RFK Jr ‘Retires’ All 17 Members of CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices
RFK Jr. names 8 new MAHA-aligned members to key CDC committee after ousting entire panel, including one author of the Great Barrington Declaration against covid lockdowns.
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the, has taken the unprecedented step of removing all 17 sitting members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
This committee is composed of supposedly ‘independent’ medical and public health ‘experts’ who advise the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on vaccine recommendations for both children and adults, influencing federal vaccine policies, insurance coverage, and liability protections.
Kennedy said he is “retiring” all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, asserting that it “has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.”
“A clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science,” Kennedy wrote in an opinion piece published by the Wall Street Journal.
Kennedy went onto social media to detail the reasoning for the move, and promising to replace committee members with those more aligned with the Make America Health Again Vision.
Over the coming days, I will use this platform to announce new members to populate ACIP. None of these individuals will be ideological anti-vaxxers. They will be highly credentialed physicians and scientists who will make extremely consequential public health determinations by applying evidence-based decision-making with objectivity and common sense.
I will also be tweeting examples of the historical corruption at ACIP to help the public understand why this clean sweep was necessary.
The most outrageous example of ACIP’s malevolent malpractice has been its stubborn unwillingness to demand adequate safety trials before recommending new vaccines for our children. Today, a compliant American child receives between 69 and 92 routine vaccines (depending on brand/dictated dosage) from conception to 18 years of age. This is up from 11 shots in 1986. ACIP has recommended each of these additional jabs without requiring placebo-controlled trials for any of them. This means that no one can scientifically ascertain whether these products are averting more problems than they are causing.
Yesterday, I retired 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices or ACIP, the @CDCgov external panel that wields the grave responsibility of adding new vaccines to the recommended childhood schedule. Over the coming days, I will use this platform to announce…
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) June 10, 2025
Kennedy then announced 8 new ACIP Members:
- Joseph R. Hibbeln, MD, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist with a career in clinical research, public health policy, and federal service.
- Martin Kulldorff, MD, PhD, is a biostatistician and epidemiologist formerly at Harvard Medical School and a leading expert in vaccine safety and infectious disease surveillance.
- Retsef Levi, PhD, the Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a leading expert in healthcare analytics, risk management, and vaccine safety.
- Robert W. Malone, MD, a physician-scientist and biochemist known for his early contributions to mRNA vaccine technology.
- Cody Meissner, MD, a Professor of Pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and a nationally recognized expert in pediatric infectious diseases and vaccine policy.
- James Pagano, MD, a board-certified Emergency Medicine physician with over 40 years of clinical experience following his residency at UCLA.
- Vicky Pebsworth, OP, PhD, RN, who has a doctorate in public health and nursing from the University of Michigan.
- Michael A. Ross, MD, a Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University, with a career spanning clinical medicine, research, and public health policy.
On Monday, I took a major step towards restoring public trust in vaccines by reconstituting the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP). I retired the 17 current members of the committee. I’m now repopulating ACIP with the eight new members who will attend ACIP’s…
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) June 11, 2025
Legal Insurrection readers who followed our COVID coverage should be familiar with Kulldorff. In 2020, he joined Oxford University’s Professor Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya to author the Great Barrington Declaration. Subsequently, he asserts Harvard fired him for his lockdown-questioning challenges.
Of course, our Big-Pharma-subsidized press is declaring that the new panel is comprised of “anti-vaxxers” by finding ‘experts’ to deride their credentials.
Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the FDA’s independent panel of vaccine advisers, called some of the new members “anti-vaccine activists.”
“I think the public is not going to be getting the same quality of advice as we had before the purge,” he told CNBC. “I think the people who were on the committee that just got fired had far greater expertise in the areas that you needed expertise than this group.”
Offit said he expects recommendations from ACIP to be “less informed” with the new members.
But if testing doesn’t prove your new vaccine works without causing significant potential for adverse effects, why should it be approved.
I will look forward to seeing how the new ACIP proceeds. I suspect the new panel has substantially fewer ties to Big Pharma.
Yep! 14 members of CDC’s vaccine advisory committee who voted to jab your young children have big ties to Big Pharma.
SIGN UP #TheDefender: https://t.co/zL66EdwTnDhttps://t.co/OW7lD1w0H0
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) November 25, 2021
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Comments
Offit seems to think ACIP chairs are lifetime sincures.
why did kulldorff get axed –
He seemed to have some common sense.
At my 50th high school reunion, one class mate became an infectious disease expert at major medical institution in LA. He made the comment that without the masking and vaccinations, that 2m would have died in the US including 500k children.
pretty clear the experts were hired goons and not actual experts
This is why he should have been granted something in the state department and kept as far away as humanly possible from anything health related.
This is a complete and utter disgrace and yes it is identical to Democrats ousting scientists to get the message they want with the “science” label.
Danny,
Nope, not even close. It is a new day and the center/right populist movement of MAGA/MAHA/Tea Party has adapted to the realities of the modern political battlefield. Every Presidential Admin is fully entitled to seek advice from the folks they believe are best qualified to provide that advice within the framework of the policy priorities of that Presidential Admin.
These fired hacks were captured by the industries they were.supposed to be providing regulatory and policy advice about. They demonstrated their lack of.fitness to hold their position the moment they signed off on making the ‘jab’, an unproven inoculation which didn’t confer immunity to the recipient nor prevent transmission by the recipient and has since been shown to have very little to no benefits to the young (under 65) and relatively healthy in exchange for serious risks.
If you don’t feel like the advice and recommendations of the new advisory group is sound then by all means schedule an appoint with your Physician and get on an AI platform to gather more information before acting on it….which will same in contrast to the previous panel who urged mandates.
The fired hacks included signers of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Wrong again.
DR Martin Kulldorff MD, PhD was appointed to serve ON the advisory board by RFK Jr. He is one of the three principal authors of the Great Barrington Declaration along with DR Sunetra Gupta and DR Jay Bhattacharya.
“This is a complete and utter disgrace…”
He said without providing a single statement to back it up.
You’re clearly not cut out for the work we have ahead of us to reclaim this country.
Why do scientists who fought against Fauci by signing the great barrington declaration get fired?
Which signers were “fired,” Danny?
Yes indeed, please answer the question posed by steves59. Name the person fired who signed the Great Barrington Declaration.
For that matter name the fired ‘scientists (plural) who fought Fauci’ by publicly refuting the absurd Fauci Fascism during Rona?
Good, we already saw what a crappy job they did during covid. We don’t need more from them
Kennedy makes me nervous. I understand his first mission is to tear down the “deep state establishment” but well, I worry that he may go too far with some of his ideas.
The other 17 were rubber stampers. I’ll take a totally new team that might, just might ask questions of big pharma and others. I am appalled and have been at the number of shots kids get these days. You cannot prevent every disease but you CAN build an immune system with proper food and exercise to stay healthy. 69-92 jabs in 18 years? This makes no sense – what’s an immune system to do when challenged by so many
invasive organisms??????
How many interactions among all these jabs have been tested? Bet it’s crickets.
The subhead is very misleading.
Was the “one author of the Great Barrington Declaration” one of the people newly NAMED or one of the people OUSTED?
I originally read it as the latter.
Yes, it is extremely misleading. Until reading the article I thought that the Great Barrington Declaration author was one of those ousted. Instead Martin Kulldorff, the author, is one of those named to the new panel.
As far as Offit is concerned, he never met a vaxx he didn’t like. Listen to him long enough and if you didn’t know any better you’d swear that human health is primarily dependent on getting injected with Big Pharma products on a regular basis.
They need to clean house at the NHTSA.
There are over 20k complaints on the Collision Avoidance Systems – many with serious crashes over the past 5 years. Only 1 small open/shut investigation on a very narrow subset.
Meanwhile ONE complaint and some news stories on a Tesla defect and Tesla gets to jump to the front of the investigation line at the agency. Tesla has been at the front of the line for a while.
The agency not only being used as a political weapon, but I think some of the auto manufacturers are bribing the agency to NOT investigate. Also if you call to make a complaint, it is very obvious DEI is in full force in their hiring.
well aint that a shot in the arm
and a kick in the arrrse
Sounds like RFKJ has replaced one ideologically uniform team with another.
Will the replacement team be a group that really uses the data and vigorously debates things or just (despite his claim) another rubber stamp?
This sounds like a purge. Maybe a necessity, but still a purge.
This how the political process works under the new rubric the d/prog imposed; ‘elections have consequences’ we were famously told. Since then the d/prog have every political victory to advance their ideological agenda across the broader gov’t. They’ve stacked boards and commissions with political hacks. They’ve recast formerly political appointments within Agencies as Civil Service positions. They’ve issued inauguration Eve pardons, changes to rules/regulations and disbursed vast sums of taxpayer $ to their ideological allies in NGOs.
The d/prog reset the table to reflect their winner take all philosophy. They’ve done so since 2009. Anyone who had any objections to this shift has had 16 years to do so and make it count. There’s been enough time to hold 4 Presidential elections, 8 HoR elections and for every Senate seat to have been contested at least twice over. No hand wringing now that the center/right populist movement has figured out how to play by the exact same ‘winner take all’ rule set.