Some officials in the Trump administration are at odds with others who are helping shape vaccine policy over whether to remove COVID-19 vaccines from the U.S. market, according to a report from Axios.
The news outlet, citing comments on social media platform X from Robert Malone, M.D., the vice chairman of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), indicates that there is disagreement between those involved in the discussions on whether to ground COVID shots.
Malone, a vaccine critic who was added to the ACIP by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in June, posted on his account on Jan. 18: “Regarding covid vax HHS policy—How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” He also added: “Now you are constantly attacked online and in MSM (militant social media) both for eating the elephant and also for not eating it fast enough.”
With that post, Malone drew comments from several users who complained that the government wasn’t moving fast enough to pull COVID vaccines. In response to a user who said that the FDA needs to take the vaccines off the market “all at once,” Malone said, “We are aligned.”
In response to another user who asked, “What is the hold up & who is the hold up?” Malone answered: “FDA Commissioner.”
A few days later, speaking to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Action, Malone hinted again at the topic and teased his committee’s intentions.
“I’m not deaf to the calls that we need to get the COVID vaccine mRNA products off the market,” Malone said. “All I can say is stay tuned and wait for the upcoming ACIP meeting. If the FDA won’t act, there are other entities that will.”
The next meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices runs Feb. 27-29. While the CDC is not required to follow the committee’s recommendation, the panel does wield significant influence.
Among ACIP’s reworked roster, it’s not just Malone who’s shown an eagerness to revisit COVID shots.
In August, one of the most vocal vaccine critics in the newly formed ACIP, Retsef Levi, Ph.D., was tapped to lead a working group that is reviewing the safety of COVID shots. In a 2023 video posted to X, Levi called COVID vaccines “clearly the most failing medical product in the history of medical products, both in terms of efficacy and safety.”
The elevation of longtime vaccine critics such as Malone and Levi to positions of influence in the ACIP is “unfortunate,” according to Robert Hopkins, M.D., an infectious disease physician and the medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID).
“These vaccines have saved millions of lives, and they remain important because we continue to see at least tens of thousands of hospitalizations a year,” Hopkins said in an interview with Fierce. “We continue to see deaths every year from COVID-19. We have seen a decline in severe outcomes from COVID and deaths, year over year. But there is no guarantee that’s going to continue.”
While much of the discussion surrounding COVID vaccines lately has been online and away from official public-facing channels, the FDA has ramped up its own scrutiny of the shots. In awarding its most recent COVID-19 vaccine approvals, the agency imposed usage restrictions that weren’t previously in place.
And two months ago, Vinay Prasad, M.D., who heads up the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), wrote a memo to staffers telling them that the agency was planning to tighten regulations on vaccines and claimed that “no fewer than 10 children” had died from using COVID vaccines.
“What I’ve come to understand is that his statement was not the same as the opinion of the experts at the FDA who did the reviews,” Hopkins said. “So, it’s really hard to know what’s true and what’s assertion with a lot of the actions that have come out of the current ACIP, the current CDC leadership and the current FDA leadership.”
Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) upended the immunization schedule for children in the U.S., eliminating six of the 17 vaccines that were previously recommended to protect them from disease, including the COVID shot.
That decision came despite a December report from the CDC, which found that the 2024-25 version of the COVID vaccine was 76% effective at preventing visits to an emergency department or urgent care in children between ages 9 months and 4 years. The efficacy figure was a comparison to those of the age group who did not receive a dose of the 2024-25 shot.
Basic information that Hopkins says is “compelling,” regarding the debate, is that among adults who are hospitalized with COVID, the majority have chronic health conditions and are unvaccinated. Meanwhile, among children aged 4 and younger who are hospitalized with COVID, the majority do not have chronic health conditions and are unvaccinated.
“We’ve got opportunities to reduce these impacts,” Hopkins said. “It doesn’t seem to me to make sense—even at our low rates of vaccination—to take away a vaccine that is potentially saving thousands of lives a year.”
