A committee of experts that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine policy — a group believed to be in the crosshairs of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — will not meet for its regularly scheduled February meeting, a senior HHS official confirmed Thursday.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices was to meet from Feb. 26 to 28, its first gathering since the Trump administration took office. That will not happen, Andrew Nixon, the HHS director of communications, told STAT in an email. Later on Thursday, a notice of the postponement was posted on the ACIP’s homepage.
Nixon did not directly answer STAT’s query of when the meeting would be held instead, saying only that it is “upcoming.”
Kennedy, whose first day at HHS was Tuesday, has denounced the ACIP in the past. During his Senate confirmation process, he told the Finance Committee that 97% of ACIP members had conflicts of interest — a claim that people familiar with the rigorous vetting process ACIP members undergo have refuted.
The CDC staff that organizes the committee’s work has for weeks been trying to get final approval from HHS to hold the meeting, without success. Until last week, the subcommittees or work groups that do the preparatory work for meetings of the full committee had been barred from meeting due to the communications “pause” the administration placed on federal health agencies soon after President Trump’s inauguration. The subcommittee meetings were allowed to resume last week, multiple sources told STAT.
For a time, the CDC thought the ACIP meeting could take place, and in person on the agency’s campus, though plans were recently made to shift it to an online session as the secretariat waited for final approval to convene the meeting.
The meeting — the agenda for which has been online since early January — was to be held to discuss multiple vaccine issues, and to vote on recommendations for the use of a newly approved vaccine to prevent chikungunya, a mosquito-borne disease; a new meningitis vaccine from GSK, to be marketed as Penmenvy; as well as new recommendations on influenza and RSV vaccines.
All advisory committee meetings where votes will take place must have a period for public comment. Members of the public can submit written comments, or ask to enter a lottery to be allowed to make a verbal comment during the meeting.
But because HHS would not formally authorize the meeting to proceed, the portal through which public comments would be submitted was not opened. Sources said that this was the final trigger for the decision of the CDC’s ACIP secretariat to ask to postpone the meeting.
Nixon said in his brief email that the meeting would be “postponed to accommodate public comment in advance of the meeting.”
Public health experts have been concerned about the future of this committee, which for years has helped the CDC decide how to use approved vaccines most effectively. Vaccines that are recommended by the ACIP must be covered by health insurance, if the CDC director signs off on its recommendations. CDC directors have rarely rejected those recommendations.
Nearly two dozen groups of medical professionals and issue advocacy groups, including the American Medical Association, the Gerontological Society of America, and a range of individual medical professionals and public health experts wrote an open letter Thursday to Kennedy and acting CDC Director Susan Monarez urging them to promptly reschedule the meeting. The campaign is being spearheaded by the Partnership to Fight Infectious Disease.
Dorit Reiss, a law professor at UC Law San Francisco who follows the work of the ACIP closely, called the postponement “problematic in several ways,” noting that there were important votes set to be held.
Reiss also said the move “raises suspicions that Mr. Kennedy will not keep his word to Senator [Bill] Cassidy that he will not interfere with ACIP recommendations.”
Cassidy, a supporter of vaccines, was clearly hesitant to support Kennedy because of his controversial opinions about the safety of vaccines, which Kennedy refused to walk back during his Senate confirmation process. Cassidy agreed to support Kennedy, however, after receiving a list of assurances, including that Kennedy would “work within current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems and not establish parallel systems, and uphold the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee recommendations.”
Other experts expressed concern that this postponement is a harbinger of the possible dissolution of the committee — at least in its present form.
Paul Offit, an infectious diseases expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, noted that Project 2025, a set of policy recommendations that was led by the conservative Heritage Foundation and that is seen by some as a playbook for Trump’s second term, states that CDC officials should not be allowed to make recommendations regarding vaccination requirements for school entry; those decisions should be left to parents and medical providers.
“I think that’s what this is. This is step 1 of trying to eliminate CDC as a group that makes [vaccine] recommendations,” he said in an interview.
The ACIP plays several roles. It sometimes advises on which vaccines can be administered together safely. At other times the committee explores signals of risk to vaccine recipients to see whether use recommendations ought to be altered. Concerns about the risk of developing Guillain-Barré syndrome, a form of temporary paralysis, following receipt of two of the RSV vaccines for older adults led the committee to recommend much more restrictive use of the products than manufacturers would have liked.
Fears about the committee’s future were only amplified when Trump signed an executive order Wednesday titled “Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy.” One section of the order instructs aides to review existing federal advisory committees — ACIP is one — and report within 30 days on which should be terminated “on [the] grounds that they are unnecessary.”
A CDC source told STAT that the agency was asked Wednesday to provide written justification for the existence of several federal advisory committees that operate under its aegis. There are roughly 20 federal advisory committees that advise the CDC on topics ranging from the incidence of breast cancer in young women to injury prevention and mine safety. Members of these committees are not paid employees, but receive travel expenses and, at least in the case of the ACIP, may be offered a $250 honorarium for the days on which they attend ACIP meetings, when they are designated as “special government employees.” Members are not paid for the time they spend on the work groups that do the bulk of the committee’s work.
