The revamped Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will make its debut Friday. The body’s panelists, comprised entirely of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. picks, will weigh in on the suite of new Covid vaccines from Pfizer (PFE), BioNTech (BNTX), Moderna (MRNA) and Novavax (NVAX).
Earlier this week, Kennedy, the new health secretary, named five new committee members, including several vaccine skeptics and critics. That followed his firing of all 17 members of the former committee. The committee is in charge of weighing the benefits and risks of shots before making a recommendation as to whether the CDC should add them to its guidelines.
Without the CDC’s backing, some insurers will decline to cover the costs of the new vaccines, despite the fact that they all have Food and Drug Administration approval. Tyler Evans, an infectious diseases specialist who heads up the Wellness Equity Alliance, says it’s an unprecedented time for vaccines. And that could lead to something of a patchwork network for coverage.
“If school districts or cities or counties or states are making their own decisions about these things, it’s going to become the Wild West,” he told Investor’s Business Daily. “It’s going to be really complicated, where you are going to see a number of outbreaks out there.”
Are Covid Shots Ripping Apart The CDC?
The meeting comes at a tricky time for Kennedy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency that sits above ACIP, remains leaderless after he fired the former director, Susan Monarez, less than a month into her post. According to reports, she “refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives.” The White House says she was “not aligned with the President’s agenda.”
Now, the agency is reportedly falling apart at the seams. In a post to Truth Social, President Donald Trump said the CDC is “being ripped apart” over the question of Covid vaccines. Later, the Senate took Kennedy to task with members from both parties accusing him of trying to deny people vaccines.
Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax have all issued statements over the last few weeks backing the safety of their vaccines, in part due to Trump’s claim that they haven’t publicly released their test results.
Meanwhile, the American Academy of Pediatrics has issued its own guidelines for Covid vaccines.
Dr. Annie DePasquale, a board-certified family medicine physician and founder of Collaborating Docs, acknowledged it can be disorienting when government guidance and medical academies don’t line up in real time on vaccination recommendations.
“To me, the takeaway isn’t that vaccines ‘don’t work’ — it’s that institutions sometimes weigh evolving data, operational realities and risk-benefit trade-offs differently, especially during leadership transitions,” she said in an email to IBD.
She further notes that viruses evolve. The most recently approved vaccines to protect against Covid target the LP.8.1 strain.
“That’s not a failure of science — it’s science doing its job in public,” she said.
High Stakes For Covid Vaccine Companies
The stakes are high for the Covid vaccine makers.
For Pfizer, its Covid vaccine accounted for 8% of its total sales last year. The Covid shots are BioNTech’s and Novavax’s only commercial products. Moderna also sells a respiratory syncytial virus vaccine, but its Covid shots demand the lion’s share of its topline.
“Our best predictions are unpredictable” heading into the ACIP meeting, said Evans, the infectious diseases specialist. Evans was the chief medical officer for New York City during the Covid pandemic and says he has been nominated for ACIP in the past.
“It’s really sort of frightening that a lot of the federal scientific agencies, like the CDC, are losing their leadership because (people) can’t operate in those institutions in food conscience,” he said. “We now basically have these public health shifts without somebody at the helm.”
Follow Allison Gatlin on X/Twitter at @AGatlin_IBD.
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