During his Senate confirmation hearings for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went to great lengths to downplay his previous anti-vaccine positions to try to assure the public that he wasn’t as extreme as his record indicated. But now that he has unveiled new members of an important vaccine advisory committee, his long-held extremism is not only coming back into full view, it’s also being operationalized.
On Monday, Kennedy removed all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, which is made up of medical and public health experts and advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As NBC News reports, this committee makes “recommendations to the CDC about who should get certain vaccines, including the schedule for childhood vaccinations.” These recommendations are then adopted by medical professionals and insurers.
The panel’s recommendations could affect how health insurance companies cover vaccines.
Kennedy justified the move by alleging that the experts on the panel were all compromised by financial conflicts of interest. But the claim looked like a dubious pretext for clearing the way for a new panel. As NBC News reports, “Members of ACIP, who undergo an extensive vetting process before they are appointed, are required to disclose conflicts of interest and recuse themselves from voting on vaccines for which conflicts exist.” Sean O’Leary, chair of the infectious disease committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics, who serves as a liaison to the committee from the pediatric academy, told The New York Times that the idea that the old committee’s decisions were influenced by financial conflicts of interest was “factually incorrect, and you can look at the record to see that.” He called Kennedy’s firings “manufactured chaos.”
Kennedy’s vision came into clearer view on Wednesday when he announced eight new people to serve on ACIP’s board, including several experts with questionable or outright dangerous track records on vaccinations or public health recommendations. They include:
- Robert Malone, a physician-scientist and biochemist whom The New York Times has described as a “misinformation star,” in part because of his record of misleadingly questioning the dangers of Covid and the safety of Covid vaccines.
- Vicky Pebsworth, the director of research and patient safety at the National Vaccine Information Center, which NBC News reports is “considered a leading source of misinformation about vaccines.”
- Cody Meissner, a Dartmouth pediatrics professor who was a signer of the Great Barrington Declaration, the statement that opposed lockdowns during the Covid pandemic.
- Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. NBC News reports that he “has called for an end to Covid vaccinations, claiming mRNA vaccines cause serious harm and death, especially among young people.”
- Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and biostatistician who was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Kennedy didn’t pick random people off the internet; they have credentials, often at highly esteemed institutions, although some of these academic backgrounds apparently deviate from the kind one typically expects for this panel. But many public health experts and those who keep a close eye on vaccine skeptics and anti-vaxxers note that Kennedy appears to be putting together a slate of experts who skew ideologically against consensus and near-consensus views on vaccine safety and efficacy.
“Kennedy did not pick people with strong, current expertise in vaccines,” Dorit Reiss, a professor at UC Law San Francisco who studies vaccine policy, told NPR. “It tells me that Kennedy is setting up a committee that would be skeptical of vaccines, and possibly willing to implement an anti-vaccine agenda.”
David Mansdoerfer, who served as deputy assistant secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services in the first Trump administration, called Kennedy’s announcement “a huge win for the medical freedom movement.” It’s not yet clear how the advisory board will rule on vaccine recommendations in the future. But the real-world effects of this could be significant. As The New York Times notes, the panel’s recommendations, which don’t have to be adopted by the CDC but typically are, can affect how strongly doctors recommend vaccinations. If the panel’s recommendations skew away from recommending vaccines, then it could mean that physicians might be more hesitant to counsel patients to take vaccines that have long been proved to be safe. Furthermore, the panel’s recommendations could affect how health insurance companies cover vaccines. “Right now, insurance companies cover the four-dose polio series. But without an A.C.I.P. recommendation, the shots might cost you more than $300,” the Times reports. We still don’t know how this newly formed panel will play out. But contrary to Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” mantra, all indications so far are that Kennedy is laser-focused on advancing activist goals that will make our society less healthy.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
