Just hours after reports began surfacing June 9 that four of the 17 members of the U.S. CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) had been terminated, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert Kennedy announced that all the members have been removed and the committee is being “reconstituted.”

The ostensible reason, in Kennedy’s words, is to “reestablish public confidence in vaccine science.”

However, HHS noted that all the terminated members were appointed under the Biden administration, with 13 named to ACIP just last year. “These appointments would have prevented the current administration from choosing a majority of the committee until 2028,” according to the department. “The prior administration made a concerted effort to lock in public health ideology and limit the incoming administration’s ability to take the proper actions to restore public trust in vaccines.”

New ACIP members are currently under consideration, HHS said.

The abrupt termination calls into question the next meeting of the committee, which was set for June 25-27, according to a June 9 Federal Register notice. At that meeting, ACIP was to discuss a number of vaccines and vote on recommendations for scheduling vaccines for COVID-19, human papillomavirus, influenza, and meningitis, as well as respiratory syncytial virus vaccines for adults, and for maternal and pediatric populations.

The vote on the COVID-19 vaccines was to include pediatric vaccines, even though Kennedy recently announced, without convening ACIP as is normal practice, that the annual COVID-19 vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women had been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule.