A committee of experts that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine policy — a group believed to be in the crosshairs of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — will not meet for its regularly scheduled February meeting, a senior HHS official confirmed Thursday.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices was to meet from Feb. 26 to 28, its first gathering since the Trump administration took office. That will not happen, Andrew Nixon, the HHS director of communications, told STAT in an email.
Nixon did not directly answer STAT’s query of when the meeting would be held instead, saying only that it is “upcoming.”
Kennedy, whose first day at HHS was Tuesday, has denounced the ACIP in the past. During his Senate confirmation process, he told the Finance Committee that 97% of ACIP members had conflicts of interest — a claim that people familiar with the rigorous vetting process ACIP members undergo have refuted.
The CDC staff that organizes the committee’s work has for weeks been trying to get final approval from HHS to hold the meeting, without success. Until last week, the subcommittees or work groups that do the preparatory work for meetings of the full committee had been barred from meeting due to the communications “pause” the administration placed on federal health agencies soon after President Trump’s inauguration. The subcommittee meetings were allowed to resume last week, multiple sources told STAT.
For a time, the CDC thought the ACIP meeting could take place, and in person on the agency’s campus, though plans were recently made to shift it to an online session as the secretariat waited for final approval to convene the meeting.
The meeting — the agenda for which has been online since early January — was to be held to discuss multiple vaccine issues, and to vote on recommendations for the use of a newly approved vaccine to prevent chikungunya, a mosquito-borne disease; a new meningitis vaccine from GSK, to be marketed as Penmenvy; as well as new recommendations on influenza and RSV vaccines.
All advisory committee meetings where votes will take place must have a period for public comment. Members of the public can submit written comments, or ask to enter a lottery to be allowed to make a verbal comment during the meeting.
But because HHS would not formally authorize the meeting to proceed, the portal through which public comments would be submitted was not opened. Sources said that this was the final trigger for the decision of the CDC’s ACIP secretariat to ask to postpone the meeting.
Nixon said in his brief email that the meeting would be “postponed to accommodate public comment in advance of the meeting.”
