HHS Withdraws New Rules for CDC Vaccine Panel

HHS yanked its revised charter for the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) little more than a month after the agency unveiled changes that critics warned would keep vaccine-skeptical policies and members driving the panel.

HHS withdrew the charter “due to an administrative error in meeting the revised public notification timing requirements,” according to a Federal Register notice. “As a result, the charter lapsed and the committee must be re-established.”

In March, a federal judge ruled that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likely violated federal procedures when he revamped the CDC’s influential vaccine panel in 2025. The ruling blocked Kennedy’s appointment of ACIP members and his order to end broad recommendations for all children to be vaccinated against the flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A and B, some forms of meningitis, and respiratory syncytial virus. The Trump administration appealed the ruling last month.

In his ruling, the federal judge questioned the expertise of many of Kennedy’s handpicked committee members, whom he appointed after ousting all 17 ACIP members last June.

HHS responded last month by developing a renewed charter that put greater emphasis on vaccines’ potential harms and opened the door to membership beyond ACIP’s past priority of expertise in immunization practices.

The revised charter would have expanded membership to those with expertise on “consumer perspectives” or “recovery from serious vaccine injuries.” ACIP’s roster of non-voting liaison representatives also would have grown to include vaccine-skeptical groups such as Physicians for Informed Consent and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

The influential committee last met in December 2025, when it made the controversial decision to stop universally recommending the hepatitis B vaccine at birth, a move projected to increase deaths, liver cancers, and cases of acute illness.

New Charter, Same Intent?

The shape of ACIP’s next charter is uncertain, said Richard Hughes IV, lead counsel on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ lawsuit that led to the judge’s order. “It remains to be seen whether HHS will republish the April 2026 charter, revert to the December 2025 charter — which is in large part the same as has been in place since April 2024 — or publish a newly revised charter,” he told MedPage Today.

The latest HHS notice likely signals “a willingness or even desire on the government’s part to have a properly established ACIP in advance of a possible June meeting,” Hughes said. Even with Kennedy’s ACIP appointments blocked for now by the judge’s order, “the secretary retains the authority to appoint ex officio members if a quorum of voting members is unavailable to meet.”

A new ACIP charter matching the now-withdrawn one would “more legally put in place the kind of people Kennedy wants on that committee, which are people who, like him, have basically an anti-vaccine, anti-science bias,” Paul Offit, MD, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told MedPage Today.

“Expertise is the last thing he wants on that committee,” Offit said, “because if they actually have an expertise, they’re going to disagree with pretty much everything he says.”