WASHINGTON — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appointed two new members to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee who have challenged broad medical consensus on vaccines and antidepressants in pregnancy.
Kennedy on Tuesday announced he is adding two obstetrician-gynecologists to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the body that recommends to the CDC who should get certain vaccines. They join 11 other members selected by Kennedy after he fired the previous panel of experts in June.
The newest appointees are Dr. Adam Urato, who specializes in maternal-fetal medicine and has practiced at Boston-area hospitals; and Dr. Kimberly Biss, who is based in St. Petersburg, Florida, and has held various leadership positions at an Orlando-area hospital.
HHS referred NBC News to a press release when asked about past instances in which the appointees appeared to spread medical misinformation.
“ACIP serves as Americans’ watchdog for vaccine safety and transparency,” Kennedy said in a statement. “Dr. Urato and Dr. Biss bring the scientific credentials, clinical experience, and integrity this committee requires.”
Biss has been a vocal skeptic of Covid vaccines. In 2023, she told the GOP-led House subcommittee on Covid vaccines that some patients in her practice had faced irregularities with their menstrual cycles after receiving the shots that were so severe she’d had to perform surgeries and hysterectomies. Biss also testified that the miscarriage rate at her practice went up each year from 2020 to 2022 and suggested the vaccines might have been responsible for some women entering early menopause.
Pediatrician and former ACIP member Paul Offit blasted Biss’ testimony in a post on Substack at the time, pushing back on her claims about Covid vaccine safety risks and her suggestion that breastfeeding was unsafe for women who have been vaccinated.
“Perhaps most outrageous was Biss’s stance on vaccinating children,” Offit wrote, referring to her claim that the death rate among children was low enough that vaccines weren’t needed. Biss falsely claimed that only 3 in 1 million children die from Covid, when the actual rate at the time was 10 in 1 million. Covid shots have also been demonstrated to reduce the severity of illness and lower the risk of hospitalization.
During a panel discussion last October on PBS’s Kentucky Educational Television, Biss advocated against what she characterized as an “instant rejection” of alternative medical ideas, like the questioning of vaccine safety and the Trump administration’s advice that pregnant women avoid taking Tylenol because of potential links to autism. (The bulk of scientific evidence suggests moderate Tylenol use is safe in pregnancy and does not show a link to autism.)
“I just think we need to be able to question these things and not be called a quack,” she said at the time.
Urato, meanwhile, has also questioned the safety of vaccines administered during pregnancy — including for flu, RSV and Covid — as well as the use of antidepressants among pregnant women. He has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to add a warning to a class of antidepressants known as serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, stating that they cause pregnancy complications and alter fetal brain development.
Robust scientific studies have not found a definitive link between antidepressant use in pregnancy and autism or birth defects. Some research have found a slightly elevated risk of miscarriage, while others have found no association.
In July, Urato participated in an FDA discussion in which nearly all the panelists bucked medical consensus on the safety of SSRIs during pregnancy.
“Never before in human history have we chemically altered developing babies like this,” Urato said during the discussion.
Biss and Urato didn’t respond to requests for comment after their appointments to ACIP.
Kennedy has said he overhauled the committee because the prior members were “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest.” (One of Kennedy’s picks, Dr. Michael Ross, withdrew his membership during a mandatory review of panelists’ financial holdings.) Many of the current advisory group members have expressed skepticism of vaccines — in particular, Covid shots.
The panel voted in September to recommend Covid shots only for people 65 and older and those with underlying health conditions, a change from prior guidance that everyone six months and older should get them. The vote came in spite of evidence that the shots protect healthy children and younger adults from severe illness.
In making their decision, the panelists discussed a number of fringe ideas that aren’t supported by scientific evidence, including claims that injuries caused by Covid vaccines aren’t well-documented and that the shots can lead to cancer or birth defects. Studies have continuously demonstrated the safety of Covid vaccines. Though they carry a very small risk of myocarditis — inflammation of the heart muscle — the risk is far higher after an infection with the virus itself.
In December, the advisory panel reversed a decadeslong recommendation that all infants be vaccinated against hepatitis B shortly after birth, recommending instead that women who test negative for hepatitis B talk to their doctors about whether to give their newborn the first dose right away.
The panel had been planning to evaluate the full childhood immunization schedule, but — in an unprecedented move — Kennedy altered the schedule last week without consulting the advisers. The new schedule has fewer universal recommendations for children, dropping the number of diseases targeted from 18 to 11. For example, the CDC now advises parents to talk to a doctor about whether their child should get the flu or Covid shots. The American Academy of Pediatrics has opposed the overhaul and encouraged people to follow its own schedule, instead.
