The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is set to meet with its vaccine advisers in April, in a rescheduled meeting that had been postponed.
The CDC and its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) are scheduled to meet on April 15 and 16.
The draft agenda lists all of the same topics as the agenda for the meeting that had been slated to be held in mid-February. The only addition is a 30-minute session on the epidemiology of measles and measles outbreaks.
The CDC said in February that the meeting was postponed “to accommodate public comment in advance of the meeting,” adding, “The ACIP workgroups met as scheduled this month and will present at the upcoming ACIP meeting.”
The meeting would have been the first since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became health secretary, a position that heads the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The CDC is an office within the department.
Some health experts had expressed concern about the postponement. Infectious Diseases Society of America President Tina Tan, for instance, said that postponing the meeting “delays vital discussions and needed decisions on a variety of vaccines by trusted and well-vetted experts.”
The society did not respond to a request for comment on the rescheduled meeting.
The original meeting was scheduled to feature public comments for 40 minutes. The new agenda lists 30 minutes for public comments.
ACIP is a committee that advises the CDC on vaccines, including which populations should receive newly authorized or approved shots. Members are drawn from various institutions and practices, including the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Washington School of Medicine.
The committee offers nonbinding advice on vaccine recommendations and helps develop the immunization schedules for adults and children.
Under ACIP, the U.S. schedules include more vaccine doses than other developed countries.
Kennedy has expressed concerns about the number of doses children receive and said after being sworn in that the Department of Health and Human Services would investigate whether the vaccines are a possible factor in the chronic disease issues Americans face.
“Nothing is going to be off limits,” Kennedy said at the time.
“We will convene representatives of all viewpoints to study the causes for the drastic rise in chronic disease,” Kennedy also said. “Some of the possible factors we will investigate were formally taboo or insufficiently scrutinized.”
Kennedy told senators during his confirmation hearing, “There’s nothing I’m going to do that is going to harm CDC.” He said that panels such as ACIP have featured members with conflicts of interest and that it was imperative to end those conflicts.
While members file conflict of interest disclosures and state before each meeting whether they have a conflict, there was no central database for the disclosures. The CDC recently created a searchable database listing the conflicts that have been disclosed.