Charter would have expanded member eligibility and focused on alleged injuries.
Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more A revised charter document for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s influential vaccine advisory committee has been withdrawn by the Health Department over an administrative error, according to a notice published in the Federal Register Tuesday .
The charter’s revisions under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would have allowed Kennedy to appoint dubiously qualified anti-vaccine allies to advise the CDC. It also would have directed the CDC panel to focus on alleged vaccine injuries and risks and welcomed fringe groups and anti-vaccine organizations to participate in developing federal vaccine policy.
Kennedy’s move to reshape the CDC panel—the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP—came amid Kennedy’s many other attempts to undermine it, as well as a court order to undo that meddling.
In June of last year, Kennedy summarily fired all 17 experts from ACIP and quickly replaced them with unvetted and unqualified anti-vaccine allies. Kennedy’s ACIP then held several meetings in which they aired anti-vaccine views and misinformation, allowed anti-vaccine activists to give unvetted presentations, and ultimately voted to remove longstanding, evidence-based federal vaccine recommendations based on anti-vaccine rhetoric. That includes the removal of a universal recommendation for a hepatitis B vaccine dose at birth, despite no evidence of any safety concerns or any benefit to delaying the dose. Subsequent modeling studies found that the change will mean more infections , increases in liver cancers and deaths, as well as millions of dollars in healthcare costs .
In January, Kennedy sidestepped ACIP entirely to extensively overhaul the CDC’s vaccine schedule for children, slashing the number of recommended vaccinations from 17 to 11 .
In March, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction to undo Kennedy’s changes , ruling that Kennedy likely violated federal regulations in unilaterally altering the CDC vaccine schedule and that the new ACIP members were unqualified—as outlined by the panel’s charter—nullifying all of their votes on federal vaccine recommendations.
While the Health Department is working to appeal the injunction, Kennedy attempted to circumvent the judge’s ruling on the ACIP members by altering the committee’s charter to, among other things, allow for people without expertise in immunizations and public health to be members.
But, for now, that effort, too, has been thwarted. According to the notice Tuesday, the new charter has been withdrawn for not following a federal requirement on public notification.
Beth Mole Senior Health Reporter Beth Mole Senior Health Reporter Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.
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