By Josh Nathan-Kazis

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s new vaccine advisory panel is stacked with critics of messenger RNA-based vaccines and the U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The eight appointees Kennedy named on Wednesday night replace 17 highly credentialed experts, whom he expelled early in the week from the committee that makes recommendations to the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how doctors and patients should use approved vaccines.

The reconstituted body, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, includes one scientist who was widely criticized for spreading misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic. Another appointee has been a board member of what has been widely described as an anti-vaccine group.

Not all members of the panel lack traditional qualifications. Dr. Cody Meissner, one of Kennedy's appointees, served on ACIP from 2008 to 2012. He is also a former member of the Food and Drug Administration's vaccines advisory committee and a professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.

Most of the other appointees are notable for their criticism of the Covid-19 response, or their opposition to messenger RNA-based vaccines. One, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, was a lead author, alongside National Institutes of Health director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, of the Great Barrington Declaration, a 2020 letter opposing lockdown policies.

"The list is quite disappointing," said Dr. Nancy Bennett, who chaired ACIP from 2015 to 2018, and is a professor emerita at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. "I don't think that the people on this list have the expertise to provide the leadership in vaccine policy that the ACIP has previously provided."

One of the new members, Dr. Robert Malone, is a researcher who has claimed credit for helping invent mRNA vaccines. He was widely criticized for spreading misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic, appearing on conservative talk shows to criticize the vaccine rollout and make unfounded claims about the safety of the shots.

Another of Kennedy's appointees, Vicky Pebsworth, was a member of the board of the National Vaccine Information Center as of 2022. The center has been widely described as an anti-vaccine group.

Kennedy fired all of the members of the ACIP late Monday, announcing the decision in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal. In his essay, and in the ensuing days, Kennedy condemned the panel as a "rubber stamp for any vaccine," and accused it of "historical corruption."

Patients, doctors, and insurers rely on ACIP's guidance to make decisions about who should receive which approved vaccines. Insurers' decisions about which vaccines to cover are, by law, based on ACIP's decisions. Both those factors make the committee a key element of the U.S. public health infrastructure.

Kennedy, a prominent vaccine skeptic, had pledged during his confirmation process to maintain the ACIP "without changes," according to an account that Sen. Bill Cassidy, a powerful Republican from Louisiana, gave in a speech on the Senate floor in February. The Monday firings appeared to break that pledge.

Cassidy posted on X on Monday that the "fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion." A spokesman for Cassidy didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the new ACIP members that Kennedy had announced.

"We've taken a major step back in terms of expertise, experience, and institutional memory," Dr. Paul Offit, a former ACIP member and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told Barron's. "I think where the hit is really going to come is with how the medical and scientific community views this group."

Among the eight people whom Kennedy named to ACIP, the most traditionally qualified pick is Meissner, who was on the FDA vaccine advisory committee during the pandemic and who had previously served on ACIP. During the public meetings of the FDA's advisory committee at the time, Meissner was at times an advocate for narrower recommendations for the use of the Covid-19 vaccine in children. He was a signatory to the Great Barrington Declaration.

"With the exception of Cody Meissner, I just don't think you see in these names the kind of expertise and experience that you need to get the kind of advice that the American public deserves," Offit said.

Kulldorff, the Great Barrington Declaration author, wrote in an article in City Journal in March 2024 that he was "fired" from Harvard University and from Mass General Brigham for objecting "both publicly and privately to the Covid vaccine mandates." He was a consultant to an ACIP subgroup during the pandemic, but wrote in the City Journal article that he was dismissed from that position because he "contradicted CDC policy" by publishing an op-ed that opposed the agency's decision to pause use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in early 2021.

Other new members have much smaller public profiles, but also appear to be persistent critics of the mRNA-based vaccines. One, Retsef Levi, is a professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In a video he posted to X in January 2023, and which is now his "pinned" post on the platform, he said that use of the mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines "should stop immediately."

Kennedy named the new members less than two weeks before the next scheduled meeting of the committee. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services didn't respond to a question early Wednesday about how the agency would move through the appointment process quickly while conducting sufficient vetting. Bennett told Barron's that the appointment process usually took one to two years when she was chair of the committee.

The new makeup of the committee signals a major shift in the U.S. public health bureaucracy towards the strain of vaccine skepticism endorsed by Kennedy and his allies.

"We're not the establishment anymore, they are," said Offit. "The anti-vaccine activists have been shouting from the sidelines for decades, and now they're making policy."

Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at josh.nathan-kazis@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 12, 2025 11:57 ET (15:57 GMT)

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