Tracking Emerging Public Health Challenges – November 15, 2025, – ACIP
“The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will meet Dec. 4 and 5, according to a Federal Register notice that indicates that recommendation votes may be scheduled for hepatitis B vaccines.”
“When ACIP met in September, the advisors postponed a vote on the hepatitis B birth dose, concluding there hadn’t been a thorough discussion on the safety, effectiveness, and timing of the vaccine. It remains to be seen if the group feels prepared for a vote this time around.”
“Members serving on other ACIP workgroups have said their groups have largely gone silent since Kennedy started revamping the committee. Kennedy also pushed out multiple healthcare organizations that had historically served on those workgroups.”
“During the June meeting, the new panelists voted against influenza vaccines containing thimerosal. In September, they voted against the combined measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella vaccine in kids under age 4 years. They also voted in favor of “shared clinical decision-making” for COVID vaccines.” (1)
“The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and other medical groups have updated their lawsuit against HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., calling for his novel Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) to be disbanded and its decisions overturned.
They also want ACIP to be reconstituted under court supervision, according to the updated lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday.
New ACIP appointees lack the credentials and experience necessary to be part of ACIP, and their votes should be declared null and void, according to the lawsuit.
“You have an ACIP that shouldn’t be making policy, now starting to make policy. We want it disbanded,” Richard H. Hughes IV, lead counsel on the lawsuit and partner at the Epstein Becker Green law firm, told MedPage Today.”
“AAP, along with five other medical groups — including the Infectious Disease Society of America, the American College of Physicians, and the American Public Health Association — originally sued Kennedy and HHS in July, for unilaterally changing COVID vaccine recommendations without any evidence.”
“In its press release on the updated complaint, AAP also noted other problems with recent ACIP policy decisions, including its recommendation against flu shots containing thimerosal, despite studies showing the preservative is safe. It also challenged the committee’s decision that kids under 4 should get the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine separate from the varicella vaccine, instead of the combination shot.” (2)
“For decades, babies have been wincing, squirming and crying their way through a series of vaccinations that start as soon as they’re born. The shots protect against diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus and mumps, which once plagued children and their parents.”
“But Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long questioned the safety and effectiveness of many vaccines.”
“So a powerful Centers for Disease Control and Prevention committee hand-picked by Kennedy is now scrutinizing the childhood vaccine schedule. The schedule is the finely calibrated timetable pediatricians use to administer the sequence of more than 30 doses to protect against more than a dozen diseases.
The move is being welcomed by some advocates, physicians and scientists.
“I think it is true that any vaccine schedule should periodically be assessed,” says Dr. Ofer Levy, a vaccine scientist at Harvard. “As we like to say, ‘Moses did not come down from Mount Sinai saying: ‘This will be the only way that you immunize.’”
“The scrutiny is especially troubling to many public health authorities, coming amid new outbreaks of diseases like measles and whooping cough. These are on the rise because of falling immunization rates.”
““Some people who are worried about vaccines argue the number of different antigens and other ingredients could overwhelm a child’s immune system. But babies’ immune systems can handle it, says Maldonado and other scientists. Children are exposed to far more stimulation naturally from microbes than from vaccines. And vaccines have been refined over the decades to minimize the number of ingredients they contain.
There are about 170 different components in the various shots in today’s vaccine schedule, Offit says, which is “actually less than the vaccines that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and I got as children of the early 1950s,” Offit says.” (3)
1.CDC’s Vaccine Panel May Change Recommendations on Hep B Shot Next Month, by Kristina Fiore, https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/hepatitis/118479.
2.Disband CDC Vaccine Panel, Updated Lawsuit Says, by Kristina Fiore, https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/publichealth/118346
3.Under RFK Jr., the CDC is scrutinizing the childhood vaccine schedule, by Rob Stein, https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/11/07/nx-s1-5576321/childhood-vaccine-schedule-rfk-cdc
curated by Jonathan M. Metsch, Dr.P.H.
Clinical Professor of Environmental Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai