Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appointed the new members after firing the entire panel.
| Martin Kulldorff | Dr. Robert Malone |
| Retsef Levi | Dr. Cody Meissner |
| Dr. Joseph Hibbeln | Dr. James Pagano |
| Vicky Pebsworth | Dr. Michael Ross |
The new members of the committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention include an inventor, a Catholic nurse, and a former committee member.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the eight new members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) on June 11, a few days after he dismissed all 17 members of the panel. Kennedy said the members “are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense.”
It’s not clear if Kennedy plans to appoint additional individuals to the committee and what type of vetting the new members went through. One said he completed three months of ethics vetting. Several organizations have voiced concern about the situation.
“The speed with which these members were selected, and the lack of transparency in the process, does not help to restore public confidence and trust, and contributes to confusion and uncertainty,” Dr. Jason Goldman, president of the American College of Physicians, said in a statement.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for additional information.
Here’s a look at the new members.
Martin Kulldorff
An epidemiologist who was terminated by Harvard Medical School over his refusal to get a COVID-19 vaccine, Kulldorff has previously served on several federal committees, including the ACIP’s vaccine safety subgroup. He was known before the COVID-19 pandemic for creating software used for vaccine safety monitoring, including by the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink.
Kulldorff, who did not return inquiries, was removed from the ACIP after saying he disagreed with the federal government’s pause on Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine. The pause, which was implemented due to an apparent risk of blood clotting, was later lifted, although the vaccine was withdrawn from the market in 2023.
Kulldorff has opposed vaccinating children for COVID-19, pointing out that they face a much lower risk from the illness than older people. “I’m a huge fan of vaccinating children for measles, for mumps, for polio, for rotavirus, and many other diseases, that’s critical. But COVID is not a huge threat to children,” he told The Epoch Times in 2021.
Kulldorff, along with now-National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, in 2020 co-authored and signed a document called the Great Barrington Declaration that said the government should shift to policies that acknowledged COVID-19 posed different risks to different people.
“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk,” they wrote at the time.
Kulldorff met with President Donald Trump at the White House around the same time to discuss COVID-19, along with another new member of the panel, Dr. Cody Meissner.
