For decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention leaned on a panel of 17 independent public health experts to determine which vaccines Americans received and when.

That ended Monday, when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. removed all 17 in a move experts say will further erode the public’s trust in the safety and efficacy of vaccines and fuel higher incidences of vaccine-preventable diseases. Kennedy says the move to clear out the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices was to restore “public trust” in vaccines.

“A clean sweep is necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science,” Kennedy said in a press release . “The Committee will no longer function as a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas. The entire world once looked to American health regulators for guidance, inspiration, scientific impartiality and unimpeachable integrity. Public trust has eroded. Only through radical transparency and gold standard science will we earn it back.”

ACIP member Dr. Noel Brewer, a public health professor in the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, says he first learned about his termination from the group when he received an email from a Wall Street Journal reporter on Monday afternoon. Around an hour later, Brewer received a termination email from the government.

Kennedy’s decision to remove members of ACIP comes just two weeks before the group is scheduled to convene on June 25 through June 27 , to vote on recommendations for vaccines, including those for COVID-19, HPV, influenza, meningococcal and RSV for adults, children and pregnant women. It is unclear when new committee members will be announced.

What is ACIP?

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is a group of scientific advisors responsible for providing the CDC with recommendations for vaccines and practices to control the spread of vaccine-preventable diseases among both adults and children.

First established in 1964 , ACIP has been considered the gold standard for expertise on vaccine recommendations in the U.S. The group reviews data, recommends which vaccines should be taken and develops recommendations on vaccine timing, frequency and dosage.

“ACIP is one of the critical pieces in that long process of bringing vaccines from research to the market,” says Susan Polan , associate executive director for public policy and advocacy for the American Public Health Association. “If there are suggestions that existing vaccines should be re-evaluated, if there are suggestions that existing vaccines should be taken off the market, it would be devastating.”

What is the significance of removing the members of ACIP?

Brewer said clearing out the committee could cause the broader scientific community to start questioning decisions on vaccines.

“My main concern is the destruction of trust by health care providers in ACIP recommendations,” he said. “Overnight, that has gone away. It will be important to repair that quickly.”

Polan agreed.

“We’re going to see an increase in vaccine hesitancy, we’re going to see fewer people having access because it’s not covered, and we’re going to see increasing cases of vaccine-preventable diseases. And those could be avoided if we were following the science.”

Removal of the entire ACIP committee could affect the future of childhood immunization practices and the availability of vaccines.

ACIP recommendations that are approved by the CDC become the official guidelines of the agency. Experts say they are vital to determining the vaccines and vaccination schedules for state childhood immunization requirements for them to enter public schools.

Dr. Adam Ratner , a member of the Committee on Infectious Diseases of the American Academy of Pediatrics, says ACIP recommendations also establish which vaccines are provided through the Vaccines for Children Program , which provided 74 million free vaccines in 2023 to participating health care providers, and for which more than half of U.S. children are eligible.

“ACIP recommendations are crucial,” Ratner says. “That is sort of the trigger for what gets covered by the Vaccines for Children program.”

Ratner says a change in ACIP recommendations on childhood vaccines could cause some states to reevaluate their immunization requirements.

“I worry about that a lot. We are already in a situation where we have a number of vaccine-preventable diseases that are surging in the United States this year,” Ratner says. “These are not just academic discussions. This is stuff with direct implications for the health of kids in the U.S.”

Dr. Andrew Pavia , an infectious disease specialist at the University of Utah Health system and spokesman for the Infectious Disease Society of America, says a new ACIP committee made up of individuals who are more anti-vaccine could make access to such medications more difficult since insurers could no longer cover their costs. Requirements for what vaccines are covered through health insurers and programs like Medicaid are often tied to ACIP recommendations, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation .

“In addition to the loss of a good source of information and a decay in trust, the loss of insurance coverage may be the greatest fallout from this,” Pavia says. “Vaccines have become relatively expensive, so for many families, without insurance coverage, they will struggle to get vaccinations for their kids.”