By Josh Nathan-Kazis

Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. health secretary, plans to announce new appointees to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's vaccine advisory panel "over the coming days," after firing all of its members late Monday.

With just two weeks to go until the panel's next scheduled meeting, Kennedy is under pressure to keep some semblance of the U.S. vaccine regulatory structure intact. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices determines how vaccines are used in the U.S., and doctors, insurers, and patients all rely on its guidance.

Quickly replacing the fired members of the committee would compress an appointment process that can take as long as two years into just a number of days. The process ordinarily includes extensive vetting for conflicts of interest.

"None of these individuals will be ideological anti-vaxxers," Kennedy wrote Tuesday evening on X. "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 characterization appears to be an attempt to reassure Republican allies, notably Sen. Bill Cassidy, a powerful Republican from Louisiana. Cassidy, who publicly wavered on supporting Kennedy's nomination to run the Department of Health and Human Services, said on the Senate floor in February that Kennedy had committed to maintaining ACIP "without changes."

The Monday firings seemed an obvious betrayal of that commitment.

Cassidy, in a post on X late Monday, wrote that "the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion." He said he had just spoken with Kennedy. "I'll continue to talk with him to ensure this is not the case," he wrote.

One question is whether credentialed experts will be willing to serve on the reconstituted ACIP, given Kennedy's repeated attacks on the body and its work. Kennedy continued those attacks on ACIP in his Tuesday post, referring to its "malevolent malpractice" and its "historical corruption." Kennedy condemned the committee in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Monday night, with a mix of true and untrue charges.

The next scheduled meeting of ACIP is on June 25. As of Wednesday morning, the committee has no known members.

The committee's official policies and procedures describe an extensive appointment process, involving solicitations, considerations by various committees, approvals, a vetting process to identify conflicts of interest, and orientation and training.

One of the ACIP members fired on Monday, University of Washington professor Dr. Helen Chu, told the healthcare news organization STAT in an interview published Tuesday that her application and vetting process took two years.

The Department of Health and Human Services didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about how Kennedy will fill the panel over the "coming days," as he said in his post, while still conducting sufficient vetting.

The disruption to ACIP, and the broader system by which the U.S. regulates vaccines, comes in the absence of a CDC director. President Donald Trump nominated Susan Monarez to lead the agency in late March, after abruptly pulling the nomination of a former congressman with a history of vaccine skepticism less than an hour before his nomination hearing was set to start.

Thus far, no hearing has been scheduled to consider Monarez's nomination. In the meantime, the position is vacant, and there is no acting director.

Vaccine stocks fell Tuesday, following the late Monday announcement. Moderna dropped 1.6%, while Novavax fell 2.8%.

Also on Tuesday, the top leaders of the Food and Drug Administration published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association laying out their priorities for their agency. At the top of the list was moving faster on drug-approval decisions. Vaccines were one issue they didn't mention.

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 11, 2025 10:20 ET (14:20 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.