Five new members named to influential CDC vaccine advisory committee days ahead of key meeting

By Katherine Dillinger, Brenda Goodman, CNN

(CNN) — Five new members have been named to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee, the US Department of Health and Human Services said Monday, just days ahead of a key meeting about vaccines for Covid-19 and other diseases.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been preparing to appoint as many as seven new members for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which is tasked with reviewing the latest science on vaccines and then making recommendations to the CDC on how they should be used.

The new members are Dr. Catherine Stein, an epidemiologist and professor at Case Western Reserve University; Dr. Evelyn Griffin, an obstetrician-gynecologist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Dr. Hillary Blackburn, director of medication access and affordability at AscensionRx and the daughter-in-law of Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee; Dr. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist with For Hearts and Souls Free Medical Clinic in Hawaii; and Dr. Raymond Pollak, a surgeon and transplant immunobiologist.

Stein has been critical of the nation’s response to Covid-19, including mask mandates and business closures. She co-authored a research paper on flawed models used during the state’s pandemic response for the group Health Freedom Ohio, which is affiliated with Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine nonprofit founded by Kennedy.

Griffin criticized the country’s response to Covid-19 and the push for people to be vaccinated against it during a Health Freedom Day event in 2024.

Milhoan appeared at a 2024 panel led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, on injuries caused by Covid-19 vaccines. During the panel, he said the vaccines had caused heart-related deaths and disability, and he cited a study from the Cleveland Clinic that he said showed that the more vaccines a person got, the more likely they were to get Covid-19. Independent fact-checkers said that was a misinterpretation of the findings.

Pollak, a transplant specialist, was a whistleblower in a case settled by the University of Illinois at Chicago after he reported that its hospital was diagnosing patients as sicker than they were to boost the number of transplants performed there.

In June, Kennedy abruptly removed all 17 previous sitting ACIP members, saying the panel was “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest.” He provided no evidence to back up that claim, and a recent review by researchers at the University of Southern California found that conflicts of interest on ACIP had been at historic lows for years.

Kennedy rapidly replaced the ACIP members with eight of his own candidates, although one withdrew during the vetting process because of financial conflicts of interest. Several have made unproven claims about vaccines, including one who said, without evidence, that Covid shots are causing “unprecedented levels of death and harm in young people.”

The next ACIP meeting is set for Thursday and Friday, when the panel is scheduled to discuss Covid-19 vaccines as well as those against hepatitis B; measles, mumps, rubella and varicella; and respiratory syncytial virus. The new additions to the committee are expected to participate in the meeting.

Former ACIP members have said that a review of a new candidates, including their conflicts of interest, typically occurs before their appointment and takes two to three months.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.