The new additions would bring ACIP membership to 14 total. Several of the proposed members have taken part in anti-vaccine activity or made anti-vaccine statements.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is planning to add seven new members to the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, multiple outlets reported Thursday morning. The new additions would bring ACIP’s total membership to 14 voting members.
The news comes three months after Kennedy unilaterally fired all 17 members of the committee and appointed eight new members, one of whom later resigned, and as the head of Health and Human Services (HHS) today faces the Senate Finance Committee for an already heated discussion.
The proposed new ACIP members, as first reported by Inside Medicine, are:
- Hillary Blackburn, a pharmacist and director of pharmaceutical services at Dispensary of Hope, a pharmaceutical charity.
- Joseph Fraiman, an emergency medicine physician based in New Orleans.
- John Gaitanis, a pediatric neurologist at Brown University in Rhode Island.
- Evelyn Griffin, an obstetrician based in Louisiana.
- Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist and pastor in Hawai’i.
- Raymond Pollak, the former chief of transplant surgery at the University of Illinois.
- Catherine Stein, an epidemiologist at Case Western Reserve University.
None of the new members appear to have direct vaccine or infectious disease experience.
Like other additions that Kennedy has made to ACIP, several of the new appointees have made anti-vaccine or vaccine-critical remarks. Fraiman is the author of a 2022 paper that called into question the safety of mRNA vaccines. He also wrote the Hope Accord, a public petition calling for the withdrawal of mRNA vaccines.
Milhoan is affiliated with the Independent Medical Alliance, a group critical of COVID-19 vaccines. Gaitanis, according to reports from a variety of outlets, has appeared as an expert witness in multiple lawsuits alleging injury from vaccines.
When Kennedy replaced the entirety of ACIP in June, he quickly added a slate of new members, several of whom had made anti-vaccine comments and were involved in anti-vaccine groups. Robert Malone and Martin Kulldorff, two of the current members, have both appeared as witnesses in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturer Merck. Malone, who is also affiliated with Medical Alliance, has testified in front of Congress that mRNA vaccines can cause cancer and autoimmune disease, without evidence.
Kennedy is adding the new members to ACIP shortly after pushing for the firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez when she refused to sign off on rolling back certain COVID-19 vaccine approvals.
