WASHINGTON — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Monday that the department will replace all members of the advisory panel responsible for providing guidance on vaccines, a move health experts say is unprecedented.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, develops recommendations for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how to use vaccines to control disease in the general population. ACIP members include experts in medicine and public health, and the CDC determines its own guidance based on ACIP’s recommendations.

“A clean sweep is necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science,” Kennedy said in a statement, announcing he removed the 17 sitting members on the panel and will replace them with new appointees who are already under consideration.

Because the current members were appointed during the Biden administration, leaving them in place would limit the Trump administration from choosing a majority of the panel’s members until 2028, he said.

“Today we are prioritizing the restoration of public trust above any specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda,” Kennedy said. “The public must know that unbiased science — evaluated through a transparent process and insulated from conflicts of interest — guides the recommendations of our health agencies.”

Kennedy, in a separate Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing the ACIP shake-up, said the new members, “won’t directly work for the vaccine industry” and “will exercise independent judgment, refuse to serve as a rubber stamp, and foster a culture of critical inquiry — unafraid to ask hard questions.”

The announcement comes as the country is navigating a measles epidemic, the worst outbreak since the U.S. had eradicated the infectious disease in 2000.

Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic, has elevated distrust in previous vaccine guidance.

In late May, he announced that the CDC would be removing the COVID-19 shot from its immunization schedule for healthy children and pregnant people, without seeking input from ACIP members.

Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chair Bill Cassidy, R-La., said before he voted to confirm Kennedy that he had agreed to not make any changes to ACIP. On Monday, Cassidy said he had spoken to Kennedy twice about the move, and said he was assured the changes don’t affect the overall process, just the personnel.

“Of course, now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion. I’ve just spoken with Secretary Kennedy, and I’ll continue to talk with him to ensure this is not the case,” Cassidy wrote in a separate post on the social platform X.

The move immediately drew rebukes from those skeptical of Kennedy’s motives.

“RFK Jr. is paving the way to reshape vaccine policy based not on decades of science, but on his own unhinged fanaticism,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said on X following the announcement. “This is unprecedented, and unthinkably dangerous.”

Bruce A. Scott, president of the American Medical Association, said in a statement that ACIP has been a “trusted national source of science- and data-driven advice and guidance” for generations and that Monday’s action “undermines that trust and upends a transparent process that has saved countless lives.”

“With an ongoing measles outbreak and routine child vaccination rates declining, this move will further fuel the spread of vaccine-preventable illnesses,” Scott said.

The panel last met in April, two months after one of its routine meetings was abruptly canceled.

The next ACIP meeting is scheduled for June 25-27 in Atlanta.

_____

(Lia DeGroot contributed to this report.)

_____

©2025 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. Visit at rollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.