DECATUR, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - Advocates, as well as former, fired, and retired CDC workers, protested outside the agency’s DeKalb County headquarters on Tuesday after the abrupt firing of an entire key advisory committee on vaccines.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is a board that reviews information and provides non-binding recommendations to the CDC on the best timing and use of approved vaccines. For instance, the board recently recommended removing pregnant women and young children from the COVID-19 inoculation recommended list.

It’s made up of pediatricians, epidemiologists, immunologists and other physicians but on Monday, all 17 members were abruptly fired by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Making the announcement in an opinion piece penned for the Wall Street Journal, Kennedy wrote that the board members were “last minute” appointees of the Biden administration who were “plagued with conflicts of interest.”

Some now-former members of the board, like Dr. Noel Brewer, only found out they had been axed when reporters started calling about the article.

“It was deeply surprising. No one really saw this coming,” said Brewer.

Brewer fought back against Kennedy’s claim that he and his colleagues had conflicts of interest that they were trying to hide from the public.

“If you have conflicts of interest, ACIP is not for you; that’s not a committee you should be on,” said Brewer. “The current members have essentially no conflicts of interest except maybe one or two who had either some recent or ongoing funding or were doing some kind of advisory work, and that is clearly stated on the CDC website. So there’s no invisibility here.”

Kennedy, in his opinion piece, said the White House also wanted to move more quickly on replacing Biden-era appointees to the APIC, who traditionally serve terms between three and five years long.

“Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028,” Kennedy wrote.

At the CDC on Tuesday, dozens of retired or fired employees – many who used to work in virology or immunology – supported the ACIP board members. Some, like infectious disease specialist Dr. Tony Fiore, had worked with the board in the past.

“They’re an amazing group and to see them dismissed this way, it’s a real loss to the nation,” Fiore said. “The conflicts of interest that are perceived by the current administration is, if you’ve ever worked on vaccines, you must have a conflict of interest. And that’s just not how these folks think.”

Fiore’s main concern – and that of many others – is timing. The fall immunization schedule is set to come out soon, but with no ACIP board to make the recommendations, Fiore worries physicians won’t have the right information to recommend to families and patients.

“There’s just no time to get someone on the board who has been fully vetted, whose conflicts of interest have been explored already, and who can get up to speed on the information that’s needed to make these decisions,” he said.

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