As the United States faces the peak of its 11th wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the nation’s vaccine policy and public health infrastructure are under unprecedented scrutiny and strain. The upcoming September 18–19, 2025, meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has become a flashpoint in the broader debate over vaccine safety, scientific integrity, and the role of ideology in public health.
According to recent reports from the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC), led by Dr. Mike Hoerger, the U.S. is experiencing an estimated 1 million new COVID-19 infections per day, with 1 in 93 Americans currently infectious. The PMC’s September 8 report classified transmission as High or Very High in 21 states and territories, especially in the South and West, and warned that “significant transmission occurs post-peak.” The consequences are sobering: an average of 1,300 to 2,100 excess deaths per week, totaling 50,000 to 60,000 annual deaths from COVID-19 and related complications, with Long COVID affecting an estimated 6% of those infected. The current wave alone may produce up to 720,000 new Long COVID cases in the months ahead.
Amid this crisis, the ACIP—once a respected, evidence-driven body—has undergone dramatic changes. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services confirmed five new ACIP members by September 15, 2025, including several known for their skepticism of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. This overhaul followed the abrupt firing of CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez, who, according to published accounts, refused to “rubber-stamp” directives from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent vaccine skeptic. The new ACIP members, many lacking formal immunization expertise, have publicly echoed Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism. The committee’s June 2025 meeting saw the abandonment of its rigorous evidence-to-recommendation framework, a move that has raised alarms among career scientists and public health advocates.
Historically, ACIP meetings were recognized for their transparent, evidence-based discussions. But, as The Vaccine Integrity Project noted, the recent shift has led to presentations by anti-vaccine advocates filled with errors, and new members making inaccurate statements about both vaccine safety and efficacy. The committee is now set to include even more vaccine skeptics at this week’s meeting, with the agenda reflecting a focus on alleged vaccine harms rather than benefits.
One of the central controversies involves the use—and misuse—of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS is a passive surveillance tool, designed to provide early warning of potential safety signals, not to establish causation. For example, VAERS was instrumental in detecting six instances of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) related to the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine out of 6.8 million doses administered. However, causation was only established after rigorous investigation and corroboration with other data sources, such as the Vaccine Safety Datalink and systems overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Veterans Administration. As The Vaccine Integrity Project explained, “VAERS data do not prove causation.”
Despite these limitations, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plans to present data at the September ACIP meeting purporting to link COVID vaccines to 25 child deaths—a move that has “alarmed career scientists,” according to WSWS. Critics argue that the FDA is misapplying VAERS data, which, as the system’s official website warns, “may contain incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable information” and “should not be used to determine rates or establish causal relationships.” Dorit Reiss, a professor of law at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, underscored this point: “To identify causation to a vaccine, you need to show that the cause of death was something the vaccine caused, and by itself, a VAERS report would not show that. You need larger studies comparing incidents of the harm with or without the vaccine.”
The politicization of vaccine policy has real-world consequences, particularly for the most vulnerable. CDC data from July 2024 to May 2025 show that infants under 6 months had a cumulative COVID-19–associated hospitalization rate of 268 per 100,000—nearly identical to adults aged 65 to 74. No COVID-19 vaccine is approved for infants under 6 months, so protection depends entirely on maternal antibodies from vaccination during pregnancy or prior infection. Among children and adolescents aged 6 months to 17 years hospitalized with COVID-19 between October 2024 and March 2025, 89% had not received the most recently recommended vaccines. The same pattern holds for adults: 65% of those hospitalized aged 65 and older had no record of receiving the 2024–2025 recommended vaccine, and 92% of pregnant individuals hospitalized with COVID-19 symptoms had not received any vaccine dose since July 2023.
Contrary to the widespread belief that only children with underlying health conditions are at risk, CDC data reveal a starkly different reality. Among infants under 6 months hospitalized for COVID-19, 71% had no known underlying conditions. For children aged 6 to 23 months, 54% of those hospitalized were otherwise healthy. One in four children under 18 hospitalized for COVID-19 required intensive care unit (ICU) treatment. Over 90 children have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. in the past 12 months alone, and the true number may be higher due to reporting lags.
Meanwhile, the ACIP’s focus on speculative vaccine harms is not limited to COVID-19. The committee is set to vote on the MMRV vaccine (measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella) later this week, despite no new evidence requiring guideline changes. The MMRV vaccine, licensed in 2005, was associated with a twofold increased risk of febrile seizures in children aged 12 to 23 months, leading to updated ACIP guidance in June 2009 recommending separate administration of MMR and varicella vaccines for children 12 to 47 months old unless parents prefer MMRV. New ACIP members raised concerns about febrile seizures again at the June 2025 meeting, even though the risk had been thoroughly discussed and mitigated more than a decade ago.
This pattern of reviving old concerns without new evidence, coupled with the committee’s abandonment of its evidence-to-recommendation framework, has prompted warnings from former public health officials. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who resigned as director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases in August 2025, stated in his resignation letter that the “firewall between science and ideology has completely broken down.” Noel Brewer, a former ACIP vaccine adviser, accused the administration of “leveraging this platform to share untruths about vaccines to scare people,” and warned that “the US government is now in the business of vaccine misinformation.”
The implications of these developments are profound. By narrowing or removing vaccine recommendations, and by undermining the scientific and legal guarantees that ensure no-cost vaccine coverage for millions of Americans, the administration risks a return to a pre-vaccine era. Diseases like measles, pertussis, and chickenpox could once again surge, especially as kindergarten MMR vaccination rates have already dropped below herd immunity thresholds in some regions. The erosion of public trust in health agencies, fueled by the politicization of advisory committees and the misuse of safety data, threatens not only current vaccination efforts but also the future of public health and pandemic preparedness.
As the ACIP prepares to meet this week, the stakes could hardly be higher. The choices made now will reverberate for years to come, shaping the nation’s ability to protect its children, its most vulnerable, and its collective future from preventable disease.
