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Following up on a promise made in June, advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have established a formal working group to review the agency’s childhood vaccine schedule.
The Childhood and Adolescent Immunization Schedule Workgroup will examine the timing and order of recommended vaccines, the safety of simultaneously administering multiple shots and how the U.S. schedule compares to those in other countries.
The group, formed by members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), is also tasked with examining the safety of aluminum and other ingredients present in multiple vaccines, with a particular focus on the link between aluminum and asthma.
“When we come to terms with the full assault of the full schedule, it may be one of the most humbling moments of modern medicine,” said Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Senior Research Scientist Karl Jablonowski.
“It is hugely important to look at the schedule as a whole,” internist Dr. Meryl Nass told The Defender. Nass said:
“Some vaccines may have interactions with each other, which have been mostly ignored. Booster doses may not always improve immunity but have sometimes been tacked on when earlier immunity fails. However, understanding the risk-benefit equation for each vaccine can be difficult, given that we live in a highly vaccinated society, which has affected the ecology/endemicity of the pathogens against which we vaccinate.”
ACIP work groups review available published and unpublished scientific data on their assigned topics and present their findings at the ACIP public meetings to support discussion, deliberation and development of recommendations for the CDC.
“Although it is many years overdue, the ACIP committee to examine the childhood vaccination schedule in detail and aluminum in vaccines is an extremely welcome step to best protect U.S. children and understand any links to childhood chronic disease,” CHD Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker said.
Research scientist and author James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., said the focus on aluminum toxicity by the committee is unprecedented.
“This language marks the first formal acknowledgment by ACIP that aluminum hydroxide and aluminum phosphate, the primary adjuvants in most pediatric vaccines, may merit differentiated toxicological scrutiny,” he wrote in an article published on The Maha Report. “This change places the issue within the Workgroup’s formal priority and scope, not as a fringe or side issue.”
The groups’ discussions remain confidential until the public presentations.
ACIP members must complete conflict-of-interest disclosures. Major medical associations — including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Medical Association (AMA) — were removed from the work groups in August because of their own conflicts of interest.
Current work group members have not been publicized, though Lyons-Weiler reported that ACIP member Dr. Robert W. Malone is part of the childhood vaccine schedule work group.
ACIP target of attacks after RFK Jr. removed previous members
ACIP has become a flashpoint in national debates over public health policy since U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in June fired the 17 sitting members, citing conflicts of interest.
He replaced them with 12 new members.
Since then, the committee recommended the CDC end the universal recommendation for COVID-19 vaccines, while still making them available to anyone who wants them.
The new committee also stopped recommending thimerosal-containing vaccines for children; recommended that toddlers receive separate immunizations for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) and for chickenpox (varicella); and began debating whether the hepatitis B vaccine should be given to all infants at birth.
At its first meeting in June, the committee also voted to recommend that all newborns receive Merck’s new monoclonal antibody shot, designed to protect against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
It was also during that first meeting that ACIP co-chair Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., first announced that the new committee would review the childhood schedule. He said:
“The number of vaccines that our children and adolescents receive today exceeds what children in most other developed nations receive — and what most of us in this room received when we were children.
“In addition to studying and evaluating individual vaccines, it is important to evaluate the cumulative effect of the recommended vaccine schedule. This includes interaction effects between different vaccines, the total number of vaccines, cumulative amounts of vaccine ingredients, and relative timing of different vaccines.”
A voter poll conducted in July by Zogby Strategies showed that nearly half of voters, and 60% of parents polled, support a review of the CDC vaccine schedule for kids.
Babies can get multiple aluminum-containing vaccines in single visit
Nass said that in the past, researchers had to test adjuvants individually. Today, they approve vaccines as single final formulations. “We would probably know more about adverse reactions if testing of each vaccine component was required,” she said.
Experts told The Defender that scientists have long expressed concerns about using aluminum as an adjuvant to enhance immune response.
Manufacturers widely use aluminum hydroxide and aluminum phosphate as adjuvants in the DTP, hepatitis B, pneumococcal conjugate and HPV vaccines.
Under the current CDC schedule, healthcare providers can give infants multiple aluminum-containing vaccines in a single visit. Exposures can exceed 1,200 micrograms.
That’s far above the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) per-dose limit for adults of 850 micrograms — a limit researchers never scaled for infants’ body weight or tested for safety in that age group, according to Lyons-Weiler.
Biologist and aluminum expert Christopher Exley, Ph.D., said his research has shown that vaccines typically contain more aluminum than the manufacturers claim, and that there is no known dose that is safe for children.
“We must stop injecting our children with any vaccine that includes an aluminium adjuvant,” he said.
Lyons-Weiler wrote that studies have produced conflicting data on the safety of aluminum adjuvants. For example, a 2023 study in Academic Pediatrics reported that aluminum exposure before age 2 modestly increased the risk of asthma.
In contrast, a 2025 study in Annals of Internal Medicine examined 1.2 million Danish children and found no connection between aluminum exposure and 50 health outcomes, including asthma, autism and autoimmune diseases.
Critics of the study — including Kennedy and CHD, which published a rebuttal — argued that the study’s lack of an unvaccinated comparison group undermined its conclusions. When Kennedy called for the paper to be retracted, the journal declined, stating that the study showed no scientific misconduct.
Historical models supporting aluminum safety have also come under scrutiny, according to Lyons-Weiler. A 2011 study in the journal Vaccines — long used to justify current vaccine safety claims — relied on oral aluminum studies in adult mice, but failed to account for infant weight, kidney immaturity or the injected route of exposure. Critics argue that these oversights render the model’s conclusions unreliable.
Additional research in Autoimmunity Reviews (2019), the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry (2009) and the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology (2018) suggests injected aluminum can persist in muscle and brain tissue, potentially contributing to neurological or autoimmune conditions.
Lyons-Weiler concluded:
“Together, these studies dismantle the assumptions behind the FDA’s old safety models. They show that aluminum from vaccines does not simply clear from the body as once claimed — and that infant exposure levels require urgent, evidence-based re-evaluation.
“It remains to be seen whether the ACIP Workgroup will reckon with or reinforce the outdated methodologies underpinning current vaccine dosing practices. But there can be no doubt the scientific and regulatory foundation of aluminum adjuvant safety in pediatric vaccines needs precisely the kind of rigorous review that the new workgroup will give it.”
Exley said that if the work group decides only to reduce the aluminum exposure in infants, there will be no impact on infant health.
“If ACIP votes to lower the aluminium content of vaccines it will produce a headline but nothing else,” he said. President Donald “Trump and Kennedy have a limited time to truly change the world. Half measures will not achieve this and the next administration will take us all back to the hopeless place we were in before.”
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Institute of Medicine raised concerns about vaccine schedule in 200
In 2001, the Institute of Medicine (IOM), since renamed the National Academy of Medicine, raised concerns that exposing susceptible children to multiple vaccines during development may cause serious injuries, and that researchers had not conducted adequate studies assessing the immunization schedule as a whole.
At that time, the schedule included fewer vaccines than it does today. The RSV, rotavirus, Haemophilus influenzae type b or Hib, flu and meningococcal vaccines had not yet been added.
After issuing its 2013 report on the schedule, the IOM again noted, “Studies designed to examine the long-term effects of the cumulative number of vaccines or other aspects of the immunization schedule have not been conducted.”
The institute commissioned Kulldorff — then a biostatistician and epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and now ACIP co-chair — to prepare a report assessing the feasibility of studying the vaccine schedule.
Based on Kulldorff’s findings, the institute recommended that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services include a study of the schedule in its recommendation process — a task ACIP is now undertaking under Kulldorff’s leadership.
Nass said most data the committee assesses has been produced by the pharmaceutical industry, “an Achilles’ heel” no one has figured out how to solve. She said:
“Manufacturers are unlikely to design testing protocols that will come up with the data to sink a favored product if there is any way possible to avoid doing so. They may control all data, whose reliability is questionable. The revolving door is another huge issue. Regulators that treat pharmaceutical products favorably may get a job with pharmaceutical companies right after retiring as regulators.
“So what data can be trusted? Until meaningful penalties are imposed for corrupt practices, and greater efforts are made to identify corrupt practices, it will be difficult to trust the data underlying all our medical products.”
Related articles in The Defender- AAP, AMA Booted From CDC Vaccine Advisory Working Groups
- Study Claiming No Link Between Aluminum in Vaccines and Autism Riddled with Flaws, Critics Say
- Calls Grow for Journal to Retract Danish Study After Corrected Data Show Link Between Aluminum in Vaccines and Autism
- CDC’s New Vaccine Advisers Vow to Study Cumulative Effect of Childhood Vaccine Schedule
