Emergency room doctor, critic COVID-19 Vaccine And obstetricians who advise supplement companies Vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and provides vaccine advice to the federal government.
Kennedy announced the new roster of the Advisory Committee on Impacting Practices (ACIP) on June 11th. This comes just two days after firing all 17 previous members and accusing ACIP of “malicious misconduct.” ACIP advises US civil servants who should receive the approved vaccine, when and when. These recommendations are often used to guide whether public and private health insurance programs will pay for shots.
Kennedy has pledged that ACIP will reevaluate its vaccine “scheduling” for children. This week’s committee reforms are “a big step towards restoring public confidence in vaccines,” Kennedy said in a post on his social media platform.
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Several new ACIP members have expressed general support for the vaccine. But many of them also express skepticism. He served on the board of anti-vaccination organizations, and the second was a prominent skeptic of the Covid-19 vaccine on social media. As First reported by a biomedical news outlet statisticsKennedy included four new committee members in his dedication to the 2021 book. The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, The Earth War on Democracy and Public Health.
“This is a public health disaster,” says Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease doctor in New York City. “It could put us backwards for decades.” HHS did not respond to requests for comment prior to publication.
A broad meaning
Infectious disease experts are worried about the implications that ACIP may vote to recommend a lower vaccine or a lower dose than current advice. Paul Offit, a pediatrician with infectious diseases at the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital and co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine who worked for ACIP from 1998 to 2003, says there is no need to cover vaccines that ACIP does not recommend. And he adds, “The doctor or pharmacist who gives the vaccine may feel they are responsible for giving it the vaccine,” he adds.
Arthur Reingold, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said that without an ACIP recommendation, even those who can pay for the vaccine may find it difficult to get without an ACIP recommendation. It could lead some pharmacies to stop raising them.
Offitt said at the next ACIP meeting, which begins June 25th, the panel will decide whether to recommend a vaccine for Covid-19, human papillomavirus, meningococcal disease and RSV. “These are established vaccines, and are we voting for them?” Offitt says. “The entire childhood and adult vaccination schedule is on the table.”
Kennedy criticized ACIP for what he said was rampant conflicts of interest among its members. June 12th, Biopharma News Outlet’s endpoint news was Two newly named ACIP members, Robert Malone and Martin Krudolph, have been paid for service as expert witnesses In a lawsuit against Merck, a pharmaceutical company that exceeds two vaccines. Malone I said in x This work was completed six years ago.
Kennedy also said past committee members did not require what they consider to be an appropriate safety trial with a control group that received a placebo before recommending the vaccine.
But many vaccine studies included placebo controls, Latner says, unless it’s unethical to conduct one trial. And Reingold, who previously worked for ACIP, says the committee has strict policies on conflicts of interest, and committee members must reject themselves from votes that could cause conflict. “The issue of potential conflicts of interest is fundamentally exaggerated and the objectivity of this panel is questioned,” he says.
Offit says several independent groups have reviewed previous ACIP members and found no conflict of interest. “Now these people are grateful to RFK JR, so the conflict of interest is genuine.
Review process
Researchers are also concerned about loss of expertise. The committee’s new lineup is “intrusive,” says Nancy Bennett, a public health expert at Rochester University Medical Center in New York.
In the past, members have been appointed, and then staff from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been sent to the head of the CDC, and finally the head of the HHS has been sought for approval. Bennett says the review process took years. “ACIP was intended to be made up of people with deep expertise in the area,” says Ratner. “That’s what we lost.”
Joseph Hibel
Hibbeln is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who once worked at the National Institutes of Health. His recent paper focuses on the relationship between nutrition and a variety of disorders, including mental health, and his LinkedIn profile states that 21st century diets are “inadequate in brain nutrients and likely to contribute to the high burden of mental illness around the world.” A search of PubMed, a database of biomedical papers, did not publish any papers he wrote about vaccines or infectious diseases. He did not respond to requests for comment.
Martin Kruldorf
Kruldorf is a Swedish epidemiologist and senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute, based in West Hartford, Connecticut, and was formed to oppose it “providing an independent voice for individual freedom.” Lockdown policy established by civil servants during the Covid-19 pandemic. With Jayanta Bhattacharya, current head of the US National Institutes of Healthwritten by Kruldorf The Great Barrington Declaration 2020, This has been proposed against the Covid-19 lockdown, except for vulnerable groups.and brought many pushbacks out of the medical world.
last year, Kulldorff wrote City Journal He was fired from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts for refusing to receive the Covid-19 vaccine despite being immune from his already infected. He also wrote, “Vaccinations are an essential medical invention and can gain immunity without the risk of arising from getting sick,” but suggested that early Covid-19 vaccine trials during the pandemic were not properly designed. Kulldorff did not respond NatureRequest a comment.
retsef levi
Levi is a professor of operational management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He has published several papers on Covid-19. This raises concerns about the side effects of the Covid-19 vaccine. In a 2023 post on social media platform X, Levi said: “There is growing evidence that mRNA vaccines cause serious harm, including death, especially among young people, and it is uncontroversial. Levi did not respond to a request for comment.
Robert Malone
Malone is Doctors and scientists whose research contributed to the development of mRNA vaccines. He claims he has not received the credit worthy of his role, but in a 2023 video, he said that the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine will damage children’s organs and will not benefit children.
He was promoted again Ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug for treating Covid-19.Attaching evidence indicates it is ineffective. Malone declined to comment, but in an emailed statement he said he “will do his best to serve with unbiased objectivity and rigor.”
Cody Meissner
Meissner researches pediatrics at Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and serves on multiple federal committees on vaccines. He was a member of ACIP from 2008 to 2012. He highlighted the importance of the Covid-19 vaccine in 2021, saying, “The main message we send is that everyone has to get two doses.” In 2021, he co-authored commentary for a newspaper that opposed it. Mask Mandate For the children, he expressed skepticism about the benefits of repeated Covid-19 booster shots for children. He did not respond to requests for comment.
James Pagano
Now retired, Pagano works as an emergency medical doctor and medical director for emergency rooms. Kennedy described him as “a powerful advocate of evidence-based medicine.” He published two fiction books on hospital doctors and wrote a blog post in 2014 questioning whether climate change is a reality. His public records regarding vaccines are thin. He did not respond to requests for comment.
Vicki Pebworth
Pebsworth is a nurse, health administrator and health politics analyst who is a voting member of the FDA Advisory Committee on Vaccines. She is also a volunteer at the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a nonprofit organization that highlights the risks of vaccines and informs them of “biological mechanisms involved in vaccine damage and death.” Her NVIC profile says her interest in vaccine safety began after her son “received seven live viruses and killed a bacterial vaccine administered during a 15-month well visit,” and then experienced long-term health issues. Pebworth was part of the FDA’s National Vaccine Advisory Committee working group that monitors the safety and potential risks of post-market vaccines. In 2020, she told the FDA committee that the NVIC position “using coercion and sanctions it was unethical and illegal to persuade adults to take experimental vaccines or give them to children.” First reported by CBS. She did not respond to requests for comment.
Michael Ross
Ross is obstetrician and chief medical officer at Manta Pharmama, an implantable device company in Maryland. He is an executive and advisor for almost 12 pharmaceutical and medical device companies, including LarreArx, which distributes herbal supplements. Ross was the presidential appointee of the CDC Committee on Breast Cancer Prevention and was a professor at George Washington University and a professor for 46 years. His LinkedIn profile lists his specialties as “Contact lenses, International Business, Healthcare, Drug Enforcement Management, and Drug Consulting.” He did not respond to requests for comment.
This article was reproduced with permission and was First published June 12, 2025.
