The recent move to replace the US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s panel of vaccine advisors should help restore American confidence at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The candidate told the senators Wednesday.

President Donald Trump’s CDC director pick Dr. Susan Monales testified before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee amid growing warnings from lawmakers about eroding American confidence in vaccine safety under Kennedy’s HHS leadership.

The Senate hearing happened the same morning when the CDC’s newly appointed advisory committee on vaccination practices convened its first meeting in Atlanta despite calls from lawmakers, including Louisiana Republican Chairman Bill Cassidy.

“The secretary had to make decisions related to ensuring that ACIP supports restoring public trust,” Monales said when asked about the reconstructed panel.

Kennedy rejected all 17 ACIP members this month, citing conflicts of interest. Two days later, he nominated eight new members, several of whom had records criticizing the vaccine’s safety. As of Wednesday morning, one candidate, Dr. Michael Ross, had withdrawn during federal screening of members’ financial holdings.

Monares, a microbiologist and infectious disease expert who has worked for several federal health agencies over the years, said she is not familiar with the details of the shake-up, but is open to placing more people on the committee. The CDC Director can encourage experts to join ACIP, but the HHS Secretary will ultimately sign off for the appointment.

“These are not easy places to fill,” Monales said. “It takes a lot of time commitment to get you to want to be involved from some of these highly trained technical experts.”

Cassidy and several Democrat senators sought the reassurance of protecting ACIP’s integrity as CDC director from Monares.

“Part of the concern is that while the people on the panel are scientifically qualified, they have no experience in vaccination (background), Cassidy said, the responsibility lies with you.” He shared the panel on Monday, pointing out specific presentations to specific scheduled presentations about the preservative thimerosal, a particular vaccine.

Cassidy has also cultivated mRNA, a widely used Covid-19 vaccine technology that is promised early in other vaccinations and potential treatments. Some vaccine critics, including new ACIP member Dr. Robert Malone, have touted unproven theories that mRNA vaccines can cause cancer and other serious side effects.

“If you turn your back on that platform, you have a solution to the tragedy, Lyme disease, with HIV, which is the tragedy,,” Cassidy said. He pushed Monales to include ACIP panel experts with experience in mRNA and immunology.

She agreed.

“We absolutely need highly trained scientists and experts to participate,” Monales said. ACIP is “a very important part of the CDC. It’s a very important and important process.”

The candidate also said several times that “vaccines save lives.”

At other times during the hearing, Monales distanced himself from other Trump administration instructions, including large-scale layoffs at the CDC and proposals to eliminate certain programs.

Monales, who served as the CDC’s assistant director from January to March, has repeatedly said he is not familiar with the details of lead poisoning prevention efforts and layoffs that stalled anti-Tobacco education campaigns.

Monares said she was not involved in HR decision-making during the government’s efficiency-driven layoffs, but she later said she would work with CDC staff to “make sure we’re strengthening.”

While Kennedy was critical of the addition of fluoride to public water supplies, Monales was more uncommitted when Democrat Maryland Sen. Angela of Brooks was questioned about the HHS secretary’s plan to end CDC support for fluorination in state and local drinking water.

“Fluoride is an important factor in oral health,” Monales said.

Brooks also said that the public water supply in Potomac, Maryland, where Monares lives, has been fluorinated and asked Monares if it is safe.

“I think water in Potomac, Maryland is safe,” replied Monares.

Trump chose Monales to lead the agency after withdrawing his first candidate, former Florida MP Dr. Dave Weldon. In a public letter after the withdrawal, Weldon accused Cassidy and Maine Sen. Susan Collins of cratering the nomination amid concerns over the vaccine’s views.

At the first meeting of the controversial new group of vaccine advisory groups with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the committee announced a new plan to study established vaccine guidelines.

The Advisory Committee on Vaccination Practices will create a new workgroup to study the cumulative effects of childhood and adolescent vaccine schedules, the hepatitis B vaccine dose administered at birth, and the combination of measles, mumps and chicken pox vaccines.

It was the first time a new group of seven external CDC vaccine advisors have been convened since US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rejected a previous panel of 17 experts this month, claiming they had a conflict of interest. He appointed a new group of eight members two days later. They withdraw during the financial holdings screening, leaving seven people behind to review the country’s vaccine recommendations.

Public health experts were concerned about both the unprecedented layoffs of the previous committee and the background and status of some of the new advisors. Two served as expert witnesses to the vaccine in the trial, while others suggested that the Covid-19 vaccine contributed to the deaths of young people and should be removed from the market.

Kennedy, who led the anti-vaccine group’s child health defense before becoming HHS’s secretary, suggests that childhood vaccines are understudied. Pediatricians and infectious disease experts say that isn’t the case.

The American Academy of Pediatrics said Wednesday that it would no longer be participating in the ACIP meeting because “with the committee being fired, it is no longer a reliable process.”

“We don’t lend names or expertise to systems that are politicized at the expense of child health,” Dr. Sue Cresley said the organization has pledged to continue to publish vaccination schedules developed by experts developed by science that pediatricians and families across the country.

Kulldorff said the new workgroup on childhood and adolescent vaccine schedules will look at “interacting effects between different vaccines, cumulative amounts of vaccine components, and the relative timing of different vaccines.”

Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine scientist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s external vaccine advisory board, said that every time a vaccine was added to the schedule, its interaction with other vaccines was reviewed.

“We need to prove that a vaccine does not interfere with the safety or immunogenic profile of existing vaccines, and vice versa,” he told CNN on Wednesday.

Offitt said the new committee’s plan is “a purely anti-vaccine agenda that will bring it back to life with public policy.”

The second new workgroup considers vaccines that have not been reviewed for more than seven years, Kulldorff said, including whether hepatitis B vaccines should be universally recommended for newborns.

“Unless the mother has hepatitis B, we can argue that it will delay the vaccine for this infection. This infection is predominantly spread through sexual activity and intravenous drug use,” Kulldorff said.

The CDC states that “universal HEPB vaccination of all infants beginning at birth provides important safeguards and prevents infection in babies born to mothers with unspecified (hepatitis B) positive prior to birth.”

“Scientific evidence provides overwhelming support for the safety of the hepatitis B vaccine,” the agency says.

“Hepatitis B can be handed over from a parent to a baby at birth — and if that happens, the outcome can be fatal. It’s unscientific and dangerous to ignore the success of US vaccination programs.

When universal birth volume recommendations were temporarily suspended in 1999, some confusion broke out, with about 10% of hospitals halting all birth volumes regardless of infant risk, Offit wrote in the Journal of New England Medicine in 2007.

The third new workgroup will consider vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, chicken, or water cell, Kruldorf said, “The vaccine is important for combating measles at the first dose of 12 to 15 months.”

This vaccine can be used as a combination of all four or as two shots that protect against water cells that are given individually. A combination of four vaccins is given to children between the ages of 1 and 2 is a high-understandable risk of febrile attacks. Administering a water cell vaccine apart from the MMR vaccine avoids this increased risk, and the CDC notes that it is “very low for both options.”

Kulldorff said the committee could reevaluate the one-year-old vaccine recommendations and that the Working Group could consider the best timing of the vaccine and potential alternatives like those used in Japan.

The US has seen a decline in measles vaccination rates, with more than 1,200 cases reported this year since the US was eliminated in 2000. Everything was not vaccine-connected.

ACIP recommendations have historically been subject to a major shaking. They affect both vaccination insurance coverage and state insurance.