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Senator Bernie Sanders is calling for a congressional inquiry into the mass firing of all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

The Independent from Vermont issued his demand in a letter to Bill Cassidy, Louisiana Republican colleague and chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), which confirmed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, as Health and Human Services secretary.

“Secretary Kennedy’s reckless decision to fire these nonpartisan scientific experts and replace them with ideologues with limited expertise and a history of undermining vaccines will not only endanger the lives of Americans of all ages, it directly contradicts a commitment he made to you before he was confirmed that he would not make any significant changes to this important Committee,” wrote Sanders.

Before voting to confirm Kennedy, Cassidy said in a Senate floor speech that the nominee had promised to work “within the current vaccine safety and monitoring systems.” Cassidy added that Kennedy promised that if he was confirmed, the nominee said he would “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes.”

As reported by Medscape Medical News, Kennedy fired the ACIP panel members on June 9, claiming that all had conflicts of interest.

Even Cassidy expressed alarm after the firings, stating on X, “now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion.” But Cassidy claimed that he would keep talking to Kennedy “to ensure this is not the case.”

Sanders has requested an immediate investigation into the firings and asked the Senate Committee on HELP to “conduct serious oversight into the actions Secretary Kennedy has taken to mislead the American people about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and erode public health.”

The ACIP firings drew widespread condemnation from public health advocates and medical organizations. Many of those same organizations banded together to pass an emergency resolution at the American Medical Association’s annual meeting in June that also backed a Senate investigation and called on Kennedy to reverse the firings.

Kennedy also reportedly removed most of the ACIP staff, including Melinda Wharton, MD, MPH. Wharton joined the CDC in 1986 and became director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases in December 2013. She was replaced by the director of scheduling and advance in the CDC director’s office, but there is still no acting CDC director. That new official now is under the direction of a political appointee, The Washington Post reported.

Another CDC official, Fiona Havers, MD, who oversaw COVID data collection on the Respiratory Virus Hospitalization Surveillance Network team, also resigned in the wake of the firings, as reported by Medscape Medical News.

Earlier in June, after Kennedy unilaterally changed the ACIP immunization schedule to remove guidance for COVID-19 vaccination for pregnant women and move to shared decision-making for healthy children, a top CDC leader in the COVID field, Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, MD, resigned. Panagiotakopoulos had been at the agency for almost a decade.

Speaking out publicly, the former ACIP panelists wrote in JAMA, “We are deeply concerned that these destabilizing decisions, made without clear rationale, may roll back the achievements of US immunization policy, impact people’s access to lifesaving vaccines, and ultimately put US families at risk of dangerous and preventable illnesses.”

Alicia Ault is a Saint Petersburg, Florida-based freelance journalist whose work has appeared in many health and science publications, including Smithsonian.com. You can find her on X @aliciaault and on Bluesky @aliciaault.bsky.social.