CDC purges career officials from oversight of vaccine committee

Career officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responsible for overseeing the agency's committee of outside vaccine experts have been removed from their role in the process, multiple CDC officials tell CBS News.

News of their removal comes the same week Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all the members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, known as ACIP, and replaced them with eight new picks that include close allies and COVID vaccine critics. The next meeting of the committee is coming up at the end of June.

The vaccine recommendations from the committee are closely watched by state and local authorities, health care providers and others because they are tied to several federal policies that enable access to the shots, including requirements for insurance coverage and programs for uninsured children.

Multiple federal health officials said the staffers removed from overseeing the panel included Dr. Melinda Wharton, the associate director for vaccine policy, and her team at the agency's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

A CDC spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Wharton had served as the committee's executive secretary before she was pulled from her role.

Among other things, she and her team had been responsible for vetting nominees for ACIP membership, which would usually include extensive screening for potential conflicts of interest before someone would be named to the committee.

Multiple CDC officials said that Kennedy circumvented the CDC's process to pick his new members of the committee.

HHS said in an "ACIP FAQ" document shared with members of Congress and stakeholders that Kennedy's new picks for the committee were being selected "through a rigorous examination of their scientific credentials and a comprehensive ethics review for potential conflicts of interest."

Wharton and her team had also overseen the panel's operations, including prioritizing its agenda and planning meetings for work groups that huddle to discuss technical details between the committee's public discussions and votes.

ACIP work group planning meetings have since been postponed due to the lack of voting committee members to attend them, multiple people familiar with the matter told CBS News.

Those people said the CDC's chief of staff, Matt Buzzelli, an appointee of the Trump administration, was now effectively in charge of the committee's planning.

Buzzelli is seen by many within the agency as the CDC's de facto head, in the absence of a Senate confirmed director or acting director appointed by Kennedy.

One former CDC official said the move amounted to "putting RFK like-minded people and removing all potential internal CDC opposition" in the committee, calling it far from normal.

Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, one of the CDC officials overseeing the work group on COVID-19 vaccines, resigned last week after Kennedy ordered edits to the CDC's recommendations to exclude children and pregnant women.

Several medical groups criticized Kennedy's move at the time to bypass the committee and its COVID-19 vaccines work group. The American Pharmacists Association is among those now withholding endorsement of the CDC's new adult immunization schedule.