RFK Jr. appoints five new members of the CDC vaccine committee

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The Secretary of Health and Social Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., added five new members on Monday to a key panel of the government vaccine he served in June.

This decision concerns a critical meeting of the committee, called the advisory committee on vaccination practices, or ACIP, scheduled for Thursday and Friday. The panel will examine the data and make recommendations on vaccines for COVID-19 and hepatitis B, as well as on measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox, before fall and winter.

So who are the new advisers? They include an infectious illness expert who has pushed cocoat mandates, such as vaccination requirements, The mandates and another member who pleaded for unproven treatments for this virus, including the ivermectin.

“There are evidence that certainly suggests that some members have based their opinions on Scientific information or has misinterpreted the results of scientific studies, “CNBC Neil Maniar, professor of public health at the Northeastern University, told CNBC.

It is not a surprise: the seven members appointed by Kennedy to the AICI earlier this year included widely known vaccine reviews. Kennedy maintains that the evisceration of the last committee was necessary to restore public confidence in vaccinations.

But the panel is traditionally made up of independent experts in medical health and public health “which count on the gold stallion of the best scientific evidence,” said Maniar. He called it “concerning that we are going in a very different direction with a committee that plays a very important role in terms of policy and immunization coverage” in the United States

ACIP regularly examines vaccine data and makes recommendations to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which determine which is eligible for shots and if insurers should cover them, among other efforts.

Here’s what you need to know about the five new members:

• Kirk Milhoan is a pediatric cardiologist at the Driscoll children’s hospital in Texas. HHS, in a press release, said that it “holds a doctorate in the mechanisms of myocardial inflammation”. He is the principal researcher at the independent Medical Alliance, a group trained in 2020 who fought to restrict the use of arnm vaccines for women and pregnant children and pleaded for unproven coated treatments. The biography of Milhoan on the group’s website indicates that it is devoted to the treatment of patients suffering from “cardiovascular toxicity linked to the vaccine due to advanced protein”. In a panel in 2024 on vaccine injuries summoned by representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia republican and a skeptical vocal boost, Milhoan said that these vaccines cause more harm than good.
• Hillary Blackburn is a pharmacist and director of access to drugs and affordability to the Catholic health system, ascent. She is the daughter-in-law of Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.
• Evelyn Griffin is an obstetrician and gynecologist based in Baton Rouge, in Louisiana. HHS said: “She was among the first robot-assisted gynecological surgeons in the United States and led efforts to reduce maternal morbidity and mortality”. According to local reports, she spoke out against Louisiana’s decision to add firing on the calendar of academic vaccination and testified on the undesirable effects of vaccines.
• Raymond Pollak is a transplant surgeon in Illinois. In 1999, Pollak was a denunciator in a pursuit against the hospital at the University of Illinois alleging that the hospital admitted patients for liver transplants when they were not medically necessary. HHS said that he had published more than 120 articles evaluated by peers and that he had been the principal researcher on the biology subsidies of the transplantation of the National Institutes of Health and numerous trials of drugs. Pollak’s opinions on vaccines are not clear.
• Catherine Stein, Epidemiologist of infectious diseases at the western reserve University School of Medicine. HHS said that it had published 115 articles evaluated by peers and that its research has focused on tuberculosis and infectious diseases. Stein openly criticized the United States’s response to Covid and minimized the seriousness of the pandemic. She told Ohio legislators that health officials inflated death and hospitalization figures, according to Ohio Capital Journal.

We will cover the ACIP meeting this week with the new members, so stay attentive for our coverage.

Do not hesitate to send advice, suggestions, history ideas and data to Annika in a new e-mail: annika.constantino@versantmedia.com.

It is Ashley, who comes to you with new soft-aer this week.

On Monday, I officially started a new role at CNBC as our AI journalist! I will cover the main AI laboratories, including Openai and Anthropic, for our site. There is certainly no shortage of stories to dig, and I am delighted to start.

But as my coverage scope changes a little, it unfortunately means that it is my last week as a regular contributor to the Newsletter Healthy Returns. It was so fun to connect with readers via this format, and I will fail to write it every week.

Fortunately, there are tons of overlap between AI and health care at the moment, so I will always cover the sector through this objective. You will always see my signature in the newsletter from time to time too.

I won’t go far, so stay in touch. You can send me history advice and ideas in ashley.capoot@versantmedia.com.

Until next time!

The prices of grocery and gas make the headlines with regard to the IPC, the government inflation report closely monitored. But for a large part of this year, health care inflation has removed a greater bite from our wallets, and it is about to take an even more important part of our money next year.

Inflation of medical care reaching a three -year summit in August, insurers increase bonuses between commercial plans.

While the IPC has shown that prescription drugs have increased just under 1% in August, high -priced medicines for cancer care remain the highest category for health spending for large employers. With regard to high volume medicines, GLP-1 is a large cost engine, with the ever-increasing list of conditions treatable by the NOVO Nordisk Ozempic and the growing demand for workers for Zepbound and Wegovy weight loss treatments.

High -cost and high volume drugs have already created major challenges for employers, the advent of statins to treat high cholesterol in the 1990s to the treatment of hepatitis C pierced ten years ago. In these cases, employers were pressure for changes in the management of benefits in pharmacies.

This could be another time when PBMS will feel the pressure to offer a new model.

Some employers start to explore how they can get better prices on GLP-1 via the cash market. Although they and the drug manufacturers would violate their PBM contracts if they went directly to GLP-1 sales, some new PBM participants offer new models of contract for weight loss and potentially costly cellular and genic therapies in the pipeline.

Payient CEO, Brian Whorley, calls that a stress test for the PBM market.

It has become common currency to see the heads of the Directorate of large technologies and pharmaceutical companies meet with managers of the White House and President Trump himself.

United Group The CEO, Stephen Hemsley, seems to take a page of this game book.

Hemsley recently met the chief of staff to President Susie Wiles, according to the Wall Street Journal. This decision comes as the United CEO of United Test is trying to get out of the company under a regulatory check -up cloud.

This summer, legal personnel approached the Ministry of Justice about an investigation into its activities, and later this fall, the company should publish an external audit of its commercial practices in its health insurance and pharmacy units.

In response to the report, a company spokesperson has declared to CNBC: “Public policy shapes health care across America, and it is our responsibility to engage with administration and congress at all levels to improve the access and affordability of patients.”

Do not hesitate to send advice, suggestions, history ideas and data to Bertha in a new e-mail: bertha.coombs@versantmedia.com.