Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services is considering overhauling his handpicked committee of vaccine skeptics after a federal judge ruled its members had been illegally appointed.
Despite promising during his confirmation hearings not to restrict Americans’ access to vaccines, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, which makes recommendations on immunization schedules, and replaced them with new members who largely shared his anti-vax views.
The vast majority of the new members also lacked “any meaningful experience in vaccines—the very focus of ACIP,” Judge Brian Murphy, a Biden appointee, wrote in an opinion this week blocking the implementation of the committee’s recommendations.
HHS is now debating whether to replace the committee members for the second time since June, or to appeal the court’s ruling, ACIP members told the Wall Street Journal.
The committee’s future was thrown into doubt when its vice chair, Dr. Robert Malone, wrote on X.com on Thursday that ACIP was being “disbanded” because it would be faster to convene a new committee than appeal Murphy’s ruling.
“I have confirmed that other ACIP members got the same phone call with the same message,” he wrote.
A few hours later, though, he wrote that there had been a miscommunication, and that a decision about how to proceed had not been made. Dissolving the committee was still an option, though.
“For some reason they are now trying to walk this back while throwing us under the bus,” Malone said of his original posts.
HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told the Journal that until they’re announced, any claims about the department’s decisions are just speculation.
The Daily Beast has also reached out for comment.
Malone is a physician and biochemist whose early work focused on the mRNA technology used in the COVID-19 vaccine.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he spread false claims about the vaccine’s safety, including posting fake videos saying athletes had died from the vaccine, and making baseless claims that the vaccine caused “a form of AIDS” by damaging T cell responses.
Last year, he and the other committee members voted to drop the government’s recommendation that children and pregnant women receive the COVID vaccine.
They also recommended that all newborns no longer be vaccinated for hepatitis B, a highly infectious disease that can lead to liver failure or cancer for infants infected at birth, and that children no longer get a combined shot targeting measles and chickenpox.
In January, the childhood vaccine schedule was revised down from 17 immunizations to 11.
The American Academy of Pediatrics and other physicians’ groups sued to block the recommendations from taking effect.
