Three days after removing all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory group, United States Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has made eight new appointments – at least half of whom have spoken out against the handling of COVID-19 and vaccines.

The new appointees to the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) are Dr Joseph Hibbeln, Martin Kulldorff, Retsef Levi, Dr Robert Malone, Dr Cody Meissner, Dr Michael Ross, Dr James Pagano and Vicky Pebsworth.

Making the announcement via X, Kennedy said that the eight will attend the committee’s scheduled meeting on 25 June. It is unclear whether additional appointments are in the offing, as eight is the statutory minimum for ACIP.

Malone has promoted several false and alarmist claims about COVID-19 vaccines, said they did not work and promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as SARS-CO-V2 treatments despite numerous studies showing they did not work.

Part of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, Malone was banned from Twitter during the pandemic for violating the platform’s misinformation policies and The New York Times has described him as a “COVID vaccine misinformation star”.

Recently, Malone controversially claimed that an eight-year-old child, Daisy Hildebrand, who died of measles in Texas had died of sepsis not measles, and blamed a medical institution for mismanaging her illness. Malone made these claims on social media before the child’s death had been made public. 

However, the Texas health department announced Hildebrand’s death on 6 April due to “measles pulmonary failure”, and noted that “the child was not vaccinated and had no reported underlying conditions”.

Kennedy describes Malone as “a physician-scientist and biochemist known for his early contributions to mRNA vaccine technology”.

Alternatives to vaccines

Pebsworth, Pacific regional director for the National Association of Catholic Nurses, is a director and board member at the National Vaccine Information Center. The centre is known for questioning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines and encouraging people to seek alternatives to vaccines.

Some 40% of the centre’s funding is from Dr Joseph Mercola, who sells alternative health products and was named the biggest source of COVID-19 misinformation on Facebook and Twitter by the Center Countering Digital Hate.

A biostatistician and epidemiologist, Kulldorff was co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration with Dr Jay Battacharya, new director of the National Institutes of Health, which favoured herd immunity to address COVID-19 for all but the most vulnerable.

Meissner, Professor of Paediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, was part the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) vaccine advisory panel that recommended the use of COVID vaccines. However, he has spoken out against children wearing masks and is in favour of children and pregnant children being excluded from the COVID-19 vaccine schedule.

Levi, Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has questioned the safety of COVID-19 vaccines

Hibbeln is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist. Pagano is an emergency medicine physician and Ross is a Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University.

Previously, Kennedy pledged to keep ACIP in place to Senator Bill Cassidy, who was considering blocking his appointment as health secretary.