• Posted June 26, 2025

Ex-Vaccine Panelist Speaks Out on Firing, New Committee

The federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has been soberly and deliberately helping set U.S. vaccination policy for more than 60 years.

During that time, its members have been thoroughly vetted through a grueling nomination process, before they take up the work of protecting the nation against infectious diseases.

All that ended earlier this month, when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abruptly fired the entire 17-member board and appointed eight hand-picked members, many of whom are anti-vaccine advocates.

This new version of ACIP wrapped up its first meeting Thursday, which included the creation of work groups to reexamine the childhood immunization schedule and a controversial presentation referencing a thimerosal study that does not appear to exist.

“In the old days, meaning before this year, this committee worked in a quiet way,” Dr. Yvonne Maldonaldo, one of the ACIP members fired by Kennedy, said in an interview with HealthDay Now. “We have been working since 1964, so over 60 years, to really review vaccines in a deliberative fashion, in an unbiased fashion.”

A professor of global health and infectious diseases at Stanford University, Maldonaldo applied to become an ACIP member in 2020 and was approved in 2024.

“Generally, it can take up to two years to really go through the nomination and vetting process,” said Maldonaldo, whose vetting was held up by the COVID-19 pandemic. “It's a very thorough process. They go through your background. They see who you’ve worked with, whether you have any significant conflicts.”

Both her firing and the nomination of the eight new ACIP members occurred in a more abrupt manner, she said.

“All 17 of us found out by reading a Wall Street Journal article that we had been terminated effective immediately by the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, and we didn’t know if that was true or not because it was in the media,” Maldonaldo said.

“We thought, 'well, we don’t know if this is official or not,' ” she said. “And a few hours later, we all got emails, very brief emails, terminating effective immediately. And so that's how we found out. We've never heard from the Secretary.”

It’s also a mystery how Kennedy came up with the eight new board members, some of whom are vaccine skeptics, Maldonaldo said.

“I don't know anything about the process of how they were selected. That has not been transparent,” she said. “I was not aware of any nomination notices. I don't know how these people were vetted. I don't know who vetted them. I don't know what documents they had to submit.”

In a Wall Street Journal editorial announcing the move, Kennedy alleged that conflicts of interest among the ACIP members required a clean sweep of the committee. Those conflicts were responsible for undermining trust in vaccinations, he wrote.

The ACIP has rules revolving around conflicts of interest in which members are receiving direct payments or working on clinical trials for companies with vaccines under consideration, Maldonaldo said.

“If you've worked in the past with these companies and you no longer are working with them, you are allowed to still be on the committee as long as you do not discuss or vote on a product by that particular company,” she said. “Before each vote and each discussion, you have to disclose, I do work with this company on this vaccine, and therefore, I am not going to discuss or vote on this matter. And that's very clear on the public record.”

However, there had been no active conflicts to report among the recently fired board members, Maldonaldo said.

“At this point, all of us are not working with any of these companies,” Maldonaldo said.

The newly constituted panel has announced its intention to review the current schedule of vaccinations recommended for children.

"The number of vaccines that our children and adolescents receive today exceeds what children in most other developed nations receive and what most of us in this room received when we were children," new ACIP Chair Martin Kulldorff announced at the meeting’s opening Wednesday. "In addition to studying and evaluating individual vaccines, it's important to evaluate the cumulative effect of the recommended vaccine schedule."

The ACIP is taking this step in the face of overwhelming public support for school vaccination requirements.

About 4 in 5 U.S. adults (79%) say parents should be required to have their kids vaccinated against preventable diseases like measles, mumps and rubella to attend school, according to poll results released this week by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“Just because something works, doesn't mean everybody's going to get it, right?” Maldonaldo said.

“If you don't allow vaccines requirements in schools, for example, people are going to spread these diseases to others who may want to be protected, but may not be eligible for the vaccine or in whom the vaccines may not work,” she said.

“I liken these to things like stop signs and helmets, where we are trying to protect everybody,” Maldonaldo added. “Road safety laws are not optional. It's not optional for you to be safe on the road. You have to be safe, and there is monitoring for that. And God help us if we take away those rules, because then people can do whatever they want and crash into people and run red lights and that leads to chaos.”

And that, she warned, is exactly what can happen with vaccine-preventable diseases.

“We have become victims of our own success, because we have reduced the risk of vaccine preventable diseases in this country where we no longer see them,” Maldonado said.

Measles is a prime example, Maldonaldo said.

There have been 23 measles outbreaks in 2025, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As of Tuesday, 1,227 confirmed measles cases have been reported in 36 states and New York City.

“In the 1990s, 1 million children a year in the world died from measles disease. That did not happen in the U.S. because we had vaccine requirements,” Maldonaldo said. “But now, because of vaccination around the world, only about 107,000 children died from measles last year. That's still 107,000 too many children, but it's a 90% reduction in deaths from measles.”

Maldonado suggested some folks are gambling with their health.

“Vaccines are safe, they're effective, they prevent diseases that we no longer see, and because of that," she said, "I think people are saying, 'well, why don't I just run the risk of being exposed to the disease? The risk of the disease is very low now, because the diseases aren't around anymore. Why should I actually risk any side effects, such as a sore arm or a mild fever, when I know my child's not going to be exposed to these diseases?' ”

That’s risky, she warned.

“If we all start thinking that way, we will start to see importations of these diseases into the U.S., and then we will establish these diseases again in the U.S.,” Maldonaldo concluded.

The ACIP panel also took up the matter of thimerosal, an ethyl mercury once added to many vaccines to prevent bacterial contamination.

“In the '90s, some vaccine products had very minute amounts of ethyl mercury, which is non-toxic, in them to preserve the vaccine so it wouldn't be contaminated,” Maldonaldo said, explaining that these were primarily used in multi-dose vials that were to be stored after opening and then used for another shot.

“The confusion was that there is a toxic mercury product called methyl mercury that is not contained in any vaccine,” she said.

“But people were confusing methyl and ethyl mercury, and so in the 90s, ethyl mercury or thimerosal was removed from virtually all vaccine products,” Maldonado continued. “We haven't been using them for probably 30 years or more.”

Currently, thimerosal is used in one multi-dose flu vaccine for children, she said.

The discussion regarding thimerosal was spurred by concerns that ethyl mercury causes autism, Maldonaldo said. 

“Despite numerous studies, and I'm talking about dozens and dozens of studies involving hundreds of thousands of children, if not more than a million children around the world, there has never been a study that demonstrated with good scientific methods a link between autism and vaccines in particular or with thimerosal,” Maldonaldo said.

Much of vaccine skepticism has been fueled by honest concerns from people who want what’s best for their families, she said.

“Part of this is really a failure to really listen to people's concerns and to say, 'look, tell me what you're concerned about,' ” Maldonaldo said, adding that the "vast majority" of people questioning vaccines are willing to listen.

“There is a smaller group, but a very vocal group, of people who are very entrenched in their vaccine misinformation and just for some reason are really not going let go of those beliefs, regardless of what they hear,” she said. “I still am optimistic that the vast majority of people do still want to hear what you have to say and will listen. It may take a little more time and you may need to explain things over and over, but that's our job — to really make sure people have their questions answered.”

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on common vaccine safety questions and concerns.

SOURCE: HealthDay Now, June 26, 2025