Jason Mast , 2025-06-25 15:36:00
A leader of a federal vaccine advisory committee said Wednesday that the panel would start a review of long-approved vaccines, as well as the cumulative effect of the shots given to children and adolescents.
Martin Kulldorff, named co-chair of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee after health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired the former members of the 17-person panel and replaced them with seven hand-picked panelists, announced the news at the start of a two-day highly anticipated hearing in Atlanta.
The review will be undertaken by two new work groups, Kulldorff said, one focused on the childhood and adolescents schedules as a whole and one focused on shots that have been approved for seven or more years. He specifically cited the hepatitis B shot given to infants at birth and the combination measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox shot, two immunizations that have been targeted by vaccine skeptics.
“We are learning more about vaccines over time,” he said, “and to stay true to evidence-based medicine, we have a duty and responsibility to keep up to date with scientific research to make sure that ACIP recommendations are optimal for both individuals and public health.”
Vaccine skeptics and anti-vaccine groups, such as Children’s Health Defense, which Kennedy co-founded, have long argued that, even if certain individual vaccines were well-studied, the entire vaccine schedule has not been. The cumulative exposure, they argue, could cause harms, such as autism — an assertion widely rejected by others in the scientific community.
“These are anti-vaccine talking points and have been for decades,” said Paul Offitt, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
The CDC panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, has explored the safety of the schedule in the past, including as recently as 2023. Matthew Daley, a senior clinician investigator at Kaiser Permanente, presented one such analysis, drawing in part on a 2014 CDC white paper that Kulldorf contributed to.
The study, drawing on the Vaccine Safety Datalink, found a potential small association between exposure to aluminum from vaccines and asthma, while noting that the “totality of available evidence continues to support the safety of the routine childhood vaccination schedule.”
It also noted, summarizing the white paper, that some of the public concerns about the risks of the schedule “may have limited biologic plausibility.”
Offit pointed to so-called concomitant studies that have to be performed before a new vaccine is added to the childhood schedule, showing that giving a new vaccine at the same time as one or more other vaccines doesn’t interfere with the effectiveness of any of the vaccines, or trigger additional safety concerns.
In Washington on Wednesday, President Trump’s nominee to be CDC director, Susan Monarez, was asked during her confirmation hearing about Kennedy’s move to halt U.S. support for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which helps provide a wide range of immunizations to the world’s poorest country. Monarez said she wasn’t involved in the decision to stop supporting Gavi but said she supported the use of vaccines.
“I think vaccines save lives,” Monarez told senators. “I think that we need to continue to support the promotion of utilization of vaccines.”
