The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced five new members of a critical vaccine safety advisory panel within days of the panel’s meeting to review the childhood vaccine schedule.
The five physicians and research scientists, selected by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will join the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to make recommendations on vaccine use to the CDC.
Kennedy made the ACIP a focal point of his HHS administration this summer by firing the 17 prior board members and, within a matter of days, appointing seven new members more aligned with his skepticism of the status quo on immunizations.
“ACIP safeguards the health of Americans by issuing objective, evidence-based vaccine recommendations,” Kennedy said in a press release Monday afternoon. “Its new members bring diverse expertise that strengthens the committee and ensures it fulfills its mission with transparency, independence, and gold-standard science.”
The new members selected on Monday include Catherine Stein, an epidemiologist and professor at Case Western Reserve University; Evelyn Griffin, an OB-GYN from Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Hillary Blackburn, director of medication access and affordability at AscensionRx; Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist for the For Hearts and Souls Free Medical Clinic in Hawaii; and Raymond Pollak, a surgeon and transplant immunobiologist.
The five new members are scheduled to join the seven members appointed by Kennedy earlier this year for the meeting this week, which will review key vaccines on the childhood schedule, including COVID-19, measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR), polio, and others.
Some of the newly selected members have relatively low public profiles, but others were highly critical of COVID-19 vaccine mandate policies during the pandemic.
For example, Griffin spoke at the Louisiana Health Freedom Day event in 2024 to promote efforts to repeal vaccine mandates. During her speech, she said doctors “blindly believed” in the safety of COVID-19 vaccines because of pharmaceutical companies’ influence on medical school curricula.
Stein also spoke out against COVID-19 vaccine mandates in 2021 during the height of the pandemic, saying COVID-19 is not “a super scary disease.”
Stein is also affiliated with Children’s Health Defense, which was led by Kennedy and is one of the country’s leading anti-vaccine organizations.
Jim O’Neill, who is the acting CDC director after Susan Monarez’s firing, said in a press release that the five new members “bring a wealth of real-world public health experience to the job.”
Monarez wrote in an op-ed after her termination that she was fired from her post in part because she would not “rubber-stamp” the decisions made by the ACIP on childhood vaccines.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), chairman of the Senate Health Committee, called for the September ACIP meeting to be postponed following Monarez’s dismissal and several high-profile resignations from the agency.
Cassidy said in late August that the meeting “should not occur until significant oversight has been conducted” and that any recommendations made by ACIP before oversight was completed “should be rejected as lacking legitimacy, given the seriousness of the allegations and the current turmoil in CDC leadership.”
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Monarez and Dr. Debra Houry, former CDC chief medical officer, will testify before Cassidy’s committee on Wednesday.
Cassidy’s office did not respond to the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment regarding the newly appointed ACIP members.
