Vaccine Advisory Committee Meetings Resume: What Lies Ahead?

Richard Hughes, Spreeha Choudhury, William Walters, and Devon R. Minnick, attorneys in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, with Sara Rosenbaum, co-authored an article in Health Affairs, titled “Vaccine Advisory Committee Meetings Resume: What Lies Ahead?”

Following is an excerpt:

On March 24, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that on April 15 and 16 the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will meet. Under the Trump administration, these meetings, once considered routine, are being closely watched because of a number of factors, such as Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy’s hostile views toward vaccines and the Trump administration’s efforts to limit similar advisory committees.

ACIP is one of the nation’s foundational public health bodies, having overseen U.S. immunization policy and practice since 1964. It is considered a global exemplar of sound prevention policy, and as a formal federal advisory committee, ACIP operates under standards designed to ensure scientific integrity and transparency. By our count, using traditional legal search techniques, ACIP’s role in setting U.S. vaccine policy is mentioned no fewer than a dozen times in federal law, and numerous state laws likely also reference ACIP in their own public health standard-setting. In other words, ACIP has grown from a body that advises the HHS Secretary into a key element of public health law.

Before his confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised HELP Committee Chair Senator Bill Cassidy that he would “maintain the [ACIP] without changes”. Within a week of Kennedy’s confirmation, however, the CDC announced it was “postponing” ACIP’s previously scheduled regular meeting in order to “accommodate public comment.” This delay has automatically pushed back multiple votes on vaccine recommendations, including a vote on a new meningococcal vaccine as well as votes on chikungunya and influenza vaccines.

The future of ACIP—its membership, the scope of its duties and how it performs those duties—is under close public scrutiny, given the role it plays in guiding immunization policy and ultimately, continued population access to the most effective vaccines. These issues remain front and center as this long-serving scientific advisory body resumes its work.