The panel is scheduled to meet for two days, beginning on June 25.
New members of the panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines should not meet this week, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said on June 23.
“The meeting should be delayed until the panel is fully staffed with more robust and balanced representation—as required by law—including those with more direct relevant expertise,” Cassidy, chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions,
wrote on social media platform X.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
The Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the CDC on vaccines, is scheduled to convene on June 25 and June 26 at the agency’s headquarters in Atlanta.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier in June
removed all members from the committee, citing conflicts of interest and how, he said, the panel had become “a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas.”
Some of the members had voted on vaccines despite recently receiving money from pharmaceutical companies, an Epoch Times review
found.
Kennedy then
named eight new members, including epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff and Dr. Robert Malone, who helped invent the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology utilized in the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.
The upcoming meeting, if held as planned, would be the first since the new members were named. The draft agenda
includes votes on respiratory syncytial virus and influenza vaccines.
After President Donald Trump nominated Kennedy to be health secretary, Cassidy publicly said he was considering not voting for him.
“Your past of undermining confidence in vaccines with unfounded or misleading arguments concerns me,” Cassidy told the former Democrat in a confirmation hearing.
Kennedy said during the hearing that he was neither against vaccines nor industry, but was “pro-safety.”
When Cassidy voted for Kennedy, the senator
said that Kennedy had made promises, including that he would “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes.”
Kennedy told lawmakers during a hearing on Tuesday that he made no such promise to Cassidy.
Cassidy, who did not respond to requests for comment,
said on X after Kennedy removed the ACIP members that “the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion.” He added, “I’ve just spoken with Secretary Kennedy, and I’ll continue to talk with him to ensure this is not the case.”
On Monday, the senator said that the new members do hold scientific credentials, but that “many do not have significant experience studying microbiology, epidemiology, or immunology.”
In particular, he said, some do not have experience studying newer technologies such as mRNA.
If the meeting is not delayed until the panel is built out with more members and a CDC director is confirmed by the Senate, then “ACIP’s recommendations could be viewed with skepticism, which will work against the success of this Administration’s efforts,” the senator said.
Cassidy’s committee is scheduled to meet on Wednesday, at the same time as the ACIP meeting, to question Susan Monarez, whom Trump nominated in March to be CDC director.
Some medical groups and other organizations have also been critical of the changes to ACIP, including the Infectious Diseases Society of America, whose president, Dr. Tina Tan,
said that the removal of all members was “reckless, shortsighted and severely harmful.”
Others praised the development.
“Secretary Kennedy’s restructuring of ACIP sends a clear message: it’s time for evidence-based, unbiased medical leadership to guide this nation’s health policies,” Dr. Joseph Varon, president and chief medical officer of the Independent Medical Alliance,
said in a statement.
“For too long, families across America have been subject to mandates and recommendations shaped by financial conflicts of interest and political pressure rather than sound medical science. That era is ending.”
