New ACIP Vaccine Board Selected

A rather interesting selection of members for the ACIP Board for Covid. Some are anti-vaxers. There are questions about anti-vaxers being on the board and a resistance to new vaccines. Others believe they may lack enough experience. “what they lack (it seems to me) is the kind of expertise or experience in vaccines that was on that committee. I think we lost experience, expertise, and institutional memory, and so I think we’ve taken a giant step backward in terms of the kind of advice that we’re going to be getting. And I wonder whether the medical and scientific community will look at this committee now and not trust their advice.”

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has named eight new members to the CDC’s “ACIP Board,” MedPage Today

Kennedy announced the new members in a post on X on Wednesday afternoon. He called the move a “major step towards restoring public trust in vaccines.”

He said these eight new members will attend the next ACIP meeting, scheduled for June 25, and that they will demand “definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations.”

Some issues with two of the members:

Robert Malone, MD, an early pioneer of mRNA technology who questioned the severity of COVID  and touted treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, and Martin Kulldorff, PhD, who was a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration along with NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD. Kulldorff was reportedly fired from Mass General Brigham, and thereby, Harvard Medical School, after controversial social media posts about COVID-19, while Malone has claimed that millions of Americans were hypnotized into taking the COVID-19 shots. He has also suggested that those vaccines cause a form of AIDS.

They will also “review safety and efficacy data for the current schedule as well,” Kennedy wrote.

The six other newly appointed ACIP members are:

• Joseph Hibbeln, MD, who was formerly an acting chief on the Section on Nutritional Neurosciences at the NIH. Hibbeln has been involved in research looking into possible associations between prenatal mercury exposure and child development.
• Retsef Levi, PhD, a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was involved in a paper that tried to make a connection between the COVID-19 vaccine rollout and cardiovascular events.
• H. Cody Meissner, MD, of Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, a former ACIP member who authored a New England Journal of Medicine paper “Understanding Vaccine Safety and the Roles of the FDA and the CDC.”
• James Pagano, MD, a retired emergency physician.
• Vicky Pebsworth, PhD, RN, of the University of Michigan, a board member with the vaccine-choice group National Vaccine Information Center (formerly Dissatisfied Parents Together), a group that is widely considered to be a leading source of vaccine misinformation, and the National Association of Catholic Nurses. Pebsworth is also a former consumer representative for FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, where she has testified and represented herself as “the mother of a child injured by his 15-month well-baby shots in 1998.”
• Michael Ross, MD, an ob/gyn at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University. Ross is an operating partner at Havencrest, a private equity fund specializing in healthcare.

On a Monday, Kennedy fired all former 17 members of the ACIP. This was a move criticized by major public health and medical organizations.

Paul Offit, MD, a vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, was most concerned about Pebsworth and Malone, who, he said, “is a clear anti-vaccine activist.” As for the rest, “they seem reasonable — what they lack, it seems to me, is the kind of expertise or experience in vaccines that was on that committee. I think we lost experience, expertise, and institutional memory, and so I think we’ve taken a giant step backward in terms of the kind of advice that we’re going to be getting. And I wonder whether the medical and scientific community will look at this committee now and not trust their advice.”

“RFK Jr. Names Replacements for CDC Vaccine Panel,”MedPage Today