Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appointed five more members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices ahead of the panel’s meeting this week, the department said Monday. Among them are a skeptic of the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and another affiliated with a group promoting unproven treatments for the virus. “ACIP safeguards the health of Americans by issuing objective, evidence-based vaccine recommendations,” Kennedy said in a statement. “Its new members bring diverse expertise that strengthens the committee and ensures it fulfills its mission with transparency, independence, and gold-standard science.” The panel is scheduled to meet Thursday and Friday. The agenda includes discussions of and possible votes on recommendations related to vaccines for COVID-19; hepatitis B; measles, mumps, rubella, varicella; and respiratory syncytial virus. The new appointments come after Kennedy in June fired all former members in an unprecedented move and then installed eight new members who largely expressed skepticism about vaccines or were not specialized in a related field. Last month, the administration fired CDC Director Susan Monarez, in part because she was unwilling to sign off on Kennedy’s changes to vaccine policies. The new members are as follows. Hilary Blackburn is a pharmacist and podcast host. She's the director of medication access and affordability at Ascension, a Catholic health care network that operates in several states, including Texas and Florida, according to her LinkedIn profile. She received a doctorate from the University of Mississippi and a master's of business administration from Western Governors University. Evelyn Griffin is an obstetrician and gynecologist at Baton Rouge General Hospital in Louisiana, where she specializes in functional medicine, a form of holistic practice popular in Kennedy's "Make America Healthy Again" movement. Griffin has supported strict abortion bans in her home state and partnered with Louisiana Right to Life to host talks about “post-Roe misconceptions.” Kirk Milhoan is a pediatric cardiologist. He was investigated and later cleared by the Hawaii Medical Board for allegedly promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to treat COVID-19. Milhoan also has ties to the Independent Medical Alliance, a medical group that advocates for unproven COVID-19 treatments. Raymond Pollak is a transplant specialist who previously served as chief of liver transplantation and director of multiorgan transplant programs at the University of Illinois. Pollak brought a whistleblower lawsuit against the school in 1999 in which he alleged the hospital was diagnosing patients as sicker than they actually were in order to perform more transplants. Catherine Stein is an epidemiology professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and a COVID-19 skeptic who has questioned the severity and spread of the disease during the pandemic. “The new ACIP members bring a wealth of real-world public health experience to the job of making immunization recommendations,” Deputy Secretary of HHS and acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill said in a statement. “We are grateful for their service in helping restore the public confidence in vaccines that was lost during the Biden era.” Ariel Cohen contributed to this report.
