ATLANTA — Public health officials watched with dread as a panel shaped by the Trump administration took up an agenda to begin dismantling six decades of vaccination development and progress.
But while the result seemed foretold, the debate was far from unanimous.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, met at a satellite campus of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because the agency’s headquarters were still smashed up from a deadly gun attack last month by a man who said the covid vaccine had made him depressed and suicidal.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made it clear he wants the panel to change the CDC’s childhood immunization schedule, which establishes, sometimes with legal authority, which vaccines are to be mandated,