A doctor who falsely claimed that Covid was a U.S.-made bioweapon and that Covid vaccines cause cancer, miscarriage and widespread heart disease is leading a federal panel likely to implement sweeping changes to the childhood vaccine schedule this week.
Kirk Milhoan — a pediatric cardiologist and church pastor tapped by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP — will preside over the committee later this week as it considers key changes to the national childhood vaccine schedule. He replaces Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician who stepped down this week to take on the role of chief science officer at HHS.
At meetings on Thursday and Friday, the committee will consider a slate of changes to the CDC’s current vaccine schedule, including whether to continue its recommendation that infants receive a hepatitis B shot at birth — a vaccine that has prevented hundreds of thousands of childhood infections. Experts warn that without the birth dose, hepatitis B will infect thousands of babies again each year. Most infected infants will develop chronic infection and 1 in 4 of those are at risk to die from chronic liver disease as adults.
“We have to say it out loud, this was a bioterror weapon,” Dr. Kirk Milhoan said of Covid in remarks before a Texas church congregation in October.
It wasn’t immediately clear what other changes the panel would be considering this week, or how Milhoan might affect those decisions. Milhoan told The Washington Post the committee planned to examine whether the childhood immunization schedule — and specifically aluminum salts in vaccines (a safe adjuvant that triggers an immune response) — could be causing increases in allergies and autoimmune disorders, a claim with little support that anti-vaccine activists have long touted.
Milhoan’s previous statements on Covid and vaccines raise questions about how much the panel’s recommendations might be supported by scientific fact.
“We have to say it out loud, this was a bioterror weapon,” Milhoan said of Covid in remarks before a Texas church congregation in October. “I believe what it was, it was actually a test release in Wuhan. And then there were people in Italy and there’s an exchange between Wuhan and Italy. And then it got transferred there and then it went, slowly, as respiratory viruses do, across the way. So from a medical standpoint, it was and the U.S. has to own this, because they funded it all.”
In the same remarks — first reported by Endpoints News — Milhoan compared vaccination efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic to the Holocaust and called mRNA technology “the biggest threat to humanity.” He also cautioned audience members against trusting public health experts, suggested vaccines cause miscarriages, and characterized the CDC as having blood on its hands.
“The medical establishment, the public health establishment … it has to be almost dismantled and started fresh because the corruption is so deep I can’t even tell you how deep this corruption is,” he said.
“If you get a vaccine and you’re in your first trimester, you have an 80% chance of miscarriage,” Milhoan said, and suggested that the Food and Drug Administration “hid that data.”
While Milhoan’s conspiratorial worldview surrounding Covid and its vaccines is well-established — evidenced by statements he’s delivered in dozens of podcasts, sermons and public speeches since 2020 — his views on non-mRNA vaccines for children are less clear. He did not respond to calls and emails from MS NOW requesting comment.
Milhoan, who joined the panel in September, is the latest conspiracy theorist elevated to a role in reshaping public health policy under Kennedy, who has installed loyalists committed to his anti-vaccine agenda while pushing out career scientists and physicians who refuse to go along. Anti-vaccine activists and their allies have been installed at public health agencies as senior advisers, researchers, experts, chiefs of staff and acting directors.
The ACIP panel is similarly stacked with members who favor Kennedy and his extreme ambitions. In June, Kennedy fired the 17 experts who previously made up the panel and announced they would be replaced with eight new — and mostly inexperienced — members, many of whom had publicly criticized vaccines and two who served as paid expert witnesses in legal cases against vaccine makers.
ACIP member Dr. Robert Malone, a former vaccine researcher, has spread false allegations of dangers and deaths linked to Covid vaccines, and published misinformation about recent measles outbreaks. Another member, Vicky Pebsworth, has worked for anti-vaccine groups for decades. Kulldorff, the previous chair, was one of three co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely criticized missive that advocated for allowing Covid to spread through communities and restricting public health measures such as lockdowns.
Kennedy himself has long made false claims about the supposed dangers of vaccines, claiming among other falsehoods that Covid vaccines killed more people than they saved and that childhood vaccines caused a collection of conditions from asthma to autism.
The ACIP panel’s recommendations — formerly made after rigorous debate by respected and vetted experts in their fields — used to guide federal policy. Today, under Kennedy, the panel enjoys little of its former prestige and sway.
Professional medical associations have come out against recent ACIP decisions, including recent votes that limited access to Covid vaccines and ended recommendations for a combined measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox vaccine. The American Academy of Pediatrics now boycotts meetings, and insurance companies have said they’ll continue to cover the schedule of vaccines recommended by the panel before Kennedy took over.
Milhoan, who is also a Christian pastor in Maui, Hawaii, and operates a medical nonprofit providing treatment to children in developing countries, worked against public health policy during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. He circumnavigated lockdowns and mask ordinances, and treated hundreds of patients with demonstrably ineffective treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. He was one of a handful of vocal contrarian doctors at the time who bucked general scientific consensus that vaccines were safe and lessened the severity and length of the virus, and has claimed — despite evidence to the contrary — that Covid vaccines have no benefit to healthy children.
Milhoan also participated in events organized by Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization founded and led by Kennedy until he resigned last year to run HHS. In a 2023 appearance on a Children’s Health Defense podcast, he claimed Covid vaccines were “toxic” and that evidence of their dangers were being suppressed.
Of his new post at ACIP, Milhoan said it was “a real pain in the butt.”
“Everyone hates you. And that’s not that big a deal. I’m used to having that,” he explained. “But the pain in the butt is is that they misrepresent you and then you have to do an enormous amount of work in a government that’s incredibly corrupt and incredibly inefficient. But that’s where God has me.”
Brandy Zadrozny is a senior enterprise reporter for MS NOW. She was a previously a senior enterprise reporter for NBC News, based in New York.