RFK Jr. picks new members of influential vaccine committee after purge

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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named eight people to the influential federal panel that recommends vaccines to Americans on Wednesday, elevating several vaccine critics days after he purged the group’s entire membership.

His picks for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices include a well-known pediatric infectious-diseases expert and at least three people who have criticized the use of mRNA coronavirus vaccines. Some of the more notable selections include Martin Kulldorff, the co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for herd immunity through mass covid infection in 2020, and Vicky Pebsworth, who is listed on the board of the nation’s oldest anti-vaccine group.

“All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense,” Kennedy said in an X post on Wednesday announcing the picks. “They have each committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations.”

The other new members are: Joseph R. Hibbeln, a psychiatrist; Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management; Robert W. Malone, a biochemist; Cody Meissner, a pediatrician; James Pagano, an emergency medicine physician; and Michael A. Ross, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology.

Kulldorff and Hibbeln declined to comment. Malone told The Washington Post he was honored to be selected but declined to answer additional questions. Kennedy’s other picks did not immediately return requests for comment.

Malone, a controversial scientist, is an ally of Kennedy’s who was at the unveiling of the Make America Healthy Again report at the White House last month.

Malone previously sued The Post, alleging defamation over the newspaper’s reporting on his advocacy against the coronavirus vaccine. The case was dismissed in 2023.

The selections come after Kennedy on Monday ousted 17 independent vaccine experts who advise the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He said the vaccine committee, which he has criticized for years, has been “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest” and has become a “rubber stamp” for vaccines.

The new composition of the panel signals Kennedy’s plan for U.S. vaccination policy, experts said. The committee’s decisions shape which vaccines are administered and to whom – and whether they’ll be free and covered by insurance.

Public health advocates raised concerns about the future of vaccination under the new committee.

“He is appointing a group of covid contrarians,” said Richard Pan, a pediatrician and former California state lawmaker who often sparred with anti-vaccine activists. “They have and will undermine trust in vaccination.”

A spokesman for Kennedy did not immediately return a request for comment on the criticisms of the new ACIP members. In an unrelated news conference Tuesday, Kennedy said the group would not be “anti-vaxxers.”

Some of the selections have track records of opposing public health guidance on vaccines.

Pebsworth, who has also served on the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, had repeatedly expressed concerns about potential harms from coronavirus vaccination. According to her biography on the anti-vaccine group National Vaccine Information Center’s website, she has worked with the group “since 2006 on vaccine safety analytical and education projects.” The organization says it promotes informed consent instead of making “vaccine use recommendations.”

Kulldorff has said he was fired from his position as a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School over his refusal to get the coronavirus vaccine, which he has advocated against. In a 2021 op-ed co-written with the now head of the National Institutes of Health Jay Bhattacharya, Kulldorff wrote: “The widespread use of vaccines against polio, measles, mumps, rubella, rabies and other pathogens has saved millions of lives. … Those pushing for coercive Covid vaccination threaten all this progress by undermining public trust in vaccines.”

Levi, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has been highly critical of mRNA vaccines and tweeted in January 2023 that “the evidence is mounting and indisputable that MRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death, especially among young people. We have to stop giving them immediately!”

Some public health advocates who criticized Kennedy’s other picks for ACIP offered a more positive assessment of Meissner, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. He has served on FDA and CDC vaccine advisory committees.

In an interview with The Post in February, Meissner praised measles vaccination and criticized the Biden administration’s universal recommendation for coronavirus vaccines, including for healthy younger people.

Kennedy has sought to change the membership of the vaccine panel since shortly after taking office, said Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine and public health at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine and former CDC medical officer who gave Kennedy recommendations in mid-February.

“He wanted highly credentialed, non-conflicted scientists and doctors who can look at data and make recommendations objectively,” Klausner said. He recalled Kennedy rejecting two names on the list, calling one “too much of an industry shill” and the other “clearly anti-vax.”

Klausner declined to identify the two individuals. A spokesman for Kennedy did not return a request for comment on Klausner’s account.

Klausner said the only ACIP nominee who raised concerns for him was Malone, who has disparaged coronavirus vaccination, raising concerns about its effectiveness and side effects.

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Malone “worked to undermine confidence in covid vaccination – which has saved hundreds of thousands of U.S. lives – and has actively contributed to vaccine hesitancy,” Klausner said.

Malone has previously called those critiques “attacks.”

A document that HHS sent Tuesday to health officials and dozens of organizations before the new members were announced stated that Kennedy’s decision to remove the previous panel members does not affect insurance coverage of vaccines, the childhood vaccine schedule, programs that rely on the committee’s recommendations or the panel’s procedures.

Kennedy has said the panel’s June 25-27 meeting will go forward as scheduled. Recommendation votes are scheduled for coronavirus, influenza, meningococcal, HPV and RSV vaccines for adults, pregnant women and infants. A quorum of at least eight ACIP members is required to hold a vote.

Kennedy has blasted the committee for never voting against vaccines.

But the panel has voted to reverse vaccine recommendations based on safety data showing elevated risks of serious complications, including the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine and a rotavirus vaccine.

The panel also has changed an initial recommendation to use a nasal spray as the preferred way to protect children against the flu, after data showed that method was no longer more effective than shots, said Jamie Loehr, a family physician in New York ousted from the committee.

“The whole goal is to have evidence that the vaccines work and are protecting people,” said Loehr, who had served as a voting member of the panel since 2021.

Medical and professional organizations condemned Kennedy for purging the committee, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, the American Association of Immunologists, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the American Nurses Association.

The American College of Physicians issued a statement Wednesday evening calling for Kennedy to halt the appointments and restore the previous committee members. “The speed with which these members were selected, and the lack of transparency in the process, does not help to restore public confidence and trust,” said Jason Goldman, the group’s president.

On Tuesday, the AMA, at its annual meeting, called for Kennedy to immediately reverse his decision and called for a Senate investigation into his actions.

Nomination to serve on the vaccine committee has traditionally followed months of vetting, members have said. Under the ACIP charter, members should have expertise in immunization practices or public health, clinical experience using vaccines or a background researching them. The committee is also supposed to include a member who brings a consumer perspective to vaccine policy.

Kennedy has accused ACIP members of having conflicts of interest, pointing to previous government reports about them having financial stakes in their decisions.

Members declare conflicts of interest stemming from their past work with vaccine makers at the start of meetings and recuse themselves from votes that could benefit the companies to which they had financial ties.

In March, the CDC unveiled a tool to make it easier to see and search the relationships with vaccine manufacturers for potential conflicts disclosed by ACIP members and votes they recused themselves from as a result.

Since taking over as the nation’s top health official in February, Kennedy has pushed back against establishment vaccine policy in the United States. He pushed out the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine scientist and hired a vaccine skeptic to evaluate vaccine safety data. He has raised questions about how the U.S. tests vaccines and unilaterally announced that federal health officials would no longer recommend coronavirus vaccines for healthy children and healthy pregnant women.