type: timeline_event
On June 9, 2025, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. removed all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the expert panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine policy and recommendations. Per a directive from Kennedy, committee members received formal notice of their immediate termination, representing an unprecedented purge of scientific expertise from federal vaccine policymaking.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Kennedy claimed that "a clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science" and alleged that the panel had been "plagued with persistent conflicts of interest." He stated that many members were "last-minute appointees" of the Biden administration and that "without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028."
The mass firing drew immediate condemnation from public health officials and medical experts. "This is horrifying," a CDC official said of Kennedy's move. Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, called the purge "a coup" and stated: "It's not how democracies work. It's not good for the health of the nation." Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician and the top Republican in the Senate's health committee, expressed concern that "now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion."
The firing was particularly significant because Kennedy had previously promised Senator Cassidy in February that he would not make changes to ACIP, representing a direct betrayal of that commitment. The timing was also notable, coming just twelve days after Kennedy had cancelled $766 million in pandemic flu vaccine contracts with Moderna and amid an ongoing H5N1 outbreak that had infected over 1,000 dairy herds and caused one human death.
Kennedy announced on social media that he would "use this platform to announce new members to populate ACIP" and claimed that "none of these individuals will be ideological anti-vaxxers. They will be highly credentialed physicians and scientists who will make extremely consequential public health determinations by applying evidence-based decision-making with objectivity and common sense." However, this assurance did little to alleviate concerns that the committee would be stacked with individuals selected for ideological alignment with Kennedy's vaccine skepticism rather than genuine scientific expertise.
HHS stated that ACIP would still hold a planned meeting from June 25 to 27 to make recommendations, with new members running that meeting. This timeline meant that critical vaccine policy decisions would be made by Kennedy-appointed replacements rather than the independent scientific experts who had been serving on the committee.
The mass firing of ACIP represented the most aggressive move yet in Kennedy's systematic dismantling of federal vaccine policy infrastructure. By removing all members of the nation's most important vaccine advisory committee and replacing them with his own appointees, Kennedy effectively captured the scientific advisory process that underpins vaccine recommendations for the entire United States. This institutional takeover occurred while a potential pandemic influenza virus was actively circulating in American agriculture, demonstrating that Kennedy's ideological agenda took priority over maintaining scientific continuity during an ongoing public health threat. The purge transformed ACIP from an independent scientific advisory body into a politically controlled entity that could be expected to advance Kennedy's anti-vaccine views regardless of the scientific evidence or public health consequences.