As expected, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. significantly rewrote the federal vaccine advisory panel charter. The edits give him more power to appoint like-minded allies as federal advisers, focus the panel on alleged vaccine injuries and risks, and welcome outside groups and anti-vaccine organizations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On Monday, a notice in the Federal Register noted that Kennedy renewed the charter of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which had expired on April 1. it showed that big changes were coming to the panel’s defining document, which has significant implications for federal vaccine policy and, in turn, affects state requirements and insurance coverage.
New charterThe journal, published Thursday, lays out new commitments that direct counselors to topics and terms dear to anti-vaccine activists. For example, ACIP members will now be responsible for “considering the analysis of the cumulative effects of vaccines and their components.” This statement reflects the clear goals of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine allies, who aim to link complex conditions such as allergies, autism and neurodevelopmental conditions to the combination of vaccines or common ingredients in these shots, such as aluminum adjuvants. This is part of previous attacks by anti-vaccine activists on individual vaccines, such as the false, spurious claim that the measles vaccine is linked to autism — a claim that has been thoroughly debunked by dozens of high-quality studies.
The charter now expressly tasks ACIP with monitoring mRNA vaccines, which has always been ACIP’s purview, but which is particularly reviled by Kennedy and those in his field. Kennedy once falsely claimed that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine was “the deadliest vaccine ever developed.”
