RFK Jr ‘Retires’ All 17 Members of CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices

LESLIE EASTMAN JUN 12, 2025 1:00 PM

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.

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.

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.

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