The American Medical Association and a leading public health research group focused on vaccines are teaming up to create a system to review vaccine safety and effectiveness, mirroring a role long played by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The groups, which will operate independently from the federal government, say their work is needed because the CDC’s vaccine review process has “effectively collapsed.” The parallel effort will initially focus on reviewing immunizations for influenza, covid-19 and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, ahead of the coming fall respiratory season.
The groups will not be making vaccine recommendations but will provide the evidence reviews to state health officials, clinicians and others making vaccine decisions.
The nation’s largest physician organization and the Vaccine Integrity Project at the University of Minnesota will convene leading medical professional societies, public health groups and health care organizations to “ensure a deliberative, evidence-driven approach to produce the data necessary to understand the risks and benefits of vaccine policy decisions for all populations — the approach traditionally used by the federal government,” according to a joint statement announcing the effort Tuesday.
The involvement of the AMA is significant because the doctors group has traditionally focused on issues such as physician reimbursement, billing practices and the economics of medical practice — not on broad public health evidence reviews. Its decision to help stand up a parallel vaccine review process reflects how seriously medical leaders view the breakdown of confidence in the federal government’s vaccine system under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“This signals a really important foray for them to come into this space,” said Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “It shows the considerable concern around where we are going with evidence-based recommendations.”
For decades, the CDC’s outside panel of vaccine experts — the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — set the standards for which vaccines the agency should recommend and who should get them. Even though the recommendations were guidance, not law, physicians, school systems, health insurers and others broadly adopted them. The vaccine panel, in coordination with CDC staff, conducted extensive data reviews of benefits and risks, and held exhaustive discussions during its public meetings before voting to make new vaccine recommendations or change existing ones.
But Kennedy fired all 17 members of the vaccine panel in June and replaced them with a handpicked group that included several vaccine skeptics. The Department of Health and Human Services has also disallowed several doctors groups that had long provided input from participating in the panel’s work groups, the teams that do the detailed analysis for the full committee.
Since then, the panel has made recommendations that have been strongly criticized by public health and medical experts, including voting in December to drop the long-standing recommendation that all newborns be given the hepatitis B vaccine.
Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesman, said the “claim that ACIP’s evidence-based process has collapsed is categorically false. ACIP continues to remain the nation’s advisory body for vaccine recommendations driven by gold standard science.” He added, “While outside organizations continue to conduct their own analyses and confuse the American people, those efforts do not replace or supersede the federal process that guides vaccine policy in the United States.”
The new effort comes after the acting CDC director, a top deputy to Kennedy, took the unprecedented step of reducing the number of vaccines that the United States routinely recommends for every child. Leading public health experts and medical organizations raised alarms, saying the shift, which bypassed vaccine experts at CDC and its vaccine advisory panel, could weaken protections against preventable deadly disease.
“Everything that has been done since the new ACIP has all been about ideology and not based on science,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for d Research and Policy, which established the Vaccine Integrity Project last year.
Osterholm said the new initiative is an attempt to fill “a huge black hole in public health and medical practice.”
“It is our duty as health care professionals to work across medicine, science and public health to make sure the U.S. has a transparent, evidence-based process by which vaccine recommendations are made,” said Sandra Adamson Fryhofer, an AMA trustee and the organization’s liaison to the CDC vaccine panel. “Together, we are committed to ensuring the American public has clear, evidence-based guidance that inspires confidence when making important vaccination decisions.”
The Vaccine Integrity Project published an evidence review and convened panels that looked at scientific studies on covid-19, influenza and RSV vaccines in 2025, and is conducting a review of the HPV vaccine.
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