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Secretary Kennedy introduced the new CDC Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) on X yesterday:
https://x.com/SecKennedy/status/1932899858920120692
Secretary Kennedy
@SecKennedyOn 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 scheduled June 25 meeting. The slate includes highly credentialed scientists, leading public-health experts, and some of America’s most accomplished physicians. All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense. They have each committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations. The committee will review safety and efficacy data for the current schedule as well. I’m proud to announce ACIP’s new members:
Joseph R. Hibbeln, MD, is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist with a career in clinical research, public health policy, and federal service. As former Acting Chief of the Section on Nutritional Neurosciences at the National Institutes of Health, he led research on immune regulation, neurodevelopment, and mental health. His work has informed U.S. public health guidelines, particularly in maternal and child health. With more than 120 peer-reviewed publications and extensive experience in federal advisory roles, Dr. Hibbeln brings expertise in immune-related outcomes, psychiatric conditions, and evidence-based public health strategies.
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. He has served on the Food and Drug Administration’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Subgroup of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, where he contributed to national vaccine safety monitoring systems. Dr. Kulldorff developed widely used tools such as SaTScan and TreeScan for detecting disease outbreaks and vaccine adverse events. His expertise includes statistical methods for public health surveillance, immunization safety, and infectious disease epidemiology. He has also been an influential voice in public health policy, advocating for evidence-based approaches to pandemic response.
Retsef Levi, PhD, is the Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a leading expert in healthcare analytics, risk management, and vaccine safety. He has served as Faculty Director of MIT Sloan’s Food Supply Chain Analytics and Sensing Initiative and co-led the Leaders for Global Operations Program. Dr. Levi has collaborated with public health agencies to evaluate vaccine safety, including co-authoring studies on mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and their association with cardiovascular risks. His research has contributed to discussions on vaccine manufacturing processes, safety surveillance, and public health policy. Dr. Levi has also served on advisory committees and engaged in policy discussions concerning vaccine safety and efficacy. His expertise spans healthcare systems optimization, epidemiologic modeling, and the application of AI and data science in public health. Dr. Levi’s work continues to inform national and international debates on immunization safety and health system resilience.
Robert W. Malone, MD, is a physician-scientist and biochemist known for his early contributions to mRNA vaccine technology. He conducted foundational research in the late 1980s on lipid-mediated mRNA delivery, which laid the groundwork for later developments in mRNA-based therapeutics. Dr. Malone has held academic positions at institutions including the University of California, Davis, and the University of Maryland, and has served in advisory roles for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense. His expertise spans molecular biology, immunology, and vaccine development.
Cody Meissner, MD, is a Professor of Pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and a nationally recognized expert in pediatric infectious diseases and vaccine policy. He has served as Section Chief of Pediatric Infectious Disease at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and has held advisory roles with both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Dr. Meissner has been a voting member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, where he has contributed to national immunization guidelines and regulatory decisions. His expertise spans vaccine development, immunization safety, and pediatric infectious disease epidemiology. Dr. Meissner has also been a contributing author to American Academy of Pediatrics policy statements and immunization schedules, helping shape national standards for pediatric care.
James Pagano, MD, is a board-certified Emergency Medicine physician with over 40 years of clinical experience following his residency at UCLA. He has worked in diverse emergency settings, from Level 1 trauma centers to small community hospitals, caring for patients across all age groups, including infants, pregnant women, and the elderly. Dr. Pagono served on multiple hospital committees, including utilization review, critical care, and medical executive boards. He is strong advocate for evidence-based medicine.
Vicky Pebsworth, OP, PhD, RN, earned a doctorate in public health and nursing from the University of Michigan. She has worked in the healthcare field for more than 45 years, serving in various capacities, including critical care nurse, healthcare administrator, health policy analyst, and research scientist with a focus on public health policy, bioethics, and vaccine safety. She is the Pacific Region Director of the National Association of Catholic Nurses. She is a former member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee and the National Vaccine Advisory Committee’s 2009 H1N1 Vaccine Safety Risk Assessment Working Group and Vaccine Safety Working Group (Epidemiology and Implementation Subcommittees).
Michael A. Ross, MD, is 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. He has served on the CDC’s Advisory Committee for the Prevention of Breast and Cervical Cancer, where he contributed to national strategies for cancer prevention and early detection, including those involving HPV immunization. With research experience in hormone therapies, antibiotic trials, and immune-related conditions such as breast cancer prevention, Dr. Ross has engaged in clinical investigations with immunologic relevance. He has advised major professional organizations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and contributed to federal advocacy efforts around women’s health and preventive care. His continued service on biotech and healthcare boards reflects his commitment to advancing innovation in immunology, reproductive medicine, and public health.
Several former members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) who were dismissed by RFK, Jr. early this month accepted payoffs from Big Pharma:
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/cdc-advisers-ousted-rfk-jr-voted-vaccines-despite-conflicts
CDC Advisers Ousted By RFK Jr. Voted On Vaccines Despite Conflicts
By Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times - June 20, 2025Multiple people who until early June served on a federal vaccine advisory committee cast votes on vaccines despite receiving or recently receiving money from pharmaceutical companies that stood to be affected by the votes, according to an Epoch Times review.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta on Aug. 25, 2023. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times
Dr. Helen Y. Chu, a professor of medicine and allergy and infectious diseases at the University of Washington, reported throughout 2024 receiving funds from Merck, among other pharmaceutical companies. In October 2024, in her first meeting as a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), Chu voted in favor of expanding recommendations for vaccination against pneumococcal disease.Merck manufactures multiple pneumococcal conjugate vaccines.
Chu did not submit any conflict of interest disclosures for the meeting, according to a CDC database.
ACIP advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines. Members “are required to declare any potential conflicts of interest that arise in the course of ACIP tenure,” according to the CDC’s website. Members who declare perceived or actual conflicts of interest, the site says, “will be asked to recuse themselves from participating in the discussion and decision-making of the issues relating to that interest.”
ACIP rules state that to be considered for appointment to the panel, potential members must resign from any roles with a vaccine manufacturer, with exceptions for service on data monitoring boards and participation in clinical trials. The rules refer to a federal law that says special government employees such as ACIP members are barred by criminal statute “from participating personally and substantially in an official capacity in any particular matter in which, to his knowledge, he or any other person specified in the statute has a financial interest, if the particular matter will have a direct and predictable effect on that interest.”
Chu has outlined payments from Merck in conflict-of-interest disclosures for numerous studies. In a study published in August 2024, several months before the ACIP vote, Chu reported “consulting with” Merck. In another paper, received by a journal on Nov. 7, 2024—two weeks after the ACIP meeting—she reported “receiving personal fees” from a number of companies and groups, including Merck and Pfizer. In other papers in 2024 and 2025, Chu said she has served on an advisory board for Merck and received advisory board fees.
Chu is listed in another government database, which compiles payment records for physicians, as receiving $3,255 from Merck in 2023 and $4,899 from Merck in 2019, primarily for consulting.
That database has not yet published information for 2024.
Chu did not respond to requests for comment.
Chu and the other 16 ACIP members dismissed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier in June said in an article published on June 16 that ACIP procedures “have minimized the risk of alleged conflicts of interest and biases” and that “statements about potential conflicts were required during each meeting and before each vote, and members recused themselves from voting if any conflicts were identified.”
Other Members
Other dismissed members also voted on vaccines even though they recently received funds from at least one company that stood to be affected by the votes, The Epoch Times review found.
Dr. Edwin Jose Asturias, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Public Health, and Dr. Lin H. Chen, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, reported receiving thousands of dollars from Merck through at least 2023.
Both participated in the same 2024 vote on pneumococcal vaccination as Chu.
Chen also received $43,462 through at least 2023 from Valneva, which makes a chikungunya vaccine.
She abstained in April from voting on that shot.
“No conflict, but to avoid possible perception of conflict of interest for past [work] on chikungunya trials, I will abstain,” she said.
At a mid-2024 meeting, Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, professor of pediatrics, epidemiology, and population health at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, recused from votes on COVID-19, influenza, and pneumococcal vaccines because she was the principal investigator for trials for vaccines against COVID-19, respiratory syncytial virus, and varicella, including Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine trial.
Months later, in the October 2024 meeting, Maldonado supported the expansion of pneumococcal vaccination recommendations and cast a vote in favor of advising the CDC to recommend more COVID-19 vaccine doses.
Maldonado reported $997,800 in research funding from Pfizer in 2023, according to the Open Payments database. She received $6,682 from Merck in 2023.
Dr. Oliver Brooks, CEO of Watts Healthcare Corporation in California, joined the latter vote. He reported receiving approximately $44,000 from Sanofi Pasteur through at least 2023. Under an agreement signed in 2024, Sanofi is assisting Novavax in commercializing its COVID-19 vaccine.
Chen, Maldonado, the University of Colorado School of Public Health, and Watts Healthcare did not return inquiries.
“Having a conflict-of-interest does not mean that people’s decisions will be biased but it creates the impression that the decisions could be biased and that undermines public confidence,” Dr. Joel Lexchin, an associate professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of Family and Community Medicine, who has studied conflicts of interest, told The Epoch Times in an email.
“To remove that impression, the most optimal way to move forward is to avoid the conflict but if that can’t be done then people must manage the conflict. In this case, that would be by abstaining on the vote,” added Lexchin, who assessed the situations of Chen and Maldonado.
Lexchin also said the members should have refrained from participating in discussions on the vaccines.
Another former ACIP member, Noel T. Brewer, a professor in public health at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health, has disclosed in recent papers past work as a paid consultant for Moderna, Novavax, and Sanofi, which make or are involved with COVID-19 vaccines, as well as Merck. It’s not clear when the work was done.
Brewer, who did not respond to a request for comment, voted in favor of expanding pneumococcal and COVID-19 vaccination guidance.
Asturias, Brewer, Brooks, Chen, Chu, and Maldonado also all voted in 2024 to approve new versions of the childhood and adult immunization schedules. The schedules include pneumococcal, COVID-19, respiratory syncytial virus, and varicella vaccines. None declared conflicts of interest.
Timing of Conflicts
Potential ACIP members must fill out a confidential U.S. Office of Government Ethics financial disclosure. Filers are told to report positions in the conflict of interest section for the preceding 12 months.
No other timing is mentioned in the ACIP rules or charter.
The CDC did not respond when asked to confirm that it only considers potential conflicts within the previous year.
Lexchin said that three years is typically the period of time set by journal editors for conflicts of interest.
In the article from the just-ousted ACIP members, they reported conflicts of interest for the past 36 months.
Chen said in the article that she resigned from Valneva and stopped receiving fees from pharmaceutical companies before starting her ACIP term. Chu reported receiving fees, and Maldonado listed her trial work for Pfizer and AstraZeneca, with neither specifying that the money stopped coming in before their work on ACIP began.
Asturias and Brooks did not list any conflicts.
Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, fellow and director of the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Bioethics and American Democracy Program, told The Epoch Times in an email that it’s a recurrent challenge for health agencies such as the CDC and the committees that advise them to avoid being captured by industries, and that one method of capture is through payments.
Kheriaty, who was previously fired from the University of California–Irvine School of Medicine for not receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, said that in addition to prohibiting ACIP members from taking money from pharmaceutical companies during their time on the committee, the members should be barred after serving for at least eight years from accepting payments from the industries with which they were involved.
“Such a policy would prevent not only current conflicts of interest but also mitigate the promise of ‘future reward’ from industry,” he said. “Disclosure of conflicts alone is insufficient; these conflicts must be eliminated entirely.”
Dr. George Kuchel, professor of geriatrics at the University of Connecticut’s Center on Aging, another ousted ACIP member, abstained this year from voting on respiratory syncytial virus vaccines.
“I have no conflicts of interest,” he said at the meeting. “However, I will abstain ... because I consulted for six months about a decade ago.”
The Department of Health and Human Services declined to provide the confidential disclosures filled out for the government by the former panelists or the conflict-of-interest waivers issued for the members in 2024 and 2025. The CDC in 2023 rejected a Freedom of Information Act request from The Epoch Times for the information, saying the documents were “exempted from release by statute.”
Full Sweep
In their article this week, the former members decried their removals, describing the move and the narrowing of COVID-19 vaccine recommendations as lacking clear rationale and destabilizing efforts to vaccinate more people in the United States.
They also said that the ousters and the appointment of eight new members, along with reorganization of CDC employees working on immunizations, “have left the U.S. vaccine program critically weakened.”
“I’d argue the opposite: what has weakened trust is decades of stacking advisory committees with individuals, whether financially conflicted or intellectually entrenched, while sidelining those who ask hard, necessary questions,” Kim Witczak, who has served on federal advisory committees as a consumer representative, told The Epoch Times in an email.
Kennedy has said that he removed the members because of a history of issues, including conflicts of interest.
He pointed to how a House of Representatives committee in 2000 found conflicts of interest among members of ACIP and the panel that advises the Food and Drug Administration on vaccines, including that some owned stock in the companies that make vaccines, and a 2009 inspector general report that concluded that 64 percent of members of one of the CDC’s advisory committees had potential conflicts of interest that were not identified or resolved.
“Today we are prioritizing the restoration of public trust above any specific pro- or anti-vaccine agenda,” Kennedy said in a statement. “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.”
He later wrote on the social media platform X that for the past 20 years, “individual panelists regularly voted to recommend new vaccines owned by companies with which they personally had obscene financial conflicts.”
Health officials have said they will be implementing new policies that recommend panelists recuse themselves from votes that would impact current or former clients.
Kennedy was responding to concerns raised about Dr. Robert Malone, a new ACIP member who was paid by plaintiffs suing Merck over its measles, mumps, rubella vaccine. In a report filed in 2018, Malone concluded that Merck misrepresented testing results.
Malone told The Epoch Times that he has not been involved in the case, which was dismissed in 2023, for years, and that he has received ethics training for the new position.
ACIP rules state that members, during their tenure, “do not serve as a paid litigation consultant or expert witness in litigation involving a vaccine manufacturer.”
A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email that ethics agreements for the new members will be released before they start work on ACIP. The panel is slated to meet for three days beginning on June 25.
Martin Kulldorff, another new member, prepared a separate report against Merck in a different case that was also dismissed. Additionally, he is listed as an expert witness in a third case that is set to go to trial later this year. Kulldorff has not responded to requests for comment.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) remade by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to look at many vaccines. It does not appear they have been intimidated by the Big Pharma hate campaign launched against them:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/whats-next-for-cdcs-remade-vaccine-advisory-committee-5879188
What’s Next for CDC’s Remade Vaccine Advisory Committee?
Plans include reviewing hepatitis B and measles vaccine recommendations.
By Zachary Stieber | July 01, 2025The vaccine advisory committee remade by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to look at multiple other vaccines, after it voted to advise officials to stop recommending influenza shots that contain mercury.
Martin Kulldorff, the new chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), said on June 26 that one proposal is to tell the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to make clear that young children should not receive the measles, mumps, rubella, varicella (MMRV) combination immunization.
Instead, the CDC would recommend that children under the age of 47 months receive two separate vaccines: the measles, mumps, rubella shot, and the varicella, or chickenpox, vaccine.
The change would reflect data that indicate the MMRV combination vaccine causes more febrile seizures, he said. The CDC said the same thing in a background paper on the subject dated June 25.
A vote on the matter could occur as early as the next meeting, which is expected to take place in August or September.2 New Subcommittees
Kulldorff, an epidemiologist who was fired by Harvard Medical School for declining a COVID-19 vaccine, also announced two new work groups, or subcommittees.
One will examine the impact of vaccines on the childhood immunization schedules.
“It is important to evaluate the cumulative effect of the recommended vaccine schedule,” Kulldorff said. “This includes interaction effects between different vaccines, the total number of vaccines, cumulative amounts of vaccine ingredients, and the relative timing of different vaccines.”
Researchers with the CDC and other institutions said in a 2022 paper that exposure to aluminum in vaccines was associated with asthma, although they said that additional investigation was required to confirm a link.
The second subcommittee will examine vaccines that have not been reviewed in more than seven years, including the hepatitis B vaccine, the first dose of which the CDC recommends at birth for infants.
“Unless the mother is hepatitis B positive, an argument could be made to delay the vaccine for this infection, which is primarily spread by sexual activity and intravenous drug use,” Kulldorff said.
Kulldorff declined in an email to The Epoch Times to say whether he'd been directed by Kennedy to look at the measles vaccines, or to reveal any other proposals the committee plans to take up at its next meeting.
The Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC’s parent agency, did not respond to a request for comment, including on whether Kennedy directed the committee to vote on vaccines containing the mercury-based preservative thimerosal.
Kennedy, earlier in June, removed all 17 members of the ACIP and replaced them with Kulldorff and others.
Votes on RSV Antibody, Influenza Vaccines
During the committee’s first meeting since the replacements, it advised the CDC to add a second monoclonal antibody treatment against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) for infants.
Dr. Robert Malone, a new ACIP member, told The Epoch Times that there was extensive discussion on the antibody at the subcommittee level and that one of the reasons he voted in favor was to provide another option against the virus, given how stock of the existing antibody ran low in the past.
Retsef Levi, another ACIP member, told The Epoch Times he voted against making the second antibody available to all infants because of concerns over a lack of granular data from clinical trials for both products. He would have supported letting high-risk infants receive the new antibody.
Kulldorff also voted in favor of the antibody. He participated despite being a paid witness in a legal case against Merck, which manufactures the new antibody, in January.
Dr. Joel Lexchin, a professor at the University of Toronto who has studied conflicts of interest, told The Epoch Times via email that Kulldorff “had a clear conflict and should not have voted.”
Kulldorff has not responded to requests for comment about potential conflicts of interest. He said during the meeting he did not have any conflicts related to the issues at hand.
Lexchin previously told The Epoch Times that some of the members ousted by Kennedy should have abstained from certain votes after they received money from pharmaceutical companies that stood to be affected.
The new advisers also voted to keep in place the CDC’s recommendation that virtually all individuals aged at least 6 months receive an influenza vaccine on an annual basis, before they advised the CDC to stop recommending thimerosal-containing flu shots.
About 5 percent of the flu shots administered in recent months contained thimerosal, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
Members who voted in favor of removing thimerosal said they wanted to cut down on controllable sources of mercury exposure. Dr. Cody Meissner, the only no vote, said he didn’t see a safety issue with the amount of mercury in influenza vaccines and that he was concerned the vote would imperil influenza vaccine access for some.
The FDA and Sanofi, an influenza vaccine manufacturer, said that the supply would be sufficient without the thimerosal-containing vaccines.
The meeting did not involve much debate or discussion on general influenza vaccination, according to Malone.
“We were presented with essentially language that was already approved and and had to make a decision about whether or not to endorse ... a universal influenza vaccine recommendation, as has been the case for decades. The decision was that this was not the time to fight on that hill about the universal influenza vaccine recommendation,” Malone told The Epoch Times.
Panel member Vicky Pebsworth abstained from the vote, citing a lack of discussion.
Immune Imprinting
Malone said at the close of the meeting that he would be part of a subcommittee focused on influenza and that he anticipated considering “the long-standing issue of immune imprinting and original antigenic sin, which may or may not be a concern in the case of routine annual influenza vaccination.”
Immune imprinting refers to when previous vaccinations or infections leave behind an immune memory, causing the body to produce antibodies targeting that memory, even if a new variant or vaccine is introduced.Vaccinating people annually against influenza may be counterproductive due to imprinting, Malone told The Epoch Times.
“It might be tempting to think that vaccinating everybody with the same vaccine every year is the best strategy, but I think there is actually quite a lot of evidence that suggests that that might not be the case,” Levi said.
Levi also said that he’s aware that some people want the remade panel to make radical changes, while others have expressed concern that that the panel will do just that.
“I think that the fact that we are not rushing to make fast decisions on radical changes should hopefully give people some indication that we are going to be very, very thoughtful and thorough in first understanding why people make decisions the way they are now before we are going to recommend changes,” he said.
The new members stated in a joint statement after the meeting: “Our central duty is to protect public health, and we understand that we must answer the call for reestablishing confidence in the scientific examination process. This committee strongly supports the use of vaccines, and other countermeasures, predicated on evidence-based medicine, including rigorous evaluation and expansive, credible scientific data, for both safety and efficacy.”
‘A Welcome Change’
Barbara Loe Fisher, cofounder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, and a former vaccine adviser to the government, told The Epoch Times in an email that historically, most of the ACIP work groups have focused on promoting vaccination rather than examining vaccine safety or effectiveness.
“From a consumer perspective, it is a welcome change to see ACIP form work groups to tackle topics that are of concern to increasingly well-educated Americans paying more attention to the impact of vaccine policies on health outcomes,” she said.
Pebsworth is a volunteer director for the center. Fisher said Pebsworth won’t speak to media outlets during her time on the panel.
Some other organizations criticized ACIP’s focus on the childhood schedule and thimerosal.
“Re-examining the childhood vaccine schedule and the use of thimerosal are both politically motivated actions that are not based on science,” Dr. Tina Tan, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said in a statement. “Raising questions without adequate data casts doubt on vaccination, which can further drive down confidence in vaccines. More than any other medications, vaccines are extensively and constantly reviewed and evaluated.”
Kulldorff said during the meeting that Kennedy had given the committee “a clear mandate to use evidence-based medicine for making vaccine recommendations.”
“Vaccines are not all good or bad. If you think that all vaccines are safe and effective and want them all, or if you think that all vaccines are dangerous and don’t want any of them, then you don’t have much use for us—you already know what you want,” he said.
“But if you wish to know which vaccines are suitable for you and your children and at what ages, then we will provide you with evidence-based recommendations.”
Biden U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy just took complete control of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and its work on behalf of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a Big Pharma and government financed political front.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5786565-judge-blocks-kennedy-vaccine-changes/
Federal court blocks Kennedy’s vaccine changes, invalidates vaccine advisory panel
By Joseph Choi - March 16, 2026A federal judge on Monday blocked Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s changes to vaccine policy, including the reduction of the recommended childhood immunizations and his remaking of a key vaccine advisory panel.
U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy, a Biden appointee, granted a motion by the American Academy of Pediatrics for a preliminary injunction against the reduced childhood immunization schedule earlier this year, along with the remaking of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, invalidating all votes made by the committee since.
Murphy found that the reconstitution of the ACIP last year failed to abide by the Federal Advisory Committee Act. He also found that the CDC bypassing the ACIP when changing the childhood immunization schedule was both a “technical, procedural failure” and “an abandonment of the technical knowledge and expertise embodied by that committee.”
“The Court concludes that, in addition to being contrary to law, the issuance of the January 2026 Memo was arbitrary and capricious because it abandoned the agency’s longstanding practice of getting recommendations from ACIP before changing the immunization schedules without sufficient explanation,” Murphy wrote in his ruling, referring to the CDC’s announcement at the start of the year altering the childhood and adolescent immunization schedule.
Last June, Kennedy fired all 17 sitting members of the ACIP, claiming it was necessary to “re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.” He went on to appoint a slew of known vaccine skeptics and critics to the committee.
Since this remaking, the new members of the ACIP went on to vote in favor of no longer recommending birth doses of the hepatitis B vaccine; to delay the combined measles, mumps, rubella and varicella vaccine; and to no longer recommend the COVID-19 vaccine for everyone 6 months and older but to leave it to “individual-based decision making.”
When it came to the new members of the ACIP, Murphy acknowledged that many of them had “extensive expertise” in their fields. The federal judge determined, however, there are “glaring gaps” in the expertise “relevant to the functions and tasks performed by the committee.”
“First, of the fifteen members currently on ACIP, even under the most generous reading, only six appear to have any meaningful experience in vaccines—the very focus of ACIP,” wrote Murphy.
He specifically named current ACIP members Hillary Blackburn, Evelyn Griffin, Joseph Hibbeln, James Pagano, Raymond Pollak and chair of the committee Kirk Milhoan as appearing to “lack any expertise or professional qualifications related to vaccines or immunization as required by ACIP’s Charter.”
Murphy further determined that while three other members of the committee — Retsef Levi, Robert Malone and Catherine Stein — may have experience relevant to the ACIP, they lack the qualifications to constitute “expertise” in vaccines and immunizations.
HHS indicated the ruling would be appealed.
“HHS looks forward to this judge’s decision being overturned just like his other attempts to keep the Trump administration from governing,” department spokesman Andrew Nixon said in a statement to The Hill.
The plaintiffs had requested that the court block an upcoming ACIP meeting, but Murphy wrote that doing so would be “inappropriate.” He wrote that blocking a meeting would be a “far greater intrusion into Defendants’ operation than merely staying the current appointments.”
He did note, however, that any upcoming meetings are effectively canceled due to the appointments of the members being blocked.
An HHS official told The Hill that an upcoming ACIP meeting scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday has been postponed.
The MAHA take on Biden U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy's taking control of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the behest of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP):
https://www.themahareport.com/p/a-boston-judge-rolls-back-secretary
Why the Boston Rollback of Secretary Kennedy’s Vaccine Wins Won't Stick
By Louis Conte - March 23, 2026A silent war has been raging between a group of scientific reformers committed to restoring public trust in the nation’s vaccine program through gold-standard science and transparency, and a Big Pharma ghost army committed to the status quo.
This second group is composed of legacy media’s selected talking head ‘experts’, lawyers retained by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and a shadowy cabal of troll commenters whose job is to discredit scientists doing nearly any work perceived to threaten Big Pharma narratives and control.
That the AAP is captured by Big Pharma is beyond question as their website’s list of current corporate ‘partners’ clearly reveals.
That’s why what happened in a Boston courtroom on March 16 is no great surprise.
To remind you: The AAP is one of the medical associations that brought a lawsuit against the CDC’s newly-configured Advisory Commission on Immunization Practices (ACIP) that resulted in a March 16 decision by District Judge Brian E. Murphy to temporarily block all reforms related to vaccines under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Murphy’s court also ruled to shut down an ACIP meeting that had been scheduled for March 18 and 19.
A Biden-appointee, Judge Murphy has restored the vaccine schedule to how it was during the Biden years, in defiance of the will of the voters.
If his decision holds (it likely won’t), mercury will be allowed back into vaccines, all one-day old infants will be forced to take the Hep B vaccine, and children across the nation will be required to take Covid vaccine boosters to stay in school.
One federal judge – and all the Covid-era insanity is back.
It was Covid-era insanity that the ACIP had scheduled to review last week. The organization created a workgroup to study diverse reactions to Covid-9 vaccines. The memo is called, “Post Covid-19 Vaccination Chronic Injuries – Proposed Action.”
This memo was to be unveiled during the ACIP meeting. But the AAP convinced Judge Murphy to cancel that meeting and to invalidate the historical changes HHS Secretary Kennedy and President Trump have made over the past year.
Why was the ACIP meeting canceled? That’s fairly obvious. The memo contains disclosures about vaccine injuries that directly challenge Big Pharma’s narrative about the vaccines’ safety profile.
Dated February 15, 2026, the memo presented published, unpublished and clinical data about Covid-19, culled by the ACIP, all related to chronic injuries from Covid vaccines. It also proposed voting language for potential future ACIP deliberations.
The memo also announces and acknowledges a novel medical condition its ACIP authors call “Post-Acute-COVID-19-Vaccination Syndrome” (PACVS).
This syndrome, which afflicts a large swath of Americans who took the Covid vaccines, has not been legitimized by the AAP and legacy media. Despite the hundreds of thousands of people who have reported suffering from the post-vaccine condition, leading medical groups and the media are adamant that it does not exist.
It does.
The memo makes the ACIP case: “Patients suffering from PACVS present with heterogenous, prolonged symptoms that typically involve multiple organ systems, many of which overlap with chronic post SARS CoV-2infection syndrome, often referred to as Long-COVID.”
People with PACVS have been suffering silently, without support from doctors who often attribute their illness to psychosomatic symptoms. The ACIP workgroup noted that Covid vaccine-injured Americans often suffer from systematic under-recognition, suppression, abandonment, and being labeled ‘antivaxxers.’
The working group memo describes PACVS symptoms as “persistent post-vaccination multi-organ symptom clusters involving neurologic, cardiovascular, immunologic, endocrine, pulmonary, gastrointestinal, and autonomic systems.”
From the same memo, we also learn that the vaccine-injured suffer from neuropathies, dysautonomia, cognitive impairment, immune dysregulation, chronic fatigue, type1 diabetes, gastrointestinal, neuro-endocrine, and autoimmune presentations, myocarditis, vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT), venous and arterial thromboembolism, and other thrombophilia associated with clotting.
Don’t be steamrolled: People with PACVS are sick and the mainstream medical establishment is not treating their illness because it does not fit neatly into any medical box.
Most physicians lack awareness and do not have the training and diagnostic categories that would enable them to recognize the cluster of Covid vaccine injury symptoms. PACVS rarely fits into currently used diagnosis codes. Symptoms patients experience overlap with commonly observed short-term, post vaccination side effects but PACVS patients experience symptoms for prolonged periods of time.
Current diagnostic frameworks and the lack of adequate surveillance systems is restricting syndrome identification. This is allowing a potentially reversible vaccine injury to “progress unchecked to chronic deregulation.”
The workgroup proposes establishing a PACVS surveillance system; clinical care coordination; disability recognition; reimbursement and patient support; research and international data sharing; and pharmacovigilance – the identification, evaluation, and mitigation of adverse effects and other drug-related problems.
The workgroup also recommends establishing ICD codes to identify aspects of PACVS so that treatments can be covered by insurance and health care.
Establishing ICD codes may seem like an uninteresting bureaucratic maneuver. However, establishing codes for vaccine injuries would force the medical establishment to acknowledge that vaccines they administered have caused significant harm to their patients.
All of this would be unremarkable if it were in response to a newly-identified disease or disorder. But what makes it unprecedented is that the workgroup recommends such steps following vaccine injuries.
For the AAP and their allies, this is totally unacceptable. Acknowledgement of PACVS is an attack on their belief system – on the normative, on ‘settled science.’
For years, it was heresy to question any aspect of vaccine safety. Instead of being like every other category of medicine, vaccinology became a cult, controlled by nefarious forces that profited handsomely from the compliance of millions of people who were never allowed to question their faith.
For now, a Boston Judge has put a hold on Secretary Kennedy’s reforms and helped keep PACVS out of the news cycle.
But the silent war continues.
Judge Murphy’s decision won’t hold because the Supreme Court has already turned back similar decisions involving lower courts found to over-reach their authority.
The American people know or sense the truth about Covid vaccine injuries. These injuries are all too real for each person who discovered, post-jab, that they had one. They are too real for their friends and family, too.
But the AAP doesn’t want you to know anything about such injuries and certainly not that some are settled in a vaccine court. Along with their allies in Big Pharma, the AAP’s mandate is to obfuscate and free themselves from accountability.
A number of informative graphics at the original, at the hyperlink, above.
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