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“We are committed to ongoing coverage of vaccines to ensure access and affordability for this respiratory virus season,” the statement continued. “We encourage all Americans to talk to their health care provider about vaccines.”
ACIP made headlines in early June when RFK Jr. fired all 17 of its members and replaced them with eight new appointees. (The HHS secretary appoints the committee’s members, but conventionally they serve fixed 4-year terms.) These new appointees include Retsef Levi, who has stated—in the face of scientific consensus—that mRNA vaccines are deadly, and Robert Malone, who routinely shares articles about supposed links between cancer and the Covid vaccine, which no credible research has found to exist. Neither Levi nor Malone replied to a request for comment.
Michael A. Ross, another recently appointed committee member, resigned from ACIP during a review of his financial holdings, the New York Times reported on June 24. When introducing his new ACIP appointees in a post on X earlier in June, RFK Jr. had described Ross as a faculty member at George Washington and Virginia Commonwealth universities—but spokespeople for the universities told NBC News4 that Ross had not taught at either in years. Ross did not reply to a request for comment.
The committee made news again on June 25 when, during its first meeting of the year, it announced it would form a working group to review the recommended immunization schedule for children and teens.
“The number of vaccines that our children and adolescents receive today exceed what children in most other developed nations receive, and what most of us in this room received when we [were] children,” ACIP chair Martin Kulldorff said during the meeting.
He noted that the group would examine the “cumulative effect” of the recommended vaccine schedule, including interactions between vaccines, the total number of vaccines given, their timing, and recipients’ exposure to vaccine ingredients.
But the process for adding vaccines to the schedule is already rigorous. Before a vaccine can receive FDA licensure, its manufacturer must prove it does not negatively affect the safety or immune response of other vaccines administered at the same time on the schedule, says Paul Offit, director of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Vaccine Education Center.
In addition, “the notion that these vaccines are somehow weakening your immune system or overwhelming your immune system is fanciful,” Offit says. Today, children are exposed to fewer viral or bacterial proteins in the first few years of the vaccine schedule than those in earlier generations. When Offit’s parents received the smallpox vaccine, they were exposed to 200 proteins in a single shot. In contrast, the measles vaccine only contains 10.
During the meeting, Kulldorff repeated claims he made in 2024 that he was fired from Harvard because he refused to get the Covid vaccine; he and Malone have also each served as paid expert witnesses in two separate suits against Merck over the safety of the company’s HPV vaccine and its mumps vaccine, respectively. Kulldorff did not reply to a request for comment.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) did not send representatives to last week’s ACIP meeting, as it typically does. According to Academy president Susan Kressly, this was because the AAP believes the vaccine recommendation process lost credibility when its original membership was gutted by Kennedy.
“We won’t lend our name or our expertise to a system that is being politicized at the expense of children’s health,” Kressly said in a video posted online before the meeting was set to begin. The AAP did not reply to a request for comment about the video.
The most recent child immunization schedule that the AAP endorses, from November 2024, is posted on the AAP website. A newer one, posted on the CDC site, has already changed recommendations. It no longer lists as “routine” Covid vaccines for children under 18 who are not immunocompromised, but instead lists them under vaccines recommended for “shared clinical decision-making,” informed by “personal preference and circumstances.” The change should not affect insurance coverage.
