5 new members added to CDC vaccine advisory panel ahead of key meeting 

Just days before vaccine advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention meet to weigh who should get COVID vaccines this season, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has selected five more members to the committee he purged of Biden administration appointees in June.

The new members of the influential Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices are:

• Hilary Blackburn, a pharmacist at AscensionRx, who also hosts a podcast, 
• Dr. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist and an affiliate of the Independent Medical Alliance, 
• Dr. Evelyn Griffin, an ob/gyn and functional medicine practitioner, 
• Dr. Raymond Pollak, a semi-retired transplant surgeon, and 
• Catherine Stein, an epidemiology professor at Case Western Reserve University, who has claimed the government overstated COVID risks.

“The new ACIP members bring a wealth of real-world public health experience to the job of making immunization recommendations,” said Jim O’Neill, Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services and Acting Director of the CDC in a media statement. “We are grateful for their service in helping restore the public confidence in vaccines that was lost during the Biden era.”

The advisory group – now numbering 12 members – makes recommendations that help determine which vaccines are offered free through the Vaccines for Children program, and what health insurers typically cover. They also influence state and local laws around vaccine requirements.

The appointments expand the committee just before it meets this week in Atlanta. On Thursday and Friday, the members will be considering policies such as who should get the fall COVID-19 booster shot, and whether all babies should get the hepatitis B vaccine at birth.

Short list of members leaked in early September

The new members were among seven that appeared on a list that was first reported by the “Inside Medicine” newsletter on Sept. 3. Two others who were named then — Dr. Joseph Fraiman, an emergency medical physician, and Dr. John Gaitanis, a pediatric neurologist at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Rhode Island — were not appointed to the committee by HHS.

NPR reached out to each of the new members of the committee earlier this month, when their names first appeared in media reports. Only one responded.

Dr. Raymond Pollak, a semi-retired transplant surgeon, was still in the midst of the vetting process on Sept. 5. “I think I’d be an ideal choice for a committee like this,” he told NPR. “I have expertise in clinical trial management and ethics, and my background in transplant biology allows me to understand the science of what is being proposed.”

Pollak says he had not paid much attention to ACIP before he joined the committee, but he sees having non-vaccine experts on the panel as a plus. “I think it’s a value to have broad representation of the community at large, both with and without the necessary expertise in order to formulate policy that makes sense to everybody,” he says.

And while Pollack considers COVID vaccines “safe to administer and provided a benefit in that it kept down the severity of the illness and prevented hospitalization,” he says the vaccine rollout was “poorly managed,” contributing to hysteria and conspiracy theories that the government covered up harms and injuries related to the vaccine. “The notion that the government tried to ‘cover it up’ is false,” Pollak says. “All of the information on adverse effects is readily available in the medical literature. The problem is it tends to stay within the profession and doesn’t get disseminated widely amongst the public.”

Kennedy’s imprint on vaccine panel grows

The new members join the seven others Kennedy named to the panel in June, replacements he handpicked after firing all 17 of the panel’s previously seated members. The replacements, who met for the first time at the CDC in June, include Dr. Robert Malone, who has spread misinformation about COVID and opposed vaccine mandates, and Retsef Levi, an MIT professor of operations management who gained prominence during the pandemic for criticizing COVID vaccines.

The members Kennedy fired had been chosen for their medical expertise and understanding of vaccine policy, and had been formally vetted to ensure that they would not directly financially benefit from any ACIP votes. They had been serving in overlapping rotations over several years to ensure continuity of expertise and process.

“There are large gaps in the new ACIP’s composition in terms of their missing expertise on vaccinology, their missing expertise on primary care, their missing expertise on cost effectiveness and clinical trials,” says Noel Brewer, a former ACIP member who had served on the committee for a year before being dismissed by Kennedy in June. “These are folks who fundamentally do not understand vaccines in a deep way. I wouldn’t take medical advice from them, and I certainly don’t think they should be setting policy for the United States.”

Since Kennedy overhauled the panel, the ACIP has seen major changes to how it operates, for instance voting to effectively ban flu vaccines with the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal in their June meeting. The change was based on debunked claims without new scientific evidence of harms. This move, among others, has led top medical organizations and public health groups to question the integrity of the group’s advice.

“Misinformation, politicization of commonsense public health efforts, and sudden changes to federal vaccine guidance is creating mass confusion and diminishing trust in public health. As we head into another fall season sure to be marked by cases of flu, Covid-19, and RSV as well as the alarming reappearance of measles and pertussis, the stakes could not be higher,” the presidents of five professional medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Physicians wrote, in a June op-ed in Stat News.

Many state vaccine laws are tied to ACIP guidance. Some states led by Democratic governors are starting to reduce their reliance on the committee over concerns that future recommendations may be based on “ideology and not science,” says Dennis Worsham, health secretary for the Washington State Department of Health, which has formed a vaccine policy alliance with California, Oregon and Hawaii.

Rob Stein contributed to this report