A new charter for the panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine use substantially refocuses the responsibilities of the committee, downplaying its role in recommending the use of new vaccines and giving it responsibility to assess alternatives for disease prevention.
Whereas previous iterations of the committee’s charter stressed the importance of vaccine research-relevant experience in the selection of its members, the new version, posted to the CDC’s website on Thursday, merely stipulates that the panel as a whole should “represent a balanced range of scientific, clinical, and public health expertise relevant to the Committee’s mission” — a broad umbrella under which people with little experience in vaccines or vaccination policy might conceivably fit.
Public health experts interpreted the new document as a way for health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccines, to try to circumvent a court challenge to his reconfiguration of this committee, known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
Kennedy fired the previous committee en masse last June and replaced it with a coterie of vaccine skeptics, people who had little to no experience in running vaccine clinical trials, assessing trial results, or even applying vaccination recommendations — the kinds of expertise that members of the influential panel had traditionally had, and which earlier iterations of ACIP’s charter demanded of its members.
