While the first meeting of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s reshuffled Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) didn’t yield any votes Wednesday, comments from the panel’s new chair made it clear that changes could be coming for U.S. vaccine policy, especially as it pertains to kids.
The ACIP, which helps guide the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on how best to implement approved vaccines, will create two new work groups to examine the cumulative effect of childhood vaccine schedules and assess shots that haven’t been subject to review in more than seven years, the committee’s newly appointed chair, Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., said at the top of a two-day ACIP meeting that started Wednesday.
ACIP work groups act as subcommittees that are tasked with reviewing data to help inform the decisions of the federal vaccine panel’s voting members. Prior to Wednesday, the ACIP counted 11 work groups among its ranks, including a group focused on combined child, adolescent and adult immunization schedules.
“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,” Kulldorff said during the meeting.
“In addition to studying and evaluating individual vaccines, it is important to evaluate the cumulative effect of the recommended vaccine schedule,” he added. “This includes interaction effects between different vaccines, the total number of vaccines, cumulative amount of vaccine ingredients and relative timing of different vaccines.”
To that end, the ACIP will establish a dedicated work group to evaluate childhood and adolescent vaccine schedules, he explained.
The move aligns with RFK Jr.’s frequent calls to investigate the number of vaccines children receive. During RFK Jr.’s first address to Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) employees in February, the noted vaccine skeptic told agency staffers that the newly minted Make America Healthy Again Commission would consider no topic off limits in its mission to determine the causes behind a “drastic rise in chronic disease” in the country.
Among the topics on the table, RFK Jr. singled out childhood vaccine schedules and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors as well as electromagnetic radiation, the herbicide glyphosate, microplastics and ultra-processed foods.
Meanwhile, apart from the childhood vaccine schedule group, the ACIP will also convene a new work group to evaluate vaccines “that have not been subject to review in more than seven years,” Kulldorff said during Wednesday’s meeting.
“This was supposed to be a regular practice of the ACIP, but it has not been done in a thorough and systematic way,” he explained. “We will change that. We are learning more about vaccines over time, and to stay true to evidence-based medicine, we have a duty and a responsibility to keep up to date with scientific research to make sure that ACIP recommendations are optimal for both individuals and public health.”
Kulldorff noted that, among other immunizations, the new group could look at hepatitis B shots given to infants at birth and whether it might be preferable to recommend separate measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) and varicella vaccines rather than a combination shot targeting all four maladies.
The group may also consider “optimal timing of the MMR vaccine to resolve religious objections that some parents have,” Kulldorff added.
As of Wednesday, it wasn't immediately clear whether the new work groups were fully staffed. ACIP work groups must be chaired by a committee member.
RFK Jr. appointed eight new members to the ACIP roughly two weeks ago following his firing of all 17 former sitting members in early June. One of those eight members has already withdrawn from the panel and is no longer a voting member of the ACIP, an HHS spokesperson confirmed Wednesday.
Some of RFK Jr.’s picks to fill out the ACIP immediately proved controversial given certain panelists’ skeptical views on vaccines and criticism of government policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, Kulldorff stressed that collaboration between the new panelists and the CDC’s work groups is paramount.
“While we may bring different perspectives on some issues, we look very much forward to working collaboratively with the current members of existing work groups, as well as with scientists here at CDC," Kulldorff said. “We share the same goal: the improvement of public health that can only be achieved through close collaboration, open discussions and, most importantly, with evidence-based medicine.”
Wednesday’s meeting was something of a trial run for the new-look ACIP, and scheduling hiccups prevented the panel from delivering a planned vote on infant respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine recommendations before the meeting adjourned for the day.
After touching on RSV and COVID-19 vaccines during the first day, the panel will reconvene for Wednesday’s scheduled vote Thursday and dive into a number of other topics around immunizations for influenza, chikungunya, anthrax and more.
In opening Wednesday’s meeting, Kulldorff—who co-authored an open letter criticizing lockdowns and other public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic—was quick to address the controversy around federal health agency overhauls taking place under the second Trump administration.
“Some media outlets have been very harsh on the new members of this committee, issuing false accusations and making concerted efforts to put scientists in either a pro- or anti-vaccine box,” Kulldorff explained. “Such labels undermine critical scientific inquiry, and it further feeds the flames of vaccine hesitancy.”
That said, some medical organizations are already distancing themselves from the overhauled panel. Wednesday, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said it could no longer support the committee following the staff shake-up.
“We won’t lend our name or our expertise to a system that is being politicized at the expense of children’s health,” AAP President Susan Kressly, M.D., said in a video posted on X. Instead, the organization will continue to publish its own immunization schedule as it has since the 1930s.