The medical community is bracing for attacks on, and the possible dismantling of, federal recommendations for safe, lifesaving childhood vaccinations after health secretary and fervent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abruptly fired all 17 members of a federal vaccine advisory committee Monday. Outrage has been swift after Kennedy announced the "clean sweep" of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's vaccine advisory panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). He made the announcement in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Open protest erupted at the CDC on Tuesday, with staff calling for Kennedy's resignation. Staff rallied outside CDC headquarters in Atlanta, objecting to agency firings, cuts to funding and critical programs, scientific censorship, as well as ACIP's ouster. "I am here today to tell you that the secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has shown himself to be a domestic health threat,” Anna Yousaf, an infectious disease researcher at the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said amid the rally, according to CBS News. “These attacks against scientific standards and well-established processes culminated yesterday when Secretary Kennedy announced that he is firing all of the members ... of ACIP," Yousaf continued, eliciting 'boos' from the crowd. “The wrong side of history” Meanwhile, the American Medical Association, which is currently holding its annual meeting in Chicago, passed an emergency resolution Tuesday calling for Kennedy to immediately reverse the ACIP purge and for the Senate to investigate Kennedy's decision, according to reporting by MedPage Today. Some AMA delegates expressed concern that the call for a congressional investigation was a "poison pill" that would diminish the impact of the rest of the statement and would fail to reveal any new information. But the concerns were easily quashed.
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