By Josh Nathan-Kazis

In an op-ed announcing the abrupt firing of the experts that advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine policy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. condemned their committee as "a rubber stamp for any vaccine, " compromised by close ties to drugmakers.

Is the health secretary, a longtime critic of the committee and a leading vaccine skeptic, right?

Barron's took a look at the claims he made as he laid out his argument for tearing apart the U.S. government's process for reviewing vaccine safety and efficacy. Some of Kennedy's allegations, like his charge that the Biden administration stacked the committee on its way out, hold up. Most others don't.

The CDC advisory group, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, holds hearings on vaccine safety and efficacy, and makes recommendations about who should use the shots approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Its members include top doctors, virologists, epidemiologists, and other experts.

Below are the claims that Kennedy made in his Journal essay, and how they compare with the facts.

Some of the committee members Kennedy fired "were last-minute appointees of the Biden administration."

It is true that the Biden administration appointed a large proportion of the committee in mid-to-late 2024.

According to a January report from the healthcare news publication STAT, which cited an unidentified former senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services, there was an "intentional" effort by the Biden administration to stuff the committee with people who weren't vaccine skeptics. As a scheme, it had big holes from the start: Though committee members serve four-year terms, the administration has the power to remove them whenever it wants.

"There's nothing in the statute, or even the charter, to prevent removing members at will," Dorit Reiss, a professor of law at UC Law San Francisco, told Barron's.

A large number of ACIP seats were kept vacant through early 2024, and as of the middle of last year, only seven people had been appointed to the committee out of a possible 19 seats. (An updated charter adopted in April of 2024 expanded the maximum committee membership from 15 to 19.)

According to a CDC roster that was no longer online as of Tuesday morning, the Biden administration appointed six ACIP members last July, and two more in December.

ACIP "has never recommended against a vaccine -- even those later withdrawn for safety reasons."

This isn't true, and the wording doesn't reflect what ACIP does.

ACIP's role isn't to approve or reject a vaccine, or to control which vaccines are on the market. That is the job of the Food and Drug Administration, which has its own vaccines advisory committee. ACIP's job is to provide guidance about how licensed vaccines should be used.

ACIP has dropped recommendations in favor of a vaccine many times.

The committee said in 2016 that patients shouldn't use an AstraZeneca nasal-spray flu vaccine called FluMist due to efficacy concerns, after saying in 2014 that FluMist was the preferred flu vaccine for young children. (It recommended FluMist again in 2018.)

In 1999, ACIP pulled its recommendation for a rotavirus vaccine due to a safety issue. And during the Covid-19 pandemic, ACIP briefly stopped recommending Johnson & Johnson's Covid-19 vaccine, before issuing a much narrower recommendation.

More broadly, the assertion seems to miscast the role of ACIP and its recommendations, which frequently shift as evidence develops. ACIP's recommendations for who should get a respiratory syncytial virus vaccine, for example, have changed multiple times over the past three years.

"The groups that inform ACIP meet behind closed doors, violating the legal and ethical principle of transparency crucial to maintaining public trust."

Kennedy appears to be referring here to the so-called work groups, subcommittees made up of ACIP members that meet outside of the public ACIP meetings to review data and recommend options for the full ACIP to choose from. Meetings of the work groups aren't open to the public. All documents related to the work groups, however, are subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

An investigation of ACIP by a House committee in 2000 found that "enforcement of its conflict-of-interest rules was weak to nonexistent," and a 2009 report by the inspector general of the HHS "echoed these findings."

Kennedy's description of the HHS report isn't quite right. He wrote that the HHS inspector general found that "few committee members completed full conflict-of-interest forms -- 97% of them had omissions." But the 97% figure in the report comes from an analysis of all members of CDC advisory committees, not just ACIP.

Conflicts of interest on FDA and CDC advisory committees have been a long-term matter of public concern. There are, however, policies in place at CDC that require ACIP members to file confidential financial disclosure reports each year, and that bar ACIP members from working for vaccine makers, or owning shares in them, among other rules. Each member is asked about potential conflicts of interest at the beginning of each public meeting.

ACIP members are allowed to work on vaccine clinical trials, and to serve on clinical trial vaccine monitoring boards , but they can't participate in deliberations or votes related to trials they worked on.

"Most of ACIP's members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines."

Some ACIP members have in the past received payments and research funding from drugmakers, but Kennedy's assertion appears to overstate the case.

The magazine Science reviewed public disclosures by drugmakers of payments made to healthcare providers, and found in March that only eight of the physicians on ACIP at the time had received payments from drugmakers. Their average payment per year was nearly $3,000 less than the average for all U.S. specialist doctors. Those payments mostly came before their terms on ACIP began; data for 2024 isn't available yet.

On Tuesday morning, Barron's conducted its own review of the payment data, which is posted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Numbers are available for 2017 through 2023.

In the latest year for which data is available, only three of the former members appear to have received more than a thousand dollars in payments not tied to research studies; none of those members were on the committee at that time.

At least a handful of the former ACIP members have, over the course of their careers, been the principal investigator on research projects that have received significant funding from drugmakers. That isn't unexpected, given that vaccine makers at times fund scientific research, and that the CDC recruits top scientists to ACIP.

Early this year, CDC posted a database of conflict- of-interest disclosures made by ACIP members before each meeting of the committee since 2020. They show that some members have been involved in clinical trials run by vaccine makers, which is permitted, and that members at times recused themselves from voting on specific vaccines.

Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at josh.nathan-kazis@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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June 10, 2025 15:52 ET (19:52 GMT)

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