NBC News
The 17 members of the Independent Advisory Committee on Vaccines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will be dismissed from their positions, as announced on Monday afternoon the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy announced the change in an editorial of The Wall Street Journal, where he said that the committee has been plagued by persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a simple approval seal for any vaccine.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, commonly known as ACIP, is composed of medical and public health experts, including pediatricians, epidemiologists and geriatricians, who formulate recommendations to the CDC on who should receive certain vaccines, including the child vaccination calendar. The Committee celebrates public meetings several times a year where data is presented and reviewed.
The Committee reports to the director of the CDC, who reviews the recommendations and can decide if he adopts them.
ACIP members must reveal any conflict of interest and refuse to vote on vaccines for which there is a conflict. The CDC published in March a database with the previous work of some members in clinical trials or vaccin investigations financed by pharmaceutical companies, but much of the information was already public.
The dismantling of the Committee is one of Kennedy’s most energetic actions to date to reformulate the US Vaccine Policy Kennedy stood out as an outstanding figure of the anti -Vacunas movement and has made various deceptive and discredited statements about vaccine damage. Since he aligned with President Donald Trump and became head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has supervised a series of measures that have undermined access to vaccines, including the withdrawal of funds for the distribution of vaccines to children of low -income families.
