The Health Department withdrew a revised charter document for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices over an administrative error, publishing a notice of the withdrawal in the Federal Register on Tuesday. The revised charter was withdrawn for failing to follow a federal requirement on public notification.

The revised charter would have allowed Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to appoint allies who lacked relevant qualifications to advise the CDC's vaccine advisory committee. It would also have directed the panel to focus on alleged vaccine injuries and risks, and would have allowed anti-vaccine organizations to participate in developing federal vaccine policy.

The charter revision came after a series of actions by Kennedy involving the committee, known as ACIP. In June 2025, he fired all 17 experts from the panel and replaced them with unvetted and unqualified anti-vaccine allies. Subsequent ACIP meetings under Kennedy aired anti-vaccine views and misinformation, and allowed anti-vaccine activists to give unvetted presentations.

The reconstituted committee voted to remove longstanding evidence-based federal vaccine recommendations based on anti-vaccine rhetoric. Among those changes, the panel removed the universal recommendation for a hepatitis B vaccine dose at birth despite no evidence of safety concerns or benefit to delaying the dose. Subsequent modeling studies found that the change will lead to more infections, increase liver cancers, increase deaths, and increase healthcare costs by millions of dollars.

In January, Kennedy overhauled the CDC's vaccine schedule for children by reducing recommended vaccinations from 17 to 11 without involving ACIP. In March, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction to undo those changes, ruling that Kennedy likely violated federal regulations by unilaterally altering the schedule and that the new ACIP members were unqualified according to the panel's charter. The ruling nullified all votes by the new ACIP members on federal vaccine recommendations.

Kennedy attempted to circumvent the judge's ruling by altering the committee's charter to allow members without expertise in immunizations and public health. The withdrawal published Tuesday halted that revised charter pending compliance with the federal public notification requirement.