Richard H. Hughes, IV, Member of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in The Hill, in “Key CDC Vaccine Committee Meeting Pushed Back,” by Nathaniel Weixel, Joseph Choi, and Alejandra O’Connell-Domenech.
Following is an excerpt:
A meeting scheduled next week for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been postponed, alarming medical organizations across the country.
ACIP was scheduled to hold a meeting from Feb. 26-28 in Atlanta, but the CDC’s webpage for the committee stated it had been postponed to “accommodate public comment in advance of the meeting.”
No new date for the meeting was provided. This move comes just one week after Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic, was confirmed as health and human services secretary.
Soon after the change was announced, a coalition of health care groups released a letter calling for the meeting to still be held. Groups that signed included the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American Medical Association and the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease.
“ACIP had a full agenda of critical, vaccine-related decisions, including discussion linked to deadly illnesses like meningococcal disease. There is great benefit to Americans in a prompt rescheduling,” they wrote.
Some cast doubt over the motivations to move the meeting.
“The pretext is that the comment period ahead of the meeting was closed. Reading between the lines — this is the beginning of likely many deliberate actions to undermine the work of the committee and upset the ‘status quo,'” Richard H. Hughes IV, a health lawyer and partner at Epstein, Becker & Green, said in a statement.
