The status of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel was thrown into further disarray this week after an outspoken member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—whose appointment was invalidated by a federal judge Monday—declared that the group was being disbanded before later correcting his claim.
Robert Malone, M.D., who joined the ACIP amid HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s gutting and restaffing of the entire panel last summer, posted on X Thursday that “ACIP has been disbanded.”
“The government’s response to the AAP lawsuit and Judge Murphey’s injunction is to disband and then recreate a new ACIP committee, as this will take less time than would be required to file and prosecute an appeal,” Malone wrote in his initial post.
Then, some five hours later, Malone posted again to explain that the information he’d received was a “miscommunication,” noting that “in fact the decision about how to proceed has not been made, and dissolving and reforming remains one of the options being considered.”
Malone’s posts referred to Monday’s ruling in Boston, in which federal judge Brian Murphy stayed RFK Jr.’s ACIP appointments and the votes on vaccine recommendations to the CDC that the panel had delivered since.
The ruling has effectively stopped the panel from convening in its current form, as it was scheduled to do on Wednesday and Thursday of this week, and further determined that recent changes by the CDC to the U.S. pediatric vaccine schedule were invalid under U.S. procedural law.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal earlier Thursday, Malone told the news outlet that he and other members of the ACIP were informed that the committee would be disbanded and remade—a position that was echoed in a statement to CNN from a spokesperson representing ACIP chair Kirk Milhoan, M.D., Ph.D.
In statements to both WSJ and CNN, an HHS spokesperson said that any assertions about next steps on ACIP not coming straight from the agency were “baseless speculation.”
The conflicting updates following Monday’s court ruling mark the latest instance of upset at the ACIP, whose meetings since the RFK Jr. reshuffle have been marked by controversy and frequent confusion.
Meanwhile, an assertion by Malone in his initial post that “[t]here will be no action from the government to respond to the defamatory characterization of the former ACIP members” speaks to an apparently widening rift between Kennedy’s largely anti-vaccine MAHA movement and the motivations of the broader Trump administration—an issue that Malone has already put a spotlight on in previous social media dispatches.
Earlier this month, the WSJ reported that the White House was clamping down on messaging and policies from HHS, including those around vaccines, ahead of midterm elections in the U.S. later this year. The purported decision to have aides in the Trump administration take a more active role in the department came after polling found that Kennedy’s various vaccine moves were unpopular, unnamed sources told WSJ.
The ostensible pushback from the White House seems to be sowing discord within Kennedy’s Make America Health Again circles as well, who are now pushing back on efforts by the administration to let vaccine issues rest, according to Stat News.
In Monday’s ruling, Judge Murphy argued that certain appointments to the ACIP may have been made in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. At the same time, the pediatric vaccine schedule changes likely ran afoul of the U.S. Administrative Procedure Act.
In critiquing RFK Jr.’s appointments to the committee, Murphy wrote that the likely procedural failures in installing the new members exhibit “the very reasons why procedures exist and [raise] a substantial likelihood that the newly appointed ACIP fails to comport with governing law.”
For its part, the HHS “looks forward to this judge’s decision being overturned just like his other attempts to keep the Trump administration from governing,” agency spokesperson Andrew Nixon told Fierce earlier this week.
