Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is continuing his ideological purge of the federal government. The Health and Human Services Secretary just terminated all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—the outside experts who help steer the country’s vaccine policies.

Kennedy announced the firings late Monday afternoon in an editorial published by the Wall Street Journal. He argued that by “retiring” the ACIP’s current members, he would restore the public’s trust in vaccines. However, RFK Jr. himself has long overexaggerated the dangers of vaccination, and experts worry that he will stock the ACIP with anti-vaccination proponents.

“Today’s action to remove the 17 sitting members of ACIP undermines…trust and upends a transparent process that has saved countless lives,” said Bruce Scott, president of the American Medical Association, in a statement provided to Gizmodo. “With an ongoing measles outbreak and routine child vaccination rates declining, this move will further fuel the spread of vaccine-preventable illnesses.”

The ACIP is a panel of outside experts assembled by the CDC. Their recommendations, formally adopted by the CDC, greatly influence which vaccines are routinely provided to the public. States often mandate that children receive vaccines universally recommended by the ACIP, such as the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, before they can enter public school, for instance. Insurance plans are also typically required to cover ACIP-recommended vaccines without any cost-sharing.

For two decades, RFK Jr. has regularly misrepresented the evidence on vaccine safety and other important health issues. And it didn’t take long for him to signal that he would undermine the country’s vaccine policies. In his opening speech as the head of HHS in mid-February, Kennedy stated that he would form a commission to investigate the childhood vaccine schedule as a potential culprit of chronic disease (no strong evidence supports a connection between the vaccine schedule and a population-level rise in chronic illness).

Kennedy has previously argued that the ACIP’s current and former members were rife with conflicts of interest, such as having received money from vaccine manufacturers. During the Senate committee hearings this January, for instance, he claimed that 97% of ACIP members had these conflicts—an unsurprisingly misleading claim. Kennedy was wrongly citing a 2009 report that found 97% of financial disclosure forms from people on advisory committees in 2007 had at least one error or omission, such as missing dates. Kennedy’s latest WSJ editorial correctly describes the 97% statistic, though he still appears to imply these omissions are largely undeclared financial conflicts (the 2009 report found that 15% of members did not comply with ethics requirements during their committee stints).

Aside from eliding the truth about the ACIP’s ethical standards, Kennedy seems to have outright broken his promise to Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) that he would “maintain” the ACIP without changes—a promise that secured Cassidy’s pivotal tiebreaker vote in early February to further his nomination through the Senate.

On a X post late Monday, Cassidy acknowledged many people’s fears that the ACIP will now “be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion.” But Cassidy didn’t acknowledge the broken promise, only stating that he would continue talking with Kennedy to “ensure that this is not the case.”

Of course, now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion. I’ve just spoken with Secretary Kennedy, and I’ll continue to talk with him to ensure this is not the case.https://t.co/iXjTDieAwY

— U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (@SenBillCassidy) June 9, 2025

Of course, there’s little reason to believe that RFK Jr’s antivax agenda will be meaningfully constrained by anyone in the government. He’s already enacted a renewed investigation into the debunked link between vaccines and autism—an investigation that will be led by notorious vaccine skeptic David Geier. Kennedy and the Trump administration have also impeded the development of newer, possibly more effective vaccines for both flu and covid-19, and are attempting to place testing roadblocks that will make future vaccine approvals harder to secure.