Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been forced to promise not to replace the 17 members of a vaccine advisory panel he purged with “ideological anti-vaxxers.”
Current and former employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been protesting and calling for Kennedy to resign after he gutted the agency’s leadership and dismissed the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, an independent panel that recommends which vaccines to approve, NBC News reported.
The American Medical Association also adopted a resolution Tuesday calling for Kennedy to reverse his decision on the ACIP and asking the Senate Health Committee to investigate the dismissals, The New York Times reported.
President Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services had claimed that all of the existing members—a group of volunteer pediatricians, geriatricians, and other vaccine experts—had conflicts of interest related to funding from pharmaceutical companies.
In a social media post on X, Kennedy said on Tuesday night that he would be announcing their replacements “over the coming days.”
“None of these individuals will be ideological anti-vaxxers,” he wrote. “They will be highly credentialed physicians and scientists who will make extremely consequential public health determinations by applying evidence-based decision-making with objectivity and common sense.”
The former environmental lawyer has long been one of the country’s most high-profile anti-vaccine crusaders. He has characterized his views as “pro-safety.”
Before he ousted the ACIP members, Kennedy forced out the top vaccine expert at the Food and Drug Administration and appointed an anti-vaxxer without a medical degree to study the “connection” between autism and vaccines.
Then he spread newer and crazier anti-vax conspiracy theories and announced the CDC would no longer recommend that healthy children and pregnant women receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
In a video posted to social media, he referred to the COVID-19 vaccine changes as “common sense.”
Studies, however, have found that unvaccinated women who contract COVID-19 are more likely to be admitted to the intensive care unit, give birth prematurely, lose their babies to stillbirth, or even die, ProPublica reported.
Officials at the CDC were reportedly blindsided by Kennedy’s announcement on the issue.
Despite his accusations about the departing ACIP members, anyone who serves on the panel must undergo a rigorous vetting process and disclose conflicts, and can’t vote on those vaccines, according to NBC.
Experts speaking to NBC questioned how members could be properly vetted within days. The Daily Beast has reached out to the Department of Health and Human Services for comment.
A new report in the Times also suggested partisan politics—not gold-standard scientific scrutiny—played a part in Kennedy’s overhaul of ACIP.
A White House official and another unnamed source told the paper that Kennedy was concerned that the members had been appointed by a Democratic president and some had made donations to Democratic candidates.
Kennedy said in Tuesday’s social media post that he would soon be sharing examples of the “historical corruption” that made the replacements necessary.
