Inside the ACIP Shake-Up: How Former CDC Experts Reacted to RFK Jr.’s New Vaccine Committee

I spent two decades at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention working with some of the world’s leading experts on infectious diseases and vaccines. My former colleagues and I are now watching in alarm as the current administration destroys one of the country’s most carefully built systems for public health collapses.

Why ACIP Matters for Vaccine Policy in the U.S.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has guided vaccine recommendations in the United States for over half a century. Its structure, processes, and products have been studied and emulated worldwide. Earlier this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed every member of the committee and replaced them with people whose primary qualifications appear to be alignment with his vaccine skepticism.

Last week, this new ACIP held its second meeting. Former CDC experts, recently retired or fired, gathered online to watch. As the meeting unfolded, they shared their uncensored thoughts in real time in private chats. What they wrote was incisive, darkly comic, and, unfortunately, imbued with sorrow for what has been lost.

An ACIP Meeting Without Scientific Rigor

ACIP was created to answer highly technical questions with scientific evidence. The committee has always relied on internationally recognized methods such as GRADE (grading of recommendations, assessment, development, and evaluation) to assess the strength and certainty of evidence and EtR (evidence-to-recommendation) to consider other factors and make a final decision. They follow this process to ensure that the public, healthcare providers, insurance companies, and other important stakeholders know how decisions are made and to ensure clarity and rigor if ACIP changes its recommendations in the future after new evidence emerges.

At this meeting, those processes were abandoned. One former CDC staff member wrote, “They changed the process without a formal vote. GRADE and EtR were voted on and endorsed, so to change they need to have a formal vote.” Another concluded, “Truly a dumbing down of the process. Although the CDC staff presentations were great.”

Instead of weighing years of accumulated data, panelists cited anecdotes and fringe studies. A pharmacist suggested that her mother’s cancer might have been caused by the COVID vaccine. Another member cited a retracted study in rats as evidence of “autism-like behavior” resulting from vaccination. A pediatric cardiologist attacked the Food and Drug Administration and news media while promoting theories about ivermectin.

As one former CDC scientist noted with irony, “The members’ questions, concerns, and musings are very interesting. They’re worthy of very thoughtful undergraduate students.” Others were blunter, writing: “His comments were pulled straight from his butt. Data-free.” “Pretty clear they’ve read nothing about the vaccines they’re planning to consider or even basic biology of vaccines.” And “do you think everyone else watching sees how clueless they are?”

Confusion, Chaos, and Inexperience on Display in ACIP Meeting

The chair of the ACIP meeting, Martin Kulldorff, inadvertently confessed publicly during the meeting that the new members are all “rookies” in vaccine policy, which likely explains the confusion that dominated the proceedings. At one point, a member announced that the committee had already voted on a resolution that had not yet been presented. Another was caught on a hot microphone muttering “you’re an idiot” after hearing yet another inaccurate explanation of vaccine biology.

The mechanics of the meeting seemed designed for non-transparency. For example, resolutions were read aloud only moments before votes. “It’s actually crazy that the ACIP reps don’t have the chance to read the resolutions before they vote,” one former CDC colleague noted. Another added, “This committee holds the fate of millions of children in their hands, and they don’t know what they’re voting on.”

Predetermined Decisions and Policy Theater

The meeting felt like policy theater, rather than the thorough, transparent, evidence-based process followed in the past. For example, the new members demanded systematic reviews of decades-old science while insisting that invalid studies from fringe journals be included.

To my former colleagues, the meeting’s decisions seemed to be scripted from the start. A former CDC leader commented in our chat, “They are just going through the motions to make it look like they are following a legitimate process, but it has all been decided ahead of time. These are pure theatrics.” Another wrote, “Doesn’t this discussion and the feeling that the decisions were predetermined suggest that ACIP itself was told what to decide? Is it RFK himself or RFK and others?”

In attempting to perform like the old ACIP without following the old processes, this new committee ended up contradicting itself repeatedly. It reversed votes on the combined measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox vaccine. It nearly eliminated hepatitis B vaccination at birth before punting, because they could not reconcile calls from RFK to end this recommendation with the extensive data and evidence meticulously presented by current CDC experts.

The most important votes concerned COVID-19 vaccines. The panel nearly adopted a requirement that everyone obtain a doctor’s prescription for the vaccine, a step that would obstruct millions of Americans who rely on pharmacists for care. The measure failed only because of a tie, which the chair broke by inexplicably voting twice. Even then, the committee recommended that all vaccination decisions require “individual clinical decision-making,” a vague phrase that could impair how patients receive vaccines in the real world.

One longtime vaccine expert concluded, “Most of the entire meeting was wasted on blather. Barely anything they talked about was based on data.”

What the New ACIP Means for Vaccines and Public Health

ACIP recommendations shape the country’s vaccine schedules, determine what insurance will cover, provide a foundation for state and local policies for schools and healthcare facilities and influence their programs. ACIP members are, historically, considered some of the nation’s leading experts in vaccines and public health policy.

My colleagues and I fear that anti-vaccine sentiment expressed at the national level by federally appointed advisers could spread rapidly to families, healthcare providers, and local policies. One described the strategy bluntly, “They demanded CDC systematically review decades of research on long-settled science and then add in invalid antivax papers, which of course they never read. This was designed to throw sand in the gears.” Another summed up the practical effects: “People don’t have the time to react or digest what is being recommended.”

In the end, some disastrous outcomes were averted for now. Requiring prescriptions for COVID vaccines would have excluded millions of Americans without regular doctors and forced unnecessary costs on families and health systems. Narrowing hepatitis B vaccination could have reversed thirty years of progress in preventing a potentially deadly liver infection.

“As foolish and misguided as the meeting was, it feels like the country dodged a bullet…it could have been much worse!” one former colleague wrote.

A Funeral for Knowledge and Expertise?

I worked for 20 years with colleagues who built ACIP into a model of scientific decision-making. What they saw last week was its dismantling. Their private comments reveal both the gallows humor and the deep grief of professionals forced to watch their life’s work destroyed, reduced to a parody of evidence-based policy making.

As one of them wrote after hours of watching: “This was a funeral for knowledge.”