In a statement via the Wall Street Journal, HHS Secretary RFK Jr. announced a reset of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, retiring its 17 members immediately. He claimed that this reset would clear the conflicts of interest the members had and restore trust in vaccine science.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, is a team of independent vaccine experts who meet at the CDC. Once a new vaccine is licensed by the FDA, ACIP reviews all the data and provides guidance on how a vaccine should be used. Their advice is what ultimately lands a vaccine on the schedule your provider uses to make sure you are up-to-date and protected.

ACIP’s voting members are mostly pediatricians, epidemiologists, and infectious disease doctors. One seat is set aside for a consumer advocate. They apply through an open process run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Dozens of nonvoting liaisons from medical societies and federal agencies also sit in, which keeps the conversation broad and transparent.

The ACIP already operates under some of the strictest conflict‑of‑interest rules in the federal government, and ACIP’s charter forbids anyone with more than a de minimis industry interest from voting on products made by that company. Members serve as Special Government Employees, must file public financial‑disclosure forms, and are required at every meeting to declare—and, when necessary, recuse themselves for—any relevant ties. Meeting minutes, member disclosures, and all supporting materials are posted online, and every session is webcast with time for open public comment. These safeguards were put in place precisely to keep vaccine policy transparent and insulated from commercial pressure.

RFK Jr. himself was required to resolve his own conflicts of interest regarding an agreement with the law firm WisnerBaum, under which he receives 10% of the funds awarded in referred vaccine litigation cases.

By abruptly firing every voting member, no conflicts were cleared. A well‑vetted process was interrupted, removing years of collective expertise, and creating a political opening for advisors whose own views and financial ties have not yet been probed.

In a tweet announcing the new members, Secretary of Health Robert F Kennedy, Jr. claims that a corrupt ACIP has expanded the childhood schedule to roughly 69 and 92 “vaccines” without ever requiring true inert placebo-controlled trials. Thus, vaccine safety remains unproven and may be driving today’s surge in chronic childhood disease.

The tweet suggests that children get too many vaccines today, but think about it this way: which of the illnesses we prevent would you be okay with your child (or yourself) catching? Since the 1980s, doctors have only added about one or two new vaccines every ten years. That slow, careful pace shows that the schedule grows through solid science, not random decisions.

Right now, the schedule protects children from 22 different diseases. The claim that kids get 92 “vaccines” uses creative math. Many vaccines come in more than one dose, so your immune system gets a reminder lesson. A booster isn’t a brand-new vaccine; it’s like reviewing for a test (meeting the real disease) you’ve already studied for. Also, some shots combine protection against four or even six diseases in a single injection. Take Vaxelis, for example. It protects against six diseases in three doses, but vaccine opponents count that as 24 separate vaccines.

Others worry about too many ingredients or antigens. In truth, combination shots use fewer total ingredients than giving each vaccine separately. A child meets between 2000 and 6000 antigens every day just by eating, playing, and breathing. The total from vaccines over 18 years, fewer than 200 antigens, is tiny by comparison. So, the big numbers some people toss around about “too many vaccines” don’t match how the schedule and kids’ immune systems really work.

It’s a mistake to believe that a placebo has to be an inert substance, like saline, but that’s not always the case. If there is an adjuvant that has been tested for safety in the past, the placebo might include the adjuvant so that people can’t detect whether they are getting the vaccine or the placebo. The World Health Organization guides the ethical use of placebos in vaccine trials in these situations.

If a new vaccine is being tested to replace a currently used vaccine, you cannot withhold the currently used vaccine and give people a saline shot instead. Today, would you sign your child up for a study of the measles vaccine if you knew they had a 50% chance of receiving no vaccine? Of course you wouldn’t. You would never gamble your child’s health that way. It would be unethical to withhold the existing vaccine from participants if not receiving it would pose a significant risk to their health.

Even so, saline-placebo-controlled trials are done for many vaccines to assess both safety and efficacy, including the Rubella, Pneumococcal, Hib, HPV, Polio, Measles,Tdap, and COVID-19 vaccines.

In a Children’s Health Defense video, HHS Secretary RFK Jr. claims that studying vaccinated versus unvaccinated people is not done because scientists are afraid of the results, which would call all vaccines into question.

Large real-world studies have repeatedly asked whether vaccinated children fare differently from their unvaccinated peers, and the answer is consistently no: Denmark’s nationwide follow-up of more than 650,000 children over a decade found that MMR vaccination neither raised nor clustered autism cases, even in kids with an autistic sibling, while a meta-analysis pooling data from 1.2 million youngsters in five countries reached the same verdict for autism and every other chronic condition examined. Cohort work from Germany, the Philippines, and multiple U.S. health-care systems drives the point home: the only clear difference between the two groups is that vaccinated kids avoid the very diseases the shots prevent.

Vaccines work by giving the immune system a quick practice test: the harmless antigen in the shot looks no different to your body than the thousands of antigens you breathe, eat, or touch every day, so learning to fight it does not “overload” immunity but simply adds another entry to the memory bank. Extensive study shows no evidence that vaccinated children develop more allergies, autoimmune problems, or developmental disorders; what they do gain is reliable protection against serious infections that can scar lungs, damage brains, or end lives.

Put together, the scientific literature shows that vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated comparisons have been done, placebo studies do exist where ethical, and neither line of evidence supports the claim that vaccines harm children. The real-world outcome is straightforward: vaccination makes kids healthier by keeping dangerous diseases away, while avoiding shots offers no health advantage at all.