On Wednesday, the head of the U.S. health department, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appointed eight new members to a vaccine advisory committee from which he abruptly fired all 17 experts in one go earlier this week.
He ousted the panel, known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which was predominantly comprised of practicing physicians with connections to top university medical centres, over claims that divisions among the group were undermining public trust in vaccinations.
“The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine,” he wrote in an announcement, published in The Wall Street Journal on Monday.
On Wednesday, he tapped new members to sit on the committee, among them a scientist who researched mRNA vaccine technology and became a beloved conservative commentator for his criticisms of COVID-19 vaccines, a leading critic of pandemic-era lockdowns, and a professor of operations management.
On Tuesday, before he announced his picks, Kennedy said: “We’re going to bring great people onto the ACIP panel – not anti-vaxxers – bringing people on who are credentialed scientists,” according to the Associated Press.
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Meet the new appointees
Vicky Pebsworth is a regional director for the National Association of Catholic Nurses and has been listed as a board member and volunteer director for the National Vaccine Information Center, a group widely considered to be a leading source of vaccine misinformation.
Dr. Robert Malone is a former mRNA researcher who emerged as a close adviser to Kennedy during the measles outbreak. He also runs a wellness institute and a popular conspiracy-heavy blog, which gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic as he shared unsubstantiated claims around the outbreak and the vaccines, including that they caused AIDS.
He has promoted unproven and alternative treatments for measles and COVID-19, and has claimed that millions of Americans were hypnotized into getting COVID-19 shots.
Malone told The Associated Press he will do his best “to serve with unbiased objectivity and rigor.”
Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist, was a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 letter maintaining that pandemic shutdowns were causing irreparable harm.
Dr. Joseph R. Hibbeln formerly headed a National Institutes of Health group focused on nutritional neurosciences and how nutrition affects the brain, including the potential benefits of seafood consumption during pregnancy.
Retsef Levi is a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies business supply chains, logistics, pricing optimization, and health care management. He also claimed in 2023 that COVID-19 vaccines were ineffective and dangerous despite evidence that they saved millions of lives.
Dr. James Pagano is an emergency medicine physician from Los Angeles.
Dr. Michael Ross, a Virginia-based OBGYN, previously served on a CDC breast and cervical cancer advisory committee. He is described as a “serial CEO and physician leader” in a bio for Havencrest Capital Management, a private equity investment firm where he is an operating partner.
Dr. Cody Meissner is a professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and a nationally recognized expert in pediatric infectious diseases and vaccine policy. He has previously served as a member of both ACIP and the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory panel.
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— With files from The Associated Press
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