Kennedy softens CDC vaccine panel overhaul after court ruling
Kennedy dropped toxicology, data science and health economics from his CDC panel overhaul after a judge blocked his first round of vaccine changes.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has scaled back the overhaul of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, dropping the more specific expertise requirements he had tried to impose only weeks earlier after a federal judge blocked his broader changes.
The shift matters because the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices sits at the center of U.S. vaccine policy. Its recommendations shape which shots are advised for Americans, when they are given and, in practice, what insurers cover. Kennedy’s first rewrite of the panel had already drawn sharp resistance by replacing the entire committee of independent experts with appointees that included vaccine skeptics and people without direct immunization experience. Those members later cut the number of shots recommended for routine childhood vaccination.
A preliminary injunction from Judge Brian E. Murphy on March 16 froze Kennedy’s appointments and stayed all votes taken by the then-stayed panel. The order also paused the heavily revised vaccine schedule issued by the Department of Health and Human Services on January 5 and reversed the downgraded hepatitis B vaccine recommendations made at the December 2025 ACIP meeting. Major medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the American Public Health Association, backed the challenge, arguing that the overhaul bypassed established scientific review and federal advisory-committee procedures. HHS later postponed a planned ACIP meeting after the ruling.
Kennedy responded by broadening ACIP’s mission to emphasize vaccine safety, a role largely handled elsewhere in the federal system, and in an April 6 charter he added wider membership categories that critics said could have allowed him to reappoint the same people the court had blocked. But the latest charter, dated May 14, backed away from the more specific expanded requirements Kennedy had sought, including expertise in toxicology, data science and health economics. Instead, it said members should represent a balanced range of scientific, clinical and public health expertise.
The timing underscores how the administration is trying to keep moving on vaccine policy while reducing the risk of another legal defeat. ACIP charters are typically renewed on a two-year cycle, and the April 6 renewal had said the charter would run through April 1, 2028. That renewal was withdrawn in a Federal Register notice published May 19, which said CDC had determined that ACIP’s re-establishment was necessary and in the public interest under the Public Health Service Act and the Federal Advisory Committee Act. The retreat suggests Kennedy is still trying to reshape the committee, but now under tighter legal and political constraints.
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