Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has promised to make decisions rooted in “gold-standard science,” fired an entire committee of vaccine advisers in part because all were appointed by a Democratic president and some had made donations to Democrats, according to a White House official and another person familiar with Mr. Kennedy’s thinking.
When he announced the firings on Monday, Mr. Kennedy cited the members’ financial ties to industry and their “immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives.” But according to the White House official and the other person, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an internal matter, Mr. Kennedy was also concerned with “political conflicts.”
The mass firing was another example of the unusually muscular — and sometimes chaotic — way that Mr. Kennedy has exercised his authority, often while setting vaccine policy. Like President Trump, Mr. Kennedy inserts himself in policy matters ordinarily left to underlings, and sometimes announces new policies on social media, with scant or no evidence to support them.
Delegates to the American Medical Association, the nation’s largest doctors group, which is holding its annual meeting in Chicago this week, adopted a resolution on Tuesday calling for Mr. Kennedy to immediately reverse his decision, and directed its leadership to ask the Senate Health Committee to investigate it.
Two public health law experts said on Tuesday that Mr. Kennedy had the authority to fire all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, or A.C.I.P., which gives guidance to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But both said that federal law required him not to act in an arbitrary manner.
“The secretary has ultimate authority, but he can’t exercise that authority arbitrarily, casually, haphazardly — he actually needs to use a deliberative process,” said one of those experts, Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. “I think he’s very vulnerable to a judicial challenge.”
In a long post on X on Tuesday night, Mr. Kennedy said that he would be using the social media platform to announce new members. “None of these individuals will be ideological anti-vaxxers,” he wrote. “They will be highly credentialed physicians and scientists who will make extremely consequential public health determinations by applying evidence-based decision-making with objectivity and common sense.”
Mr. Kennedy did not mention ideology or party affiliation in his post but said, “I will also be tweeting examples of the historical corruption at ACIP to help the public understand why this clean sweep was necessary.”
The immunization committee was created in 1964 by the surgeon general to “assist in the prevention and control of communicable diseases.” Its job is to carefully review the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, debate the evidence and vote on who should get the shots and when. Insurers and government programs like Medicaid follow its recommendations.
Experts said it was highly unusual for a secretary to take party politics into account in picking members, and none could recall an entire committee being dismissed en masse.
“It’s supposed to be an apolitical process producing the best scientific advice,” said Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. “It’s not putting people into ambassadorships because they give you money. It’s trying to select the best available expertise.”
Mr. Kennedy — one of the nation’s most vocal critics of vaccines, which he has linked to autism despite scientific studies that have failed to find evidence of a connection — has long claimed that the committee is rife with conflicts of interest because some members have worked with the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, members are required to declare whether they have conflicts and are not permitted to vote on matters in which they are conflicted.
He announced the firings in a Wall Street Journal opinion essay on Monday, calling them “a bold step in restoring public trust.” He also noted that some of the members “were last-minute appointees of the Biden administration,” adding, “Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028.”
Del Bigtree, a close ally of Mr. Kennedy’s whose nonprofit has backed efforts to end vaccine mandates and withdraw certain vaccines, said: “These are bold moves that I believe are what’s expected.
“It’s why all the people that have supported Robert Kennedy Jr. supported him all the way to joining President Trump,” he added. “This is what we wanted to see. We wanted to see an end to the corruption, infiltration of corporate interests.”
But beyond that, Mr. Kennedy was also concerned with political ideology, according to the person familiar with his views. This person pointed to an article in The Federalist, the conservative news outlet, that detailed which members had worked with industry, which had donated to Democrats and which had taken steps to “advance diversity, equity and inclusion (D.E.I.) ideology” — something Mr. Trump has said will not be permitted in his administration.
One committee member, Noel Brewer, a professor in public health at the University of North Carolina, said on Tuesday that he learned he had been dismissed when a reporter sent him Mr. Kennedy’s Wall Street Journal essay around 4 p.m. on Monday. Two hours later, he got an email informing him of the “immediate termination” of his appointment.
Dr. Brewer said that he had in the past received grant funding from Pfizer or Merck, though not in the last five years. When it became clear that he was a candidate to serve on the committee, he said, “I made sure to start turning down every single invitation.”
The Federalist article identified Dr. Brewer as someone who had donated to Democrats; in 2020, before he served on the committee, he gave $1,000 to Joseph R. Biden Jr. and $200 to a Democratic candidate for Senate in North Carolina.
Asked about the donations, Dr. Brewer said: “I’m a behavioral scientist, working to benefit public health. I’m not really qualified to make assessments of leaders’ political calculus.”
What happens next is unclear. Mr. Kennedy is expected to appoint new members of the panel before its next meeting, which is scheduled for June 25.
Dr. Brewer noted that the panel was considering several matters of importance, including whether to recommend reducing the number of doses that infants receive to protect against human papillomavirus, and whether to move to a “risk-based approach” in which the Covid-19 vaccine might not be recommended for healthy adults.
Mr. Kennedy got out ahead of the committee last month, by announcing new Covid-19 vaccine recommendations for children and pregnant women.
Michael T. Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota who has advised health secretaries of both political parties, called the dismissal of all 17 members of the committee “a political reaction, not a scientific effort.” Dr. Osterholm is spearheading a new initiative, the Vaccine Integrity Project, which called the firings “reckless” and said they were part of a troubling pattern in which Mr. Kennedy makes decisions with little evidence to support them.
In announcing the Covid-19 recommendations, Mr. Kennedy did not offer new scientific evidence. Instead he relied on a commentary published by the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and another top F.D.A. official. In claiming conflicts of interest on the immunization committee, Mr. Kennedy cited one report from 2009 and another from 2000.
Past health secretaries have sometimes exercised their authority in muscular fashion, and in some cases have overruled the recommendations of their scientific advisers.
Kathleen Sebelius, who served as health secretary in the Obama administration, overruled the F.D.A. in refusing to make emergency contraception available to teenage girls younger than 17. Donna E. Shalala, health secretary to President Bill Clinton, was instructed by Mr. Clinton to reject a recommendation to fund clean-needle exchange programs for drug users, which the C.D.C. director said would save lives.
But in interviews on Tuesday, both said that Mr. Kennedy’s involvement in the workings of the immunization committee was political interference of a different order.
“The scientists informed my judgment,” Ms. Sebelius said. She also noted that Mr. Kennedy fired the committee members at a time when the C.D.C. director could not weigh in, because the agency has no director.
Dr. Shalala said that while she had no choice but to go along with Mr. Clinton’s wish, “we never denied the science; we repeated that the science was clear and we would have saved lives.”
