As expected, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has significantly rewritten the charter for the federal vaccine advisory panel. The edits give him more power to appoint his like-minded colleagues as federal advisers, focus the panel’s attention on alleged vaccine injuries and risks, and welcome fringe groups and anti-vaccine organizations into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On Monday, a notice in the Federal Register indicated that Kennedy renewed the charter for CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which is appointed every two years, with the last term ending on April 1. But instead of the usual mundane renewal process, the notice on Monday signaled that major changes are coming to the panel’s defining document, which heavily impacts federal vaccine policy, which in turn affects state requirements and insurance coverage.
The new charter, published Thursday, unveils new responsibilities that redirect advisers toward topics and terms beloved of anti-vaccine activists. For example, ACIP members will now be responsible for “considering the analysis of the cumulative effects of vaccines and their constituent components.” The term echoes the apparent goals of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine allies, who aim to pin complex conditions — such as allergies, autism and neurodevelopmental conditions — on the combination of vaccinations or common ingredients in those shots, such as aluminum adjuvants. This pivots from earlier attacks by anti-vaccine activists that focused on individual vaccines, such as the false, fraudulent 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 explicitly tasks ACIP with oversight of mRNA vaccines, which has always been within ACIP’s purview but is particularly condemned by Kennedy and those in his field. Kennedy once falsely claimed that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine was “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”
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