A committee of experts advising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Vaccin Policy – a group that is assumed to be in the cross of health and human service secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is – will not meet for the regularly planned February meeting, a senior HHS officer confirmed on Thursday.
The advisory committee for immunization practices was to meet from 26 to 28 February, the first meeting since the Trump government took office. That will not happen, Andrew Nixon, the HHS director of Communications, told Stat in an e -mail. Later on Thursday, a message The delay was placed on the ACIP homepage.
Nixon did not immediately answer Stat’s question when the meeting would be rearranged, and only said that it is ‘prospective’.
Kennedy, whose first day was on HHS Tuesday, has denounced the Acip in the past. During his confirmation process of the Senate, he told the Financial Committee that 97% of the ACIP members had conflicts of interest -a claim that people who are familiar with the rigorous control process have undergone ACIP members.
The CDC staff organizing the committee’s work has been trying for weeks to get the final approval of HHS to keep the meeting without success. Until last week, the subcommittees or working groups that do the preparatory work for meetings of the entire committee were forbidden because of the communication that the administration placed in federal health authorities shortly after President Trump’s inauguration. The subcommissie meetings were allowed to resume last week, told several sources to Stat.
For a while the CDC thought that the ACIP meeting could take place, and personally on the campus of the agency, although there were recently plans to move it to an online session while the secretariat was waiting for definitive approval to convene the meeting .
The meeting – the agenda for which it had been online since the beginning of January – was to discuss and vote for multiple vaccine issues about recommendations for the use of a Newly approved vaccine To prevent Chikungunya, a disease transferred by mosquitoes; A new meningitis vaccine from GSK, which is brought to the market as Penmenvy; As well as new recommendations about influenza and RSV vaccines.
All meetings of the advisory committee where the votes will take place must have a period for public comment. Members of the public can submit written comments or ask to enter a lottery to make an oral comment during the meeting.
But because HHS would not formally allow the meeting to continue, the portal was not to be submitted to public comments. Sources said this was the last trigger for the decision of the ACIP secretariat of the CDC to ask to postpone the meeting.
Nixon said in his short e -mail that the meeting would be postponed to make public comments prior to the meeting. “
Experts in the field of public health have been concerned about the future of this committee, which has helped the CDC for years to decide how approved vaccines can be used most effectively. Vaccines that are recommended by the ACIP must be covered by a health insurance policy, if the CDC director unsubscribe from its recommendations. CDC directors have rarely rejected those recommendations.
Nearly two dozen groups of medical professionals and interest groups, including the American Medical Association, the Gerontological Society of America, and a series of individual medical professionals and experts in the field of public health wrote An open letter On Thursday to Kennedy and acting CDC director Susan Monarez urges them to immediately move the meeting. The campaign is led by the partnership to combat infectious disease.
Dorit Reiss, professor of Law at the UC Law San Francisco that follows the work of the ACIP closely, called the postponement ‘problematic in different ways’, and noted that important voices would be held.
Reiss also said that the relocation ‘suspects evokes that Mr. Kennedy will not keep his word to the senator [Bill] Cassidy that he will not disrupt ACIP recommendations. “
Cassidy, a supporter of vaccines, clearly hesitated to support Kennedy because of his controversial opinions about the safety of vaccines, which Kennedy refused to drop back during his confirmation process of the Senate. Cassidy, however, agreed to support Kennedy, after receiving a list of guarantees, including that Kennedy would “work within the current vaccination inspection and safety monitoring systems and not to set up parallel systems, and the recommendations of the CDC Advice Committee of the CDC to maintain. ”
Other experts expressed their concern that this postponement is a prescription of the possible dissolution of the committee – at least in its current form.
Paul Offit, an expert in infectious diseases in the children’s hospital of Philadelphia, noted that Project 2025, a series of policy recommendations led by the conservative Heritage Foundation and which is seen by some as a playbook for Trump’s second term, states that CDC – Officials should not be allowed to make recommendations with regard to vaccination requirements for school entry; Those decisions must be left to parents and medical care providers.
“I think this is what this is. This is step 1 of trying to eliminate CDC as a group that makes [vaccine] Recommendations, “he said in an interview.
The ACIP plays different roles. It sometimes advises which vaccines can be safely administered. At other times, the Commission examines signals of risks for recipients of Vaccin to see if user recommendations should be changed. Concern about the risk of developing Guillain-Barré syndrome, a form of temporary paralysis, after receiving two of the RSV vaccines for older adults, the committee led to much more limited use of the products than manufacturers that Had wanted.
Fears about the future of the committee were only strengthened when Trump is one executive order Wednesday entitled “The reduction of federal bureaucracy starts.” Some of the order instructs assistants to assess existing federal advisory committees – ACIP is one – and report within 30 days when you have to terminate ” [the] Grounds that they are superfluous. ‘
A CDC source told Stat that the Agency was asked on Wednesday to give written justification for the existence of various federal advisory committees operating under the AEGIS. There are about 20 Federal Advisory Committees This advises the CDC on topics ranging from the incidence of breast cancer in young women to injury prevention and my safety. Members of these committees are not paid employeesBut receive travel costs and, at least in the case of the ACIP, a $ 250 fee can be offered for the days at which they attend ACIP meetings when they are designated as ‘special government employees’. Members are not paid for the time they spend on the working groups that do most of the committee’s work.