On June 9, 2025, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. removed all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the expert panel that has guided U.S. vaccine policy for decades. It was the first mass removal in the committee's history. The replacements included appointees with records of publicly doubting vaccine safety. A federal judge who later reviewed the appointments found only 6 of the 13 new members had meaningful experience in vaccines.
The reconstituted panel then made the decisions that reshaped federal vaccine policy through 2025 and into 2026: COVID-19 moved to shared clinical decision-making, the combined MMRV shot lost its preferred status, hepatitis B moved to individual decision-making for certain infants, and in January 2026 the childhood schedule was rebuilt so that eleven vaccines remain universally recommended and twelve are risk-based or shared decision-making.
A correction belongs here. This entry previously said the CDC “removed six of seventeen previously recommended childhood vaccines from its universal recommendation list” and then named seven. Neither the count nor the framing was right. No vaccine was removed from the schedule; vaccines were reclassified from universal recommendation to risk-based or shared clinical decision-making, which affects insurance coverage and school requirements without withdrawing the vaccine. MMR, polio, pertussis, HPV and varicella all remain universally recommended. The full and accurate breakdown is in A Rebuilt Childhood Vaccine Schedule Moved 12 Vaccines Off Universal Recommendation Before a Judge Stayed It.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana physician who chairs the Senate health committee, had supplied a decisive confirmation vote after receiving commitments from Kennedy, among them that ACIP would be kept “without changes.” Kennedy removed all 17 members five months later. Cassidy said in June 2026, “The commitments that were made to me have been violated.”
On March 16, 2026, a federal court stayed the revised schedule and invalidated ACIP votes taken after June 11, 2025 (see A Federal Judge Blocks RFK Jr.'s Vaccine Schedule Overhaul, Finding It Likely Illegal and Most of His Vaccine Advisers 'Distinctly Unqualified' and Kennedy Fires All 17 Members of the ACIP Vaccine Panel, a First in Its History, and Brings In Vaccine Skeptics).