The chairman of the Senate’s health panel on Aug. 28 said that the next meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisers should be postponed.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meeting, slated to take place on Sept. 18 and Sept. 19, “should not occur until significant oversight has been conducted,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said in a statement.
“If the meeting proceeds, any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy given the seriousness of the allegations and the current turmoil in CDC leadership,” he added.
He cited allegations against ACIP members.
After the White House this week fired CDC Director Susan Monarez, several top CDC officials resigned.
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who had been serving as the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in his resignation letter that a document recently released by ACIP detailing the work its COVID-19 immunization work group will conduct “ignored all feedback from career staff at CDC.”
He also questioned placing Retsef Levi, an ACIP member and professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in charge of the work group.
Dr. Debra Houry, who has resigned as the CDC’s chief medical officer, in an interview with Reuters, also accused ACIP work groups of “deciding on what recommendations would be before actually having the data.”
The Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC’s parent agency, and Levi did not respond to requests for comment.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the ranking member of the Senate Health Committee, separately on Thursday called for an investigation into the firing of Monarez.
Levi, who has called for the removal of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines from the market over safety concerns, previously told The Epoch Times that his goal as chair of the work group “is to work with my colleagues at ACIP, the CDC and FDA experts and the external experts to openly study the range of issues and questions outlined in the Terms of Reference, to inform the best science and evidence-based policy recommendations, and having the health and safety of patients front in mind.”
ACIP is composed of seven members, all of whom were chosen by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after he removed the previous membership.
The panel advises the CDC on vaccine recommendations. The CDC typically accepts the advice.
The committee is slated to discuss COVID-19 vaccines; the Hepatitis B vaccine; the measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella vaccine; and the respiratory syncytial virus vaccine during its upcoming meeting, according to an agenda released by the government.
It may vote on recommendations for those vaccines.
Federal regulators earlier in the week rescinded emergency authorization for the COVID-19 vaccines while approving them for more limited populations, including people with an underlying condition such as obesity that the CDC says places them at higher risk of severe COVID-19.
Cassidy cast a deciding vote for Kennedy in February but has been critical of some of the health secretary’s decisions. Ahead of ACIP’s June meeting, he called for a postponement over concerns the panel’s new members did not represent balanced viewpoints.
The meeting was held without delay.