I track my own glucose response to 47 different breakfasts. I wear a continuous monitor during sleep. I have run enough n=1 experiments to know the difference between genuine safety signal and confirmation bias dressed up as rigor. What RFK Jr. is doing with ACIP is the second thing.
On April 9, 2026, HHS published a revised ACIP charter after a federal court ruled that most of Kennedy's appointees were, in the court's own framing, "distinctly unqualified." His response to losing in court was not to appoint better-credentialed people. It was to rewrite the qualification criteria. He broadened membership to include expertise in "recovery from serious vaccine injuries" and added duties like monitoring cumulative effects of vaccine components and reviewing Denmark's slimmer childhood schedule. The January 2026 revision aligning U.S. recommendations with Denmark's was already paused by court order in March 2026, following a lawsuit from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
I want to be fair here: the instinct to audit safety data is not wrong. Every protocol I run on myself starts with the question, "What is the downside?" Vaccine safety surveillance has real gaps, and anyone who pretends post-market monitoring is perfect is not paying attention. That concession made, what Kennedy is building is not a safety audit. It is a committee stacked to produce a predetermined output.
When You Rig the Inputs, You Already Know the Output
The revised charter was shaped with direct input from Aaron Siri of the Informed Consent Action Network, a group whose entire operating thesis is that vaccines cause harm. That is not a neutral safety perspective. That is hiring a short-seller to run your equity research department and calling it "balance."
Demetre Daskalakis, who ran CDC's immunization division before resigning in August 2025, put it plainly: the new charter "has provided a platform for organizations that have historically been opponents of vaccination." He called it a chess game rather than a public health service. He is right. The charter also hands subcommittee approval authority exclusively to the HHS Secretary, which means Kennedy controls not just who sits on the committee but which working groups can even convene. That is not systems optimization. That is a single point of failure with ideological capture baked in.
The ROI on Childhood Vaccination Is Not Debatable
I run my own bloodwork quarterly. I adjust protocols based on what the numbers say, not what I want them to say. The numbers on childhood vaccination are not ambiguous. Decades of data show no autism link. Hepatitis B vaccination prevents liver cancer. The measles vaccine has one of the strongest safety profiles in the history of medicine. Aligning U.S. recommendations with Denmark's schedule is not evidence-based optimization; Denmark's epidemiological context, healthcare infrastructure, and disease burden are different variables. You cannot just copy a protocol from a different system and call it science.
The argument that the U.S. schedule is bloated deserves a real answer from real immunologists with real data. Kennedy's restructured ACIP cannot produce that answer because it was not designed to. It was designed to produce doubt.
Congress should pass legislation requiring ACIP appointments to go through Senate confirmation, removing the HHS Secretary's unilateral control. The American Academy of Pediatrics lawsuit is the right fight, but a court injunction is a patch, not a fix. The underlying architecture needs to change. You do not fix a corrupted data input by arguing with the output every 2 years when the charter renews.
I am all for questioning every protocol. I am not for appointing people who already have the answer before the experiment starts.
