Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, named eight new vaccine advisers this week to a critical Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) panel after firing all 17 experts who had held the roles.
New members of the panel include experts who complained about being sidelined, a high-profile figure who has spread misinformation and medical professionals who appear to have little vaccine expertise. Kennedy made the announcement on social media.
“All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense,” Kennedy said in his announcement. “They have each committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations.”
Formally called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the panel advises the CDC on how vaccines should be distributed. Those recommendations effectively determine the vaccines Americans can access. This week, Kennedy also removed the career officials typically tasked with vetting ACIP members and overseeing the advisory group, according to CBS News.
Kennedy is a widely known vaccine skeptic who profited from suing vaccine manufacturers, has taken increasingly dramatic steps to upend US vaccine policy.
“ACIP is widely regarded as the international gold standard for vaccine decision-making,” said Helen Chu, one of the fired advisers, at a press conference with Patty Murray, a Democratic US senator.
“We cannot replace it with a process driven by one person’s beliefs. In the absence of an independent unbiased ACIP, we can no longer trust that safe and effective vaccines will be available to us and the people around us.”
Robert W Malone
Arguably the most high profile new member, Robert W Malone catapulted to stardom during the Covid-19 pandemic, appearing across rightwing media to criticize the Biden administration while describing himself as the inventor of mRNA technology.
Messenger RNA technology powers the most widely used Covid-19 vaccines. While Malone was involved in very early experiments on the technology, researchers have said his role was limited.
Malone’s star rose quickly after appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast in 2022, where he and Rogan were criticized for spreading misinformation. On the show, Malone promoted the idea that both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine could be possible treatments for Covid-19, but said research on the drugs was being suppressed. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have not been shown to improve outcomes from Covid-19.
“Malone has a well-documented history of promoting conspiracy theories,” said Dr Jeffrey D Klausner, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at the University of Southern California, who recently told the New York Times he was in touch with Kennedy about his appointments.
Martin Kulldorff
Kulldorff is a former Harvard professor of biostatistics and an infectious disease epidemiologist originally from Sweden. He said in an essay for the rightwing publication City Journal that he was fired because he refused to be vaccinated in line with the school policy.
Like Malone, he rose to prominence during the pandemic as a “Covid contrarian” who criticized the scientific consensus – views he said alienated him from his peers in the scientific community. He voiced his opposition to Covid-19 vaccine mandates and, in his essay, complained of being ignored by media and shadow-banned from Twitter.
Kulldorff co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for limited closures instead of pandemic lockdowns before vaccines were available. The document became a touchstone for the American political right.
Prior to the pandemic, Kulldorff studied vaccine safety and infectious disease, including co-authoring papers with members of CDC staff, such as on the Vaccine Safety Datalink. He was a member of the CDC’s Covid Vaccine Safety Working Group in 2020, but said later he was fired because he disagreed with the agency’s decision to pause Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine and with Covid -19 vaccine mandates. He served on the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) drug safety and risk management advisory committee around the same time.
He has since enjoyed support from people already within the administration, including Great Barrington Declaration co-author Dr Jay Bhattacharya, current head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Dr Vinay Prasad, head of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which handles vaccines.
Cody Meissner
Meissner is a professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. He previously held advisory roles at the FDA and CDC, including ACIP from 2008-2012.
In 2021, Meissner co-wrote an editorial with Dr Marty Makary, now the head of the FDA, which criticized mask mandates for children. In April, he was listed as an external adviser to ACIP on the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) committee.
Notably, Meissner is listed in a new conflicts of interest tool launched by the health department in March. Kennedy had criticized the fired ACIP members as “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest”.
“He’s a card-carrying infectious disease person who knows the burden of these diseases, and he knows the risk and the benefit,” Dr Kathryn Edwards told CBS News. Edwards previously served as chair of the FDA’s vaccine advisory panel.
Vicky Pebsworth
Pebsworth is a nurse and the former consumer representative on the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee. She is also the Pacific regional director for the National Association of Catholic Nurses, according to Kennedy’s announcement.
In 2020, Pebsworth spoke at the public comment portion of an FDA advisory panel meeting on Covid-19 vaccines. There, she identified herself as the volunteer research director for the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), “and the mother of a child injured by his 15-month well-baby shots in 1998”.
The NVIC is widely viewed as an anti-vaccine advocacy organization “whose founder Barbara Lou Fisher must be considered a key figure of the anti-vaccine movement”, according to an article from 2023 on how to counter anti-vaccine misinformation.
Retsef Levi
Levi is a professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management who Kennedy described as an “expert in healthcare analytics, risk management and vaccine safety”.
In 2021, he opposed Covid-19 booster shot approval during the public comment portion of an FDA advisory committee hearing. In 2022, he wrote an article calling for EMS calls to be incorporated into vaccine safety data, arguing that cardiovascular side effects could be undercounted – an article that later required correction. The potential effects of Covid-19 vaccines on heart health have been a focal point of right-leaning criticism.
Last month, Levi was criticized for publishing a pre-print paper – a paper without peer review – that he co-authored with Dr Joseph Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general, a vaccine skeptic. The paper alleged that people who took the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine were more likely to die than those who received the Moderna vaccine.
Michael A Ross
Kennedy described Ross as “a Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University, with a career spanning clinical medicine, research, and public health policy”.
However, as first reported by CBS News, Ross’s name does not appear in faculty directories for either school. A spokesperson for George Washington University told the outlet that Ross did work as a clinical professor, but “has not held a faculty appointment … since 2017”.
A spokesperson for Virginia Commonwealth University described Ross as “an affiliate faculty member” at a regional hospital system in the Capitol region.
He is also listed as a partner at Havencrest Capital Management, as a board member of “multiple private healthcare companies”.
Joseph R Hibbeln
Hibbeln is a California-based psychiatrist who previously served as acting chief for the Section of Nutritional Neurosciences at the NIH. He describes himself as an expert on omega-3, a fatty acid found in seafood.
He also serves on the advisory council of a non-profit that advocates for Americans to eat more seafood. He practices at Barton Health, a hospital system in Lake Tahoe, California. His work influenced US public health guidelines on fish consumption during pregnancy.
Dr James Pagano
Pagano is an emergency medicine physician from Los Angeles “with over 40 years of clinical experience”, and a “strong advocate for evidence-based medicine”, according to Kennedy.
