The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not directly respond to KQED’s questions about how the new panelists were chosen or vetted.
The new members include doctors who have served on federal vaccine advisory committees in the past, as well as an emergency room doctor from Los Angeles and a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Many of them have expressed skepticism about vaccines and the COVID-19 vaccine in particular.
“Secretary Kennedy has replaced vaccine groupthink with a diversity of viewpoints on ACIP,” a spokesperson for the agency wrote in an email. She also said that “the new members’ ethics agreements will be made public” before they start work on the committee, which is scheduled to meet on June 25.
In his op-ed, Kennedy said that part of the reason a “clean sweep” was needed was because members of the board who were fired “have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines.”
On the CDC’s website, a page listing the former members’ stated conflicts of interest shows that Maldonado, who was part of the team working on the Pfizer COVID and RSV vaccine trials, abstained from voting on those vaccines.
Maldonado did not want to comment on the makeup of the new board, saying “it wouldn’t be fair” to judge ahead of time.
Her concern was more practical. A number of different vaccines for different populations are discussed at committee meetings, and she said preparation involves ingesting a great deal of material from working groups and subject matter experts.
“For every single member to be able to have that information at their fingertips, review it and be ready for this meeting is going to be, I would say, challenging,” she said.
According to the Federal Register, the newly formed committee is expected to vote on recommendations for “COVID-19 vaccines, HPV vaccine, influenza vaccines, meningococcal vaccine, RSV vaccines for adults, and RSV vaccine for maternal and pediatric populations” at its June meeting.
In the short term, Maldonado said her biggest question is about the upcoming fall, when we can expect to see flu, COVID and RSV make a resurgence.
”Are those vaccines going to be recommended?” She asked. “Are they not?”
Whatever the committee decides will have a huge impact on public health.
In the wake of the pandemic, Maldonado acknowledged that there are “ significant issues around vaccine confidence.” She said she hopes that this doesn’t make those issues worse.
“We don’t see a pathway to that yet,” she said.
