RFK Jr.'s New Vaccine Advisors Signal Big Changes

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Policy, an influential CDC committee that shapes U. S. vaccine policy, has become a flashpoint in recent weeks. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 members and replaced them with 7 new members — many of whom do not have deep expertise in vaccines, and some of whom have spread vaccine misinformation. NPR public health correspondent Pien Huang https://www.npr.org/people/729920828/pien-huang was at the new working group's first meeting last week. This episode, she talks with Emily https://www.npr.org/people/767284140/emily-kwong about the sweeping changes they promised to how vaccine policy is made in the U. S. — and resurrected issues that have been advanced by groups that question vaccines. Read more https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5438485/cdc-acip-rfk-thimerosal-vaccines of Pien's reporting on this topic. Want us to cover more twists and turns in U. S. health policy? Or less? Either way, tell us by emailing [email protected] mailto:[email protected]! We'd love to know what you're hearing — and want to hear from us! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from NPR sponsor, Viori, featuring the Sunday Performance Jogger. Receive 20% off your first purchase at viori.com/npr on any US orders over $75 and free returns. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions.

• 0:19Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:24Emily Kwong?

  Here in the US, we have a vaccine's schedule. So in childhood, as you may know, there's a slate of routine vaccines to protect against hepatitis B or measles mumps and rubella. And this continues into adulthood. Think COVID boosters and the flu shot. Now, that schedule is driven by recommendations of a special committee within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, known as ACIP, or the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. And in June, there was a major shakeup to business as usual and the very makeup of this group. My coworker, public health correspondent Ping Wong, has been following all of these developments. Hey.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Hey, Emily. Yeah, Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 members of ACIP a few weeks ago, and he replaced them with seven new members, many of whom do not have deep expertise in vaccines. Some of them have spread vaccine misinformation. Dr. Sean O'Leary at the American Academy of Pediatrics told our colleague Maria Godoy that he did not have faith in this new group.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  Imagine if you took all the air traffic controllers in the US and just fired them, and you replaced them with people that not only didn't really know how to be air traffic controllers, but several of them didn't even believe in flying.

• 1:41Emily Kwong?

  And in response to this, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told NPR, quote, "Secretary Kennedy has replaced vaccine group think with a diversity of viewpoints." So the new ACIP held their first meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, Wednesday and Thursday of last week. Ping, what was your high-level takeaway, having watched it?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  I mean, Emily, I've been to a lot of these meetings, and this one was a huge departure from how they usually go. The committee promised sweeping changes to how vaccine policy is made in the US, and they resurrected issues that have been advanced in groups that question vaccines. What's clear is that these new members will be steering vaccine policy to a very different place.

• 2:20Emily Kwong?

  Today on the show, how a newly reimagined committee may drive the direction of vaccines in the US for years to come. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Mint Mobile. Ditch overpriced wireless and get premium wireless for less. Go to mintmobile.com/switch to see which plan works for you.

• 2:55Speaker 04

  This message comes from Bowlin Branch. Change the way you sleep with soft, 100% organic cotton sheets from Bowlin Branch. Designed to help you fall asleep faster. With airy blankets, cloud-like duvets, and breathable sheets. Experience pure comfort on night one and feel your sheets get softer with every wash. Discover the difference with 15% off your first order at bowlinbranch.com with code NPR. Exclusions apply. See site for details. This message comes from LexisNexis. Legal work demands more from AI. Meet LexisNexis Protege, AI built for how legal teams and professionals actually work. Grounded in authoritative legal content and your work product, Protege brings advanced AI, intelligent agents,

• 3:40Speaker 04

  and trusted legal capabilities together to help you research, analyze, draft, and verify. Work seamlessly, scale your expertise, produce work you can defend. LexisNexis Protege is AI held to the standard of law.

• 3:55Emily Kwong?

  OK, Ping, so before we start, let's talk about why this committee is so important, ACIP. They do not approve vaccines. That's the job of the FDA. But this group does shape how vaccines get distributed. How does that work?

• 4:10Speaker 02

  OK, you mentioned the vaccine schedule. So if the CDC approves a recommendation that ACIP makes, it becomes policy and it gets put into the official vaccine schedule for children and for adults, depending on what the recommendation is. Insurers also have to pay for it. So under the Affordable Care Act, health insurers are required to cover all ACIP-recommended vaccines.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  And critically, their votes also determine what's in the Vaccines for Children program.

• 4:38Emily Kwong?

  What's that?

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's a federally funded initiative that provides free access to vaccines for low-income, underinsured children. Around half of the kids in the US are eligible for free vaccines from this program.

• 4:49Emily Kwong?

  Okay, so it sounds like the committee really drives vaccine access in the US, making them like available and free.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Right, right. They drive access and they also make recommendations for, you know, what all of us should and shouldn't be getting, at what age and when.

• 5:03Emily Kwong?

  So, this group is very important, even if it's an acronym that most Americans have not heard. Who are the new members of ACIP?

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Okay, so initially, Kennedy named eight new people to the committee, but one of them dropped out before the meeting during the review for financial conflicts of interest. So now there's seven members. Some of them rose to prominence in recent years by spreading misinformation about vaccines, and specifically COVID vaccines. All of them came to this meeting mostly in person, although there were two that were remote.

• 5:33Emily Kwong?

  And were you watching remotely? Were you in the room?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  I was in the room where it was all happening. I was sitting in this press row, you know, watching the committee members and the CDC presenters and everyone else that was there very intently.

• 5:47Emily Kwong?

  Okay, so folks from the CDC are presenting to this group. That's interesting. What happened?

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Okay, so the meeting looked normal from the outside and probably even to anyone who was just watching for the first time on the YouTube stream. There were presentations, there were discussions, there were votes, but the conversations that they were actually having were very different. So, for instance, I'm going to bring you into a discussion they had about the annual flu vaccine. It started like it usually does, with CDC staff presenting data for the last flu season. And Emily, the flu season we just had was really bad. You know, according to the CDC, they saw the highest rate of people being hospitalized for flu in more than a decade. And also, 250 children died with influenza-related illness,

• 6:33Speaker 02

  which is the most they've seen since they first started tracking this 20 years ago. The response from new member Dr. Robert Malone was, it didn't seem like such a big deal.

• 6:43Speaker 05

  The 250 pediatric deaths, which is, let's acknowledge, is a modest number.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  And then, the committee started quite a serious discussion about thimerosal in flu vaccines. So thimerosal is a vaccine preservative that's rarely used in vaccines, who says.

• 7:00Emily Kwong?

  Okay.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  And back in the mid to late 1990s, there were theories that it could be a cause of autism in children, but that claim has long been disproven. And even so, vaccine manufacturers voluntarily removed it from most childhood vaccines. So again, it's used really infrequently today, and there hasn't been much new research on it for years.

• 7:20Emily Kwong?

  Okay, so they're talking about the flu vaccine, thimerosal comes up. What happens then?

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, and thimerosal actually more than came up. It was a scheduled agenda item for a vote. The new committee chair, Martin Kuldorff, said that the committee was reopening topics like thimerosal to increase public trust in vaccines. Typically, the presentations at these meetings come from CDC experts, but Kuldorff also said that this new committee is open to all types of expertise. So they got a presentation on this from Lynn Redwood, who's the former president of Children's Health Defense.

• 7:53Emily Kwong?

  What's her background? Is she a scientist?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  So she is not a PhD or an MD, but she has led the group that Kennedy founded and chaired. And this is a group that's advocated against vaccines and spread misinformation about them.

• 8:05Emily Kwong?

  Uh huh, okay, so then what happened?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  So then the committee voted on, you know, what types of flu vaccines they would recommend. And while they all agreed that people should continue to get annual flu vaccines, the majority voted to limit the recommendation to the versions of the vaccines without thimerosal. Dr. Cody Meisner, who's a pediatrics professor at Dartmouth, he was the only one who objected.

• 8:28Speaker 06

  All vaccines that are routinely recommended for young children in the United States are available in formulations that do not contain thimerosal as a preservative.

• 8:42Speaker 06

  Of all the issues that I think we, ACIP, needs to focus on, this is not a big issue.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  He also said.

• 8:51Speaker 06

  There is no scientific evidence that thimerosal has caused a problem.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  And Emily, in past ACIP meetings, this lack of evidence would usually just put an end to the discussion. They would table it, they would get more information, and they'd come back to it later. But this time, it actually sparked speculation and new recommendations.

• 9:13Emily Kwong?

  Interesting. Okay, so they took a vote on thimerosal. There was also a vote on a product that protects babies against RSV or respiratory syncytial virus. How did that vote go?

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Okay, so this vote was actually less controversial, but it still went very strangely. One of the new members, Retsif Levy, who's a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, he kept wondering out loud whether the product was killing babies, even though the CDC, the people who presented the studies, and other members of the committee were all telling him there was no reason to think this. And then, when the vote came up, Levy was one of two people to vote no.

• 9:52Speaker 05

  Dr. Levy? I vote no. I just want to clarify that my objection is based on the fact that I don't feel this is ready to be administered to all healthy babies. I think we should take a more precautionary approach to this.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  But minutes later, when the same product came up for the Vaccines for Children program, Levy voted yes.

• 10:15Speaker 05

  Dr. Levy? Retsif Levy, I don't have any conflicts of interest. I think that we need to ensure access. So whatever kids need to actually use that product, of course, I think we need to make sure that they get it, so yes.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  So the Vaccines for Children resolution is like an add-on to the main vote. People usually vote the same way because it's essentially the same question.

• 10:38Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, that makes sense, but he voted differently. So what do you, what do you make of that, Ping?

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not quite sure myself, you know? And it wasn't just Levy. There was also Vicky Pepsworth, who's volunteer director of research and patient safety at the National Vaccine Information Center. This is a group that argues for vaccine exemptions, recently called on the FDA to stop recommending mRNA COVID shots for anyone. And Pepsworth also voted no on the first RSV question and then yes to put the same product in the Vaccines for Children program.

• 11:09Emily Kwong?

  So let's move on to some work groups that have emerged. And I know we're getting into the nitty gritty of this committee, not that I meant to rhyme, but this is how the sausage gets made. This is how vaccine schedules get decided. So there's a work group that plans to look at the vaccine schedule for kids. Tell me about that.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Emily, you're absolutely right that work groups are, you know, how the sausage gets made in this situation. You know, work groups are like big, multi-year endeavors where committee members, along with CDC staff and other people who are stakeholders in this process, meet, you know, quite regularly for a long time and review all this data, funnel it down so that by the time it actually gets presented in a public meeting, it's pretty clear. So at this meeting, Kulldorf, the chair, announced that they were starting work groups with an eye towards possibly decreasing the number of shots that kids get. So that was one work group that he mentioned. He also mentioned a separate work group that was going to look into vaccines that

• 12:08Speaker 02

  had not been reviewed in more than seven years, also with a possible eye of deciding whether or not they were still necessary or needed, or whether the timing around them should be changed. And it confirmed a lot of fears that people in the public health community have had since Kennedy became health secretary. So already, he's announced that he's removing universal recommendations for kids and pregnant women to get COVID vaccines. This was a change he made without the committee's input. And now he shifted the makeup of the committee away from people with deep expertise in vaccines to people who come with a lot of skepticism, even on issues that have long been considered settled.

• 12:44Emily Kwong?

  Phew. After the meeting wrapped in Atlanta...

• 12:49Emily Kwong?

  What did folks not on the committee say, people who work in public health?

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, Tina Tan, called the meeting politicized, chaotic, and not transparent, said it was harmful to the American people, and also that it'll drive down vaccine confidence overall. And she and the IDSA are not alone in the sentiment. My colleague, Will Stone, and I have been covering reactions to this news. Many types of health experts, from infectious disease experts to physicians to pediatricians, shared similar concerns. You know, for instance, the American Academy of Pediatrics actually boycotted this meeting, decided not to attend, even though they usually do. And Dr. Jim Campbell, who's with the AEP, said they thought there'd be no room for real participation, and that the votes on thiamysol we discussed earlier

• 13:38Speaker 02

  proved that.

• 13:39Speaker 07

  The vote was based on a single talk without any work group or other expert input. That is not the way that ACIP typically works. So we're just disappointed that that's the direction that it's taken.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  And the meeting has raised big questions about the future of vaccine policy for Dr. Andy Pavia, a pediatrician at the University of Utah.

• 14:01Speaker 07

  I think hundreds of physicians, epidemiologists, pediatricians watched with some degree of horror.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Pavia also pointed out that this is a panel that helps shape insurance coverage for vaccines, and he's worried that what they decide going forward is actually going to reduce access to them for many, many people.

• 14:21Emily Kwong?

  Well, Ping, thank you for this reporting and for your insights. It is so appreciated.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  I really appreciate you as well, Emily.

• 14:29Emily Kwong?

  I love meetings, and this one is a particularly important one.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:34Emily Kwong?

  Shortravers, if you don't already, please follow us on the NPR app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Your support truly helps our show. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by Scott Hensley and our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones and Rebecca Ramirez checked the facts. The audio engineer was Quacey Lee. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.