had a wide range of vaccination expertise and completely examined and debated data on vaccines to make the best decisions for the public, said Paul Offer, former member of the ACIP and director of the Vaccine EDUCATION CENTER at the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital.
In his editorial, Kennedy said that “the problem is not necessarily that the members of the AIPI are corrupt”.
“The problem is their immersion in a system of incentives and paradigms aligned by industry which apply a close pro-industrial orthodoxy,” he said.
Dr. Bruce Scott, president of the American Medical Association, a professional organization for American doctors, said that mass dismissal “upsets a transparent process that has saved countless lives”.
“With an epidemic during measles and routine vaccination rates for declining children, this decision will further feed the spread of preventible vaccine diseases,” Scott said in a statement.
Kennedy’s decision appears unlike the insurance he has given during his confirmation hearings. Bill Cassidy, a republican senator from Louisiana who is also a doctor, reported that he had received commitments from the Secretary of Health according to which the ACIP would be maintained “without modifications”.
Monday, Cassidy wrote on X: “Of course, now fear is that the AIPI is filled with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion.
“I just spoke with secretary Kennedy, and I will continue to speak to him to make sure that this is not the case.”
Public health experts share Cassidy’s concerns that Kennedy could appoint vaccination to the board of directors.
Such replacements would mean that some vaccines “will not be at all recommended” and that other effective shots could “no longer be reimbursable by insurance companies,” said Peter Lurie, a former FDA official.
“Consequently, we will still see an additional drop in vaccination rates, then a resurgence of the diseases they could have prevented,” he said.
Kennedy did not say who he would appoint to replace the members of the board of directors. The secretary of health seems to call people himself and ask them to sit in the panel, said Dr. Offer, who said he had heard at least two people that Kennedy called.
“All its notion of radical transparency – this is the opposite of this,” said Dr. Offer. “He is a man who makes a closed -door decision.”
The AIPI has a meeting scheduled from June 25, during which members should vote on the recommendations for vaccines for covid, flu, meningococcal disease, VRS and other diseases.
Dr. Brewer said the AICPI had some of the “best scientists in the world”, adding that the secretary would find it difficult to find this caliber of short -term experts.
The BBC has contacted the American Department of Health and Social Services and the president of the AIPI, Dr. Helen Keipp Talbot, to comment.