By Mariam Sunny and Michael Erman
Dec 1 (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Monday named pediatric cardiologist Kirk Milhoan as chair of the panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine policy.
Milhoan succeeds Martin Kulldorff, who had taken the reins in June and is leaving the committee to take a position at HHS. Kulldorff has been named chief science officer at the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, which provides policy advice to the Secretary, the agency said.
Milhoan said in an interview that the change in leadership does not signal a new direction for the committee.
“Dr. Kulldorff got a very nice position of leadership in HHS, and I think we’re going to continue on the same sort of direction he was going on. I don’t see significant changes at all,” he said.
Health Secretary and vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr has been moving rapidly to rewrite U.S. vaccination policy, including dropping recommendations for COVID shots for pregnant women and children, directing states on limits to their vaccine mandates and cutting funding for mRNA-based vaccine research.
A top Food and Drug Administration official last week linked the deaths of at least 10 children to COVID vaccines and said the agency would overhaul its process for approving vaccines moving forward.
Milhoan said the committee has yet to discuss the issues raised by that memo and has not been tasked with considering it yet.
According to the draft agenda posted on the agency’s website on Monday, the panel is set to discuss hepatitis B shots on Thursday and could vote on policies concerning the shots.
Earlier in September, the panel had abandoned a vote that would have delayed the first hepatitis B vaccine dose for newborns.
Kennedy appointed Milhoan to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) earlier this year after he fired all its members and replaced them with his own nominees. Milhoan had reportedly backed the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin – both unproven treatments for COVID-19 – to treat the illness during the pandemic.
(Reporting by Mariam Sunny in Bengaluru and Michael Erman in New York; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli, Maju Samuel and Lincoln Feast.)
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