Several of the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired on Monday received tens of thousands of dollars from pharmaceutical companies in the past decade, according to HHS disclosure records.

Kennedy justified his decision to fire all 17 ACIP members and hire new ones by writing in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that the board “has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.”

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports conflicts of interest for ACIP members if they are relevant for specific meetings, and also indicates whether the members recused themselves from votes.

Medical associations pushed back against Kennedy’s characterization of the panel as beset with conflicts of interest. Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said in a statement that fired members were “vetted for conflicts of interest prior to appointment.”

The most recent data available from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, collated on OpenPaymentsData.cms.gov, indicate that seven members of the panel received more than $1,000 in consulting fees from vaccine manufacturers between 2017 and 2023.

Pharmaceutical companies gave more than $200,000 to ACIP members between 2017 and 2023, with five members receiving more than $5,000 from vaccine manufacturers during that time.

Dr. Lin Chen, a vaccines and tropical medicine expert at Harvard Medical School, received the most money from pharmaceutical companies of all the recently fired ACIP members, about $55,000, from 2017 to 2023. 

From 2021 to 2023, Chen received nearly $27,000 in consulting fees from Valneva USA and Valneva Austria. She was working on a COVID-19 vaccine during this time.

Dr. Edwin Jose Asturias, an epidemiologist from the University of Colorado, received the second-largest sum of the ACIP members, roughly $53,000, during the six-year period for which data is available. Asturias received more than $15,000 from Merck in 2018 and more than $23,000 combined from Merck and Pfizer the following year. 

Only one of ACIP’s most recent members, Dr. Yvonne Maldonado from Children’s Hospital at Stanford, had a conflict of interest listed on the CDC website. Maldonado worked for Pfizer’s safety monitoring division and did not vote on the approval of COVID-19, pneumonia, influenza, or RSV vaccines during her tenure. 

Maldonado received $33,500 between 2017 and 2023 from consulting work with Pfizer and Merck.

In his op-ed announcing his firing of the ACIP members on Monday, Kennedy cited a 2001 House investigation report that found four out of the eight members of a panel that approved a childhood vaccine for rotavirus in 1998 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies in competition to produce different versions of a vaccine for the illness.

The vaccine was ultimately pulled from the market in 1999 after reports about complications began attracting media attention. 

Kennedy also cited a 2009 HHS inspector general report that found that 87% of members of CDC advisory panels had “more than one type of omission” in their conflict of interest reports as of 2007. The report does not call out ACIP specifically for failure to report conflicts of interest. 

The medical community has lambasted Kennedy’s decision to dismiss existing ACIP members and appoint new ones. They cited Kennedy’s long history of anti-vaccine advocacy as evidence that he could replace the members with vaccine skeptics or anti-vaccine advocates. 

The American Medical Association on Tuesday called on Senate Health Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-LA) to open an investigation into Kennedy’s decision to shake up ACIP membership, saying the move violated the promise Kennedy made to Cassidy before his confirmation that he would not disrupt vaccine safety protocols. 

On Tuesday, Kennedy posted that he would announce new members soon, saying, “None of these individuals will be ideological anti-vaxxers.”

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Dr. Jason Goldman of the American College of Physicians introduced an emergency resolution during the AMA’s annual meeting on Tuesday to condemn Kennedy’s ACIP move and demand that Cassidy look into the matter.

“Kennedy promised he would not change ACIP,” Goldman said. “He clearly has.”