Robert Malone, vice chair of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, resigned Tuesday citing 'drama' from a internal miscommunication with an HHS spokesperson. Malone confirmed the decision to CQ Roll Call. He is a former mRNA researcher who became a prominent anti-vaccine activist and was personally installed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after Kennedy fired all 17 original ACIP experts last June.
The resignation follows a federal judge's ruling last week that temporarily blocked Kennedy's ACIP appointments, including Malone, and stayed the panel's changes to federal vaccine guidance and the childhood vaccine schedule. The judge found the moves were likely illegal. Days later, Malone publicly claimed on social media that HHS had disbanded ACIP entirely and would reconstitute it without appealing the ruling, then walked back the claim, calling it a miscommunication and saying disbanding was one 'option being considered.'
The full Ars Technica piece is worth reading for the sequence of events that led from the judge's block to Malone's social media post to his resignation in under a week, and for what it reveals about the internal coherence, or lack of it, inside Kennedy's operation at HHS. The question of whether ACIP survives in any legally recognized form is still open.
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