Two weeks of upheaval at the CDC culminated Monday in the complete reconstitution of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices as HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pens op-ed criticizing “conflicts of interest” he says exist on the current committee.
Not 24 hours after news broke that four members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices had their status as special government employees terminated, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is making a clean sweep of ACIP—"retiring” all 17 committee members.
“A clean sweep is necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science,” Kennedy said in a statement released by HHS Monday afternoon announcing what the department called a ‘bold step.’ “ACIP new members will prioritize public health and evidence-based medicine. The committee will no longer function as a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas.”
In an opinion piece penned by Kennedy and published Monday in The Wall Street Journal, the secretary stated that “without removing the current [ACIP] members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028.”
In the opening lines of his op-ed, Kennedy said “the U.S. faces a crisis of public trust,” a narrative both Kennedy and his staff, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and Center for Evaluation and Research Director Vinay Prasad have also driven. Kennedy, in particular, has focused on advisory committees, and he reiterated this stance on Monday in the opinion, writing: “The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.”
Kennedy added that the ACIP “has never recommended against a vaccine—even those later withdrawn for safety reasons.”
The upheaval at the CDC has been brewing for a couple of weeks now. Late last month, Kennedy, flanked by Makary and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, announced via video on X that CDC would no longer be recommending COVID-19 vaccination for healthy children or pregnant women. Last week, ACIP co-lead Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos resigned in protest, writing in an email to colleagues her belief that she was “no longer able to help the most vulnerable members” of the U.S. population. Then, on Sunday, STAT News reported that four members of the ACIP had lost their status as special government employees.
“Everyone is hoping that this was inadvertent, but concerned it may have been deliberate,” one person associated with the ACIP, who requested not to be named for fear of reprisal, told the publication.
Now, the entire committee is gone.
It’s exactly what Truist Securities analysts feared as Kennedy was undergoing his Senate confirmation hearings. “Replacing panel members with those aligning with anti-vax rhetoric could be a way to redirect public health policies,” they wrote in February.
Now, the industry will wait to see who Kennedy ultimately selects to replace the ousted ACIP members. BMO Capital Markets analysts predicted that “new appointees [are] likely to be more critical of future recommendations” and said the move “reads as a broad negative to our coverage in the vaccine space,” specifically naming Merck, Pfizer and BioNTech as companies most likely to be hit by the development. That said, the true impacts of the ACIP cuts “remain TBD,” the group wrote in a Monday evening note to investors.
“Full removal of ACIP committee adds another negative headwind to vaccine manufacturers, but we expect most impacts to be broadly muted,” BMO said, noting little stock movement after hours on Monday. “Although today’s announcement introduces some new uncertainty for the sector, we underscore for investors that this likely represents more headline risk than a true fundamental change at the agency.”
