The new members of the committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines include an inventor, a Catholic nurse, and a former committee member.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the eight new members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) on June 11, a few days after he dismissed all 17 members of the panel. Kennedy said the members “are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense.”
It’s not clear whether Kennedy plans to appoint additional individuals to the committee and what type of vetting the new members went through. One said he completed three months of ethics vetting. Several organizations have voiced concern about the situation.
“The speed with which these members were selected, and the lack of transparency in the process, does not help to restore public confidence and trust, and contributes to confusion and uncertainty,” Dr. Jason Goldman, president of the American College of Physicians, said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told The Epoch Times in an email: “Before starting work on ACIP, the new members’ ethics agreements will be made public. Every ACIP member will be vetted in accordance with their ethics agreement before they are permitted to participate in each meeting agenda item.”
Here’s a look at the new members.
Martin Kulldorff
An epidemiologist who was terminated by Harvard Medical School over his refusal to get a COVID-19 vaccine, Kulldorff has previously served on several federal committees, including the ACIP’s vaccine safety subgroup. He was known before the COVID-19 pandemic for creating software used for vaccine safety monitoring, including by the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink.
Kulldorff, who did not return inquiries, was previously removed from the ACIP subgroup after saying he disagreed with the federal government’s pause on Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine. The pause, which was implemented because of an apparent risk of blood clotting, was later lifted, although the vaccine was withdrawn from the market in 2023.
Kulldorff has opposed vaccinating children for COVID-19, pointing out that they face a much lower risk from the illness than older people.
“I’m a huge fan of vaccinating children for measles, for mumps, for polio, for rotavirus, and many other diseases, that’s critical. But COVID is not a huge threat to children,” he told The Epoch Times in 2021.
Kulldorff, along with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is now the director of the National Institutes of Health, in 2020 co-authored and signed a document called the Great Barrington Declaration that said the government should shift to policies that acknowledged COVID-19 posed different risks to different people.
“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk,” they wrote at the time.
Kulldorff met with President Donald Trump at the White House around the same time to discuss COVID-19, along with another new member of the panel, Dr. Cody Meissner.
Dr. Robert Malone
Malone, a researcher and clinical trial expert who previously co-hosted EpochTV’s “Fallout,” helped invent the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) delivery technology that is utilized in the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. He has been critical of the U.S. government’s posture on the vaccines, including vaccine mandates.
“On the basis of data from all over the world, approximately three years ago it was my impression that the risk/benefit ratio of these products did not merit continued use in any cohort,” Malone wrote on his blog in May, after the vaccines were removed from immunization schedules for pregnant women and healthy children.
Malone says on the blog that he grew concerned about “the many short-cuts, database issues, obfuscation and frankly, lies told in the development of the Spike protein-based genetic vaccines,” and that those short-cuts “have been detrimental and contrary to globally accepted standards for developing and regulating safe and effective licensed products.”
Malone has said in recent months that he is in regular touch with Kennedy, with whom he attended President Donald Trump’s Election Night celebration in Florida. He said in a June 9 post that Kennedy and his team are doing well to achieve objectives identified as part of the Make America Healthy Again agenda, including taking action to adjust the immunization schedules.
Malone told The Epoch Times after his appointment, “[I] will do my best to serve with unbiased objectivity and rigor.”
Malone stated on social media platform X that he would be keeping in mind while on the panel “the young couple with a small child facing hard decisions regarding vaccinations” and “the vaccine-injured.”
Retsef Levi
Levi, a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has expressed opposition to the mRNA vaccines, joining calls in early 2023 to remove them from the market.
“They should stop because they completely failed to fulfill any of their advertised [promises] regarding efficacy,” he said at the time. “And more importantly, they should stop because of the mounting and indisputable evidence that they cause unprecedented level of harm, including the death of young people and children.”
Death certificates for some young people list COVID-19 vaccination as a cause of death, while federal officials found evidence the vaccines caused other deaths, according to files obtained by The Epoch Times. The CDC says on its website that “data shows that people who receive COVID-19 vaccines are less likely to die from COVID-19 or COVID-19-related complications than those who are unvaccinated.”
Levi worked on several papers during or related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In a 2021 paper, Levi and his coauthors found that people who suffered cardiac arrest had worse outcomes early in the pandemic, which they attributed to a reluctance to seek care. In a 2022 paper, three researchers, including Levi, found an increase in emergency calls in Israel for cardiac arrest from January through May 2021.
And in a paper published in 2025, Levi and others determined that adults in Florida were more likely to die following receipt of Pfizer’s vaccine than were those who received Moderna’s vaccine. Pfizer and Moderna have not responded to requests for comment.
Levi told The Epoch Times on June 11 that he believes members of the vaccine advisory committee should give advice to the government based on their best judgment. Levi said he hopes to bring his experience with data-driven frameworks for balancing “different types of risks and different types of benefits.”
Dr. Cody Meissner
Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth College, has previously served on vaccine advisory committees for the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration.
When the FDA’s committee in 2020 voted to recommend emergency clearance for Pfizer’s vaccine for people aged 16 and older, Meissner abstained, saying the data at the time did not support authorizing the vaccine for 16- and 17-year-olds. He voted with other members to advise the FDA to clear Moderna’s vaccine for individuals aged 18 and up.
Meissner expressed concerns about myocarditis, or heart inflammation, when it started being seen after COVID-19 vaccination.
“Before we start vaccinating millions of adolescents and children, it is so important to find out what the consequences are because the COVID-19 disease is disappearing in adolescents and children,” he said in 2021.
Meissner later voted with other members to recommend that the FDA clear the shots for children, even though he said the side effects of vaccination weren’t known. He told The Epoch Times in 2022 that new studies indicated the benefits of the shots “roughly equals the risk of harm” for many children.
Meissner did not respond to a request for comment on June 12.
Dr. Joseph Hibbeln
Hibbeln was a captain of the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, and a longtime government employee. He retired in June 2020 from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, after a career that included a stint as acting chief of the section on nutritional neuroscience.
Hibbeln has written more than 175 peer-reviewed medical journal articles, including a review that determined there were no indications that pregnant women’s consumption fish would cause their children to become autistic.
Other papers covered nutrition, including the impact of omega-3 fatty acid intake.
Hibbeln also contributed to “Advice about Eating Fish for Women Who Are or Might Become Pregnant, Breastfeeding Mothers, and Young Children,” which is part of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines.
Dr. James Pagano
Pagano is an emergency medicine doctor who has worked for more than 40 years in the medical field.
“He has worked in diverse emergency settings, from Level 1 trauma centers to small community hospitals, caring for patients across all age groups, including infants, pregnant women, and the elderly,” Kennedy wrote.
The Medical Board of California lists Pagano as holding an active license, while also stating that he is retired. Pagano also has a license in Florida, where he is not listed as retired. Pagano did not respond to a request for comment.
Pagano has also authored multiple fiction books, including “The Drain.”
Vicky Pebsworth
Pebsworth, a registered nurse, is a regional director for the National Association of Catholic Nurses and a former member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee.
Pebsworth is the mother of a boy who “experienced serious, long-term health problems following receipt of seven live virus and killed bacterial vaccines administered during his 15-month well-baby visit which sparked her interest in vaccine safety research and policymaking and chronic illness and disability in children,” according to a biography.
During a 2020 FDA meeting, Pebsworth recounted her experience and spoke out against the accelerated timeline for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, noting that vaccines typically take years to develop.
A board member for the National Vaccine Information Center, she said at the meeting that the center is against “using coercion and sanctions to persuade adults to take an experimental vaccine, or give it to their children.”
Barbara Loe Fisher, president and cofounder of the center, in an email to The Epoch Times called Pebsworth “a woman of faith and intellectual honesty” who “is just the kind of person the ACIP needs to help secure meaningful reforms in public health policymaking.”
Dr. Michael Ross
Ross, a former professor at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University, withdrew from consideration.