The June 25-26 meeting of the U.S. CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) will be anything but business as usual. In wiping the slate clean just two weeks before the panel was to meet, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy made sure of that.
On the same day that FDA Commissioner Martin Makary spoke in a fireside chat during the 2025 Biotechnology Innovation Organization’s International Convention, the agency unveiled a pilot commissioner’s national priority voucher program that will enable companies to receive a shortened FDA review time of one to two months.
The realignment within the U.S. FDA continued with reports of the removal of two high level executives. When asked by BioWorld if the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research’s (CBER) Office of Therapeutic Products director and deputy director had been forced out and if so, why, an HHS spokesperson responded on background with a single sentence: “Center directors deserve to be supported by managers that are aligned with aggressive goals to expeditiously advance therapeutics for rare diseases using the gold standard of science.”
The 17 members abruptly terminated June 9 from the U.S. CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices are not going gently into the night. Instead, they’re raging against what could be the dying of the light.
After years of conversations surrounding indirect research costs, academic groups are now under the gun to quickly come up with an alternative to the NIH’s proposed 15% across-the-board cap on indirect costs and the decades-old university-by-university negotiated rate that can exceed a 50% add-on to a grant.
On the same day that FDA Commissioner Martin Makary spoke in a fireside chat during the 2025 Biotechnology Innovation Organization’s International Convention, the agency unveiled a pilot commissioner’s national priority voucher program that will enable companies to receive a shortened FDA review time of one to two months.
The 17 members abruptly terminated June 9 from the U.S. CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) are not going gently into the night. Instead, they’re raging against what could be the dying of the light. The 17 raised their collective voices in a June 16 JAMA opinion piece to decry what’s at stake with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy’s efforts, in his words, to “reestablish public confidence in vaccine science” by cleansing ACIP of what he claimed were conflicts due to members’ financial ties to industry.
Calling it “incredible news,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell reported June 16 that U.S. District Judge William Young ordered the Trump administration to restore funding for NIH research grants focusing on gender and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
The COVID-19 pandemic sent the world into a tailspin, raising ongoing concerns about biosecurity, a subject that encompassed the better part of the morning June 16, the first day of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization’s annual conference in Boston.
And then there were eight. That is, eight members of the U.S. CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP).Two days after dismissing the 17 members of the committee, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy named eight new members to the panel. Eight is the minimum required for a quorum, which will be necessary for the June 25-27 ACIP meeting.
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