As anticipated, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has substantially revised the charter governing a federal vaccine advisory panel. Those changes increase his authority to name sympathetic allies as federal advisors, steer the committee’s attention toward purported vaccine harms and dangers, and open the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to fringe and anti-vaccine groups.
A notice in the Federal Register on Monday said Kennedy renewed the charter for the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a routine biennial action — the previous term expired April 1. Rather than a mundane renewal, the Monday notice indicated big changes were coming to the panel’s guiding document, which plays a major role in shaping federal vaccine policy and, by extension, state mandates and insurance coverage.
The new charter, published Thursday, spells out responsibilities that steer advisors toward issues and language favored by anti-vaccine campaigners. For example, ACIP members are now charged with “considering analysis of cumulative effects of vaccines and their constituent components.” That phrasing mirrors explicit aims of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine supporters, who seek to attribute complex conditions—like allergies, autism, and other neurodevelopmental disorders—to combinations of vaccines or shared ingredients such as aluminum adjuvants. This represents a shift from earlier anti-vaccine attacks that targeted single vaccines, including the false, discredited claim that the measles vaccine causes autism—a claim refuted by numerous high-quality studies.
The charter also explicitly assigns ACIP the duty of monitoring mRNA vaccines — which have long fallen under ACIP’s remit but are especially vilified by Kennedy and his circle. Kennedy previously falsely asserted that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine was “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”
