By MIKE STOBBE and LAURAN NEERGAARD

ATLANTA (AP) — U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new vaccine advisers alarmed pediatricians Wednesday by announcing inquiries into some long-settled questions about children’s shots.

Opening the first meeting of Kennedy’s handpicked seven-member panel, committee chairman Martin Kulldorff said he was appointing a work group to evaluate the “cumulative effect” of the children’s vaccine schedule — the list of immunizations given at different times throughout childhood.

Also to be evaluated, he said, is how two other shots are administered — one that guards against liver-destroying hepatitis B and another that combines chickenpox protection with MMR, the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

It was an early sign of how the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is being reshaped by Kennedy, a leading antivaccine activist before becoming the nation’s top health official. He fired the entire 17-member panel this month and replaced it with a group that includes several anti-vaccine voices.

“Vaccines are not all good or bad,” Kulldorff said. “We are learning more about vaccines over time” and must “keep up to date.”

His announcement reflected a common message of vaccine skeptics: that too many shots may overwhelm kids’ immune systems or that the ingredients may build up to cause harm. Scientists say those claims have been repeatedly investigated with no signs of concern.

Kids today are exposed to fewer antigens — immune-revving components — than their grandparents despite getting more doses, because of improved vaccine technology, said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The American Academy of Pediatrics announced Wednesday that it would continue publishing its own vaccine schedule for children but now will do so independently of the ACIP, calling it “no longer a credible process.”

Dr. Robert Malone, left, listens during a meeting of the Advisory Committee in Immunization Practices at the CDC, Wednesday, June 25, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

CDC participants listen to the speakers during a meeting of the Advisory Committee in Immunization Practices, Wednesday, June 25, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Participants listen during a meeting of the Advisory Committee in Immunization Practices at the CDC, Wednesday, June 25, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., testifies during a House Energy and Commerce Committee, Tuesday, June 24, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib) Show Caption 1 of 4 Dr. Robert Malone, left, listens during a meeting of the Advisory Committee in Immunization Practices at the CDC, Wednesday, June 25, 2025, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart) Expand

“The narrative that current vaccine policies are flawed and need ‘fixing’ is a distortion,” said the AAP’s Dr. Sean O’Leary. “These policies have saved trillions of dollars and millions of lives.”

The ACIP, created more than 60 years ago, helps the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determine who should be vaccinated against a long list of diseases, and when. Those recommendations have a big impact on whether insurance covers vaccinations and where they’re available, such as at pharmacies.

After Kennedy’s abrupt dismissal of the existing expert panel, a number of the CDC’s top vaccine scientists — including some who lead the reporting of data and the vetting of presentations at ACIP meetings — have resigned or been moved out of previous positions.

And shortly before Wednesday’s meeting, a Virginia-based obstetrician and gynecologist appointed to the committee stepped down. According to the Trump administration, he withdrew during a customary review of members’ financial holdings.

Scientists show data that COVID-19 vaccines protect pregnant women and kids

First on the committee’s agenda Wednesday were COVID-19 vaccinations. Kennedy already sidestepped the panel and announced the vaccine will no longer be recommended for healthy children or pregnant women.

Yet CDC scientists told the panel that vaccination is “the best protection” during pregnancy, and said most children hospitalized for COVID-19 over the past year were unvaccinated.

COVID-19 remains a public health threat, resulting in 32,000 to 51,000 U.S. deaths and more than 250,000 hospitalizations since last fall, according to the CDC. Most at risk for hospitalization are seniors and children under 2 — especially infants under 6 months who could have some protection if their mom got vaccinated during pregnancy, according to the CDC’s presentation.

The new advisers weren’t asked to vote on Kennedy’s recommendations, which raise uncertainty about how easily people will be able to access COVID-19 vaccinations this fall.

After CDC staff outlined multiple overlapping systems that continue to track the vaccines’ safety, several advisers questioned if the real-world data really is trustworthy.

Vote on RSV protections is postponed

Also Wednesday, the committee took up RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, a common cause of cold-like symptoms that can be dangerous for infants.

In 2023, U.S. health officials began recommending two new measures to protect infants — a lab-made antibody for newborns and a vaccine for pregnant women — that experts say likely drove an improvement in infant mortality. The antibody proved to be 63% to 76% effective against emergency department visits for infants over the last year.

“People need to understand what a spectacular accomplishment these results are,” said ACIP member Dr. Cody Meissner, of Dartmouth.

The committee postponed until Thursday a vote on whether to recommend another company’s newly approved antibody shot as well.

Flu shot recommendations to be debated

At its June meetings, the committee usually refreshes guidance for Americans 6 months and older to get a flu shot, and helps green light the annual fall vaccination campaign.

But a vote set for Thursday also promises controversy.

The panel is set to consider a preservative in a subset of flu shots that Kennedy and some antivaccine groups have falsely contended is tied to autism.

In preparation, the CDC posted a new report confirming that research shows no link between the preservative, thimerosal, and autism or any other neurodevelopmental disorders. By Wednesday afternoon, the analysis had been removed from the committee’s website.

Neergaard reported from Washington.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

In its first meeting with an entirely new roster in place, a federal panel that helps craft vaccine policy in the U.S. revealed its plans to scrutinize the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule and other priorities that reflect longstanding concerns for Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, kicked off its two-day meeting on Wednesday morning at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta.

The committee of independent experts, which offers recommendations to the CDC on the nation’s vaccine schedule and immunization policy, has recently become a flashpoint.

Earlier this month, Kennedy booted all 17 members of the existing panel, who’d been appointed by President Joe Biden, and replaced them with a smaller selection of his own, including several who’ve gained a following for, at times, promoting misleading and inaccurate information on COVID-19 vaccines.

New workgroup will examine the vaccine schedule for kids

The meeting began with Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist formerly at Harvard Medical School who is now serving as the ACIP chair, calling for the need to “rebuild public trust” in federal health institutions in the wake of the pandemic and what he called the “inflated promises” about the COVID vaccines and mandates.

In that vein, he said ACIP would establish a new workgroup to study and evaluate the cumulative effects of the recommended vaccine schedule, including the “interaction effects between different vaccines, the total number of vaccines, cumulative amounts of vaccine ingredients and the relative timing of different vaccines.”

“The number of vaccines that our children and adolescents receive today exceed what children in most other developed nations receive and what most of us in this room received when we were children,” Kulldorff said.

Older vaccines will get another look

Another new workgroup will look specifically at “vaccines that have not been subject to review in more than seven years,” he said. Topics they will take up include the universal recommendation to administer the hepatitis B shot on the day of birth; how children are immunized against measles, mumps, rubella and varicella, or chicken pox; as well as the timing of the measles vaccine to resolve religious objections among some parents.

These new areas of focus are already making some who study vaccines nervous about the future direction of ACIP.

“They’re signaling interest in revisiting long-settled questions around vaccine safety, opening up issues that have been focal points of critics of vaccines for decades and giving them the legitimacy that comes with this previously well-respected government advisory committee,” says Jason Schwartz, associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health.

Kennedy’s unprecedented decision to purge ACIP hinged on his claims that conflicts of interest have compromised the committee, though NPR has found that a government report Kennedy often cites to make his case doesn’t back this up.

Along with Kulldorff, Dr. Robert Malone — another ACIP member picked by Kennedy — have both been paid to serve as expert witnesses in litigation against the vaccine maker Merck. Both said they had no conflicts of interest concerning the topics being discussed at Wednesday’s meeting.

Malone said he had been through “three months of vetting and training” and that any potential conflicts of interest have been “declared lacking” by the Department of Health and Human Services and CDC.

The comment suggests that Kennedy’s efforts to overhaul ACIP may have been in the works for some time, even though it was only two weeks ago that new committee members were actually appointed.

Much of the first morning of the meeting was devoted to information from CDC scientists regarding the data on COVID and vaccines against the illness. Some of the presentation seemed to directly challenge the recent decision by Kennedy and the Trump administration to remove the recommendation to vaccinate healthy children and pregnant women.

One slide summarizing the epidemiology indicated that most children under the age of 2 who are hospitalized had no underlying medical conditions and that outcomes among children can be “severe, with 1 in 4 admitted to ICU.” The data also underscored the risk to children under 6 months who “rely on the transfer of maternal antibodies” because there are no approved shots.

Copyright 2025 NPR

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has announced that the United States will no longer contribute to Gavi, a global health programme that has vaccinated more than one billion of the world’s poorest children.

In a video that aired at a Gavi fundraising event in Brussels on Wednesday, Kennedy said the group had made questionable recommendations around COVID-19 vaccines. He also raised concerns about the diphtheria-tetanus-whole cell pertussis vaccine, known by the acronym DTPw, though he provided no evidence to support those fears.

“I call on Gavi today to re-earn the public trust and to justify the $8bn that America has provided in funding since 2001,” Kennedy said in the video.

Kennedy added that Gavi should consider all available science before investing in vaccines. “Until that happens, the United States won’t contribute more,” he said.

The details of the video were first reported by the publication Politico and later by the news outlet Reuters.

Gavi said in a detailed statement that safety was one of its top priorities and that it acts in line with World Health Organization recommendations.

The statement also indicated that Gavi has full confidence in the DTPw vaccine, which it credits with having helped to cut child mortality in half in the countries it supports since 2000.

“The DTPw vaccine has been administered to millions of children around the world for decades, and is estimated to have saved more than 40 million lives over the past 50 years,” the statement notes.

The administration of US President Donald Trump has previously indicated that it planned to cut US funding for Gavi, representing around $300m annually, as part of a wider pullback from international aid.

Advocacy groups called on the US to reverse its decision.

“Kennedy claims that Gavi ignored science are entirely false,” nonprofit consumer advocacy organisation Public Citizen wrote in a statement.

“Gavi’s recommendations are grounded in global evidence and reviewed by independent experts. His suggestion otherwise fuels the same disinformation that has already led to deadly measles outbreaks and the resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases, including polio.”

A longtime vaccine sceptic, Kennedy has upended the US medical establishment since taking office in February. He has raised questions about possible ties between autism and vaccines, though numerous studies have shown there is no link.

Earlier this month, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the expert panel on vaccines at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

Created 60 years ago, the committee serves as an independent government body to review data and make recommendations about who should get vaccines. Those recommendations, in turn, can affect which vaccines health insurance plans may cover.

Of Kennedy’s initial eight replacement members, about half have advocated against vaccines.

Kennedy’s new vaccine advisers hold inaugural meeting

The newly revamped committee met for the first time on Wednesday, under intense scrutiny from medical experts worried about Americans’ access to lifesaving shots.

But already, conflicts are starting to simmer in and around the panel.

Ahead of the two-day gathering, government scientists prepared meeting materials calling vaccination “the best protection” during pregnancy — and said most children hospitalised for COVID-19 over the past year were unvaccinated.

That advice, however, conflicts with Kennedy’s. The health secretary already announced COVID-19 vaccines will no longer be recommended for healthy children or pregnant women, and his new advisers are not scheduled to vote this week on whether they agree.

COVID-19 remains a public health threat, resulting in 32,000 to 51,000 US deaths and more than 250,000 hospitalizations since last fall, according to the CDC.

Kennedy’s newly reconstituted panel also lost one of its eight members shortly before Wednesday’s meeting.

Michael Ross, a Virginia-based obstetrician and gynecologist, stepped down from the committee, bringing the panel’s number to just seven. The Trump administration said Ross withdrew during a customary review of members’ financial holdings.

The meeting opened as the American Academy of Pediatrics announced that it will continue publishing its own vaccine schedule for children, but now will do so independently of the ACIP, calling it “no longer a credible process”.

ACIP’s recommendations traditionally go to the director of the CDC. Historically, nearly all are accepted and then used by insurance companies in deciding what vaccines to cover.

But the CDC currently has no director, so the committee’s recommendations have been going to Kennedy, and he has yet to act on a couple of recommendations ACIP made in April.

Separately, on Wednesday, Senate hearings began for Trump’s nominee for CDC director, Susan Monarez.

During the hearings, she said she has not seen evidence linking vaccines and autism and said she would look into the decision to cut Gavi funding.

“I believe the global health security preparedness is a critical and vital activity for the United States,” she said.

“I think that we need to continue to support promotion of utilisation of vaccines.”

A member of the health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s newly overhauled federal vaccine advisory panel withdrew after a conflict of interest review, a spokesperson has told the Guardian.

Dr Michael Ross, who was involved in multiple private healthcare companies, withdrew after review of his financial holdings.

Kennedy unilaterally fired all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP) in June, arguing they had too many conflicts of interest.

Ross was among eight of Kennedy’s ideological allies appointed to the committee, after the secretary argued the old members of the committee were subject to too many conflicts of interest.

“Yesterday, Dr Michael Ross decided to withdraw from serving on ACIP during the financial holdings review,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said.

“The sacrifice to serve on ACIP varies from member to member, and we appreciate Dr Ross’s willingness to go through this rigorous process.”

The spokesperson made the comments after Guardian inquiries about conflict of interest disclosures for new members of ACIP. Although the Trump administration and Kennedy developed a conflict of interest tracker specifically for ACIP members, Kennedy’s appointees have not been added.

The HHS spokesperson did not respond to Guardian inquiries about when and where new, written conflict of interest disclosures would be published.

Instead, the spokesperson said the department has, “comprehensively reviewed all newly appointed ACIP members for conflicts of interests in accordance with federal law, regulations and departmental polices”, and that the members were provided “ethics training prior to discharging their duties”.

The new members of the committee were asked to disclose conflicts of interest before the meeting began on Wednesday. The committee chair Dr Martin Kulldorff and committee member Dr Robert Malone omitted widely reported work in vaccine litigation, and nurse Vicky Pebsworth said she was “asked to read” a statement disclosed ownership of a healthcare stock but said it was below the government ethics office threshold for reporting.

Ethics review of the new members was also the subject of Senate testimony on Wednesday.

Under questioning by the Democratic senator Patty Murray of Washington, the Trump nominee to head the CDC, Dr Susan Monarez, said she was “not familiar whether or not the members that are participating in the meeting this week have or have not gone through the ethics review necessary to allow them to participate in those meetings”.

“If it is known that they have not gone through the ethics process and they issue recommendations, would you accept them as valid?” asked Murray.

“If they have not gone through an ethics approval process, they shouldn’t be participating in the meetings,” said Monarez.

A sign marks the entrance to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, on 8 October 2013.

The first meeting of a critical federal vaccine panel was a high-profile display of how the US health secretary and vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr has injected chaos into vaccine policy infrastructure.

Wednesday’s meeting was held amid controversy, not only regarding the new members unilaterally appointed by Kennedy, but also the questions they would consider, their conflicts of interest and views on vaccines, and the scheduled speakers.

The new chair of the committee, former Harvard University professor of medicine Dr Martin Kulldorff, who was fired for refusing to be vaccinated against Covid-19, began the meeting by criticizing both his former employer and the media.

“Some media outlets have been very harsh on the new members of this committee,” said Kulldorff, who he said were put into “either a pro- or anti-vaccine box”.

“Such labels undermine critical scientific inquiry and it further feeds the flames of vaccines hesitancy. As Secretary Kennedy has eloquently stated, opposing mercury in fish doesn’t make you anti-fish, and opposing mercury in vaccines doesn’t make you anti-vaccines,” Kulldorff continued, referring to one of the issues the panel would consider.

Kulldorff also quickly announced the formation of two new working groups, in addition to the 11 that already serve the panel. One would study the interaction of vaccines and the cumulative childhood vaccine schedule – issues that have for years been talking points of anti-vaccine advocates including Kennedy – and another to reevaluate vaccines that have not been looked at in more than seven years. The latter would provide the committee’s new members an opportunity to change recommendations for long-approved vaccines.

The panel, the advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP) to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), develops recommendations for how to administer vaccines to the American public.

The ACIP meeting is high-stakes and will be widely watched within the scientific community, as former members argue that the nation’s vaccine approval, research and distribution systems are being dismantled.

The panel’s decisions are highly influential in deciding which vaccines the CDC ultimately recommends for children and adults. In turn, those recommendations form the basis of how health insurers decide which vaccines to cover, and thus have a direct impact on the price and availability of vaccines to the American public.

Experts consider the current situation so dire that outside groups are attempting to develop a system to provide vaccines to Americans in spite of Kennedy’s attempts to disrupt the system.

“What we’re seeing today, and if this were to continue, the medical public health professionals and the entire country are no longer going to trust ACIP,” said Dr Sean O’Leary of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on School Health. “That’s very clear.”

The panel met in spite of lack of clarity about a seemingly fundamental issue: conflicts of interest. Kennedy fired the 17 previous members of the panel after arguing they had “been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest”.

Before the presentations of the meeting started in earnest, the new members were asked to introduce themselves and verbally describe any conflicts of interest.

It’s unclear whether the new members have had conflict of interest disclosures published in writing ahead of the meeting. The new members did not appear on the Trump administration-developed conflict of interest tracker specifically for ACIP members as of Wednesday morning.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) told the Guardian that the new members had undergone ethics review but did not respond to inquiries about when and where these disclosures would be published. The spokesperson also said one of the eight Kennedy-appointed members had dropped out on Tuesday evening after a government financial review.

A spokesperson told the Guardian last week: “Before they start their work on ACIP, the new members’ ethics agreements will be made public.”

Some members did not address any conflicts of interest, seeming to focus only on their introduction. Others, like Kulldorff, did not disclose past involvement with litigation against vaccine makers. Similarly, Dr Robert Malone did not appear to disclose his work in the litigation against the Merck vaccine.

Instead, Malone said: “Any potential conflicts of interest have been analyzed and vetted and declared lacking both internally by HHS and specifically by CDC.”

Vicky Pebsworth, a nurse who holds a doctorate degree and has worked for decades as the volunteer research director for one of the oldest high-profile anti-vaccine groups in the country, said she was “disclosing I hold stock to a healthcare sector fund including vaccine manufacturers; however, the amount of that stock holding is under the office of government ethics regulatory de minimus amount. I understand I therefore can fully participate in the ACIP meeting.”

The agenda for the panel was also remade before the committee met. Previously, experts on the panel were scheduled to consider a recommendation for Covid-19 boosters.

That vote was removed from the agenda – leaving experts to hear planned presentations on Covid-19, but not to vote – because the CDC was unable to hold a final working group call. It is unclear why the call was not held.

CDC scientists explained how the Covid-19 “does remain a substantial burden among youngest and oldest age groups”. After the presentations, members of the ACIP asked whether the low uptake of the vaccine – that some had actively sown doubt about – should be considered a reason not to recommend it.

“The fact [that uptake is] so low is a reflection of the lack of trust many parents have with the Covid vaccination recommendation that the ACIP has been giving,” said Kulldorff.

In another exchange, Pebsworth suggested that the CDC should be looking at “animal studies” and “reproductive toxicity” in relation to Covid-19 vaccines, arguing that only “10% of adverse events are reported”.

Dr Sarah Meyer, a researcher with the CDC’s immunization services division who presented on the topic, said the numbers referenced by Pebsworth were misleading because they included even the most minor “adverse events”, such as sore arms. “For serious reports, we are confident we get a majority of those reported” to surveillance systems such as the Vaccines Adverse Event Reporting System.

Instead, members were scheduled to only vote on whether to recommend a second monoclonal antibody, called Clesrovimab, for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) for all infants younger than eight months old born during respiratory virus season. The vote was postponed because the meeting ran late. The committee is scheduled to meet again on Thursday.

Other advisers joining the meeting reflect the way that Kennedy has remade the federal health department. Representing the Food and Drug Administration was Tracy Beth Høeg, a sports medicine physician and epidemiologist who has called for more scrutiny of vaccines. One of the experts scheduled to present to the panel on Thursday is nurse Lyn Redwood, the ex-president of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, according to Politico.

Key Republican Dr Bill Cassidy, whose vote helped assure Kennedy’s confirmation to HHS, called for the meeting of the panel to be delayed, citing the new members’ “lack of experience” with vaccines and, in some cases, “preconceived bias against them”, according to STAT News.

Further, the panel’s new agenda cited a study that the cited author said he did not conduct or publish, according to Reuters, continuing a pattern of Kennedy’s health department producing references to garbled or nonexistent studies even as Kennedy repeatedly touts “gold-standard” science.