WASHINGTON — The Department of Health and Human Services said this month that public trust in the nation’s vaccine advisory panel has been fully restored. The announcement came 16 months after Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. removed all 17 of the panel’s members in order to restore it, and a week after public trust, reached through the Center for Measured Outcomes, said it had not been consulted.
This special report, the result of nine days of reporting, most of it by telephone, examines how a panel can be restored to public confidence by being emptied of the people who held it, what a federal court thought of the method, and what became of the footnotes.
What the Record Shows
The following events are matters of public record.
- May 2025. The department’s flagship report on children’s health, a centerpiece of its “gold-standard science” effort, was found by reporters to cite at least seven studies that could not be located. A White House spokesperson attributed the errors to “formatting issues.” A corrected version later edited or replaced at least 18 citations.
- June 2025. Kennedy removed all 17 voting members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The department said the panel would no longer function as a “rubber stamp.” A department announcement of the move was titled “HHS Takes Bold Step to Restore Public Trust in Vaccines by Reconstituting ACIP.”
- March 16, 2026. The U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts stayed the appointments of 13 members Kennedy had named to the panel, finding that the replacement did not follow federal procedure. The ruling also returned the childhood immunization schedule to its May 2025 version. HHS said it expects the ruling to be overturned on appeal.
- Oct. 5, 2026. New York’s attorney general joined a lawsuit challenging the removals and seeking to restore the earlier schedule.
The Reporter takes no position on the substance of the panel’s recommendations. This report concerns only the arithmetic.
The Arithmetic of Restoration
The method, by the department’s own account, is as follows. Seventeen members are removed. Thirteen are appointed. Thirteen are stayed. The panel, according to supporters, is now restored.
“Seventeen minus seventeen is zero. Zero plus thirteen is thirteen. Thirteen minus thirteen is zero,” said Dorothy Kessler, 64, the chair of Citizens for Radical Transparency, a group formed in 2025 to support the department’s approach. “People look at that and see a panel with no members. I see a panel with no conflicts of interest. Do you know how rare that is?”
Kessler, a retired hospital billing supervisor, has attended every public discussion of the matter since the removals, which she described as “all of them, including the ones I held in my kitchen.” She said she had done her own research on the panel’s work. “I read everything the panel ever produced. Then I read what the department said about it. Then I made up my mind, and I want the record to show I did it in that order.”
Asked whether she agreed with the court’s ruling, Kessler said the court had made “a procedural error, which is when a court does something you have to follow.”
“We trust the science,” she said. “We’ve simply asked the scientists to do it from the parking lot.”
A Visit to the Panel
The Reporter visited the panel on Wednesday at 10 a.m. It was in the parking lot of a Garnet Ridge, Ind., strip mall, behind a pharmacy, where Citizens for Radical Transparency convenes what it calls the Restored Advisory Committee.
The committee consists of one folding table, 17 nameplates placed face down, and a 13-name roster taped to a cooler. A fourteenth nameplate, handwritten, reads “PUBLIC TRUST (NOT PRESENT).” There were no members in attendance. Kessler, who said she was “not a member, but a witness,” called the meeting to order at 10:04.
“The panel will now vote on the previous minutes,” Kessler said. The minutes, which she read from a legal pad, were from a meeting the panel had not held. The vote was 0 to 0, which Kessler declared “carried unanimously.” She said the result had been recorded by “a very transparent device,” which was a photograph of the parking lot.
Asked what the committee was recommending, Kessler said it recommended “nothing, thoroughly, and on the record.” A man who identified himself only as a supporter, and who was eating a sandwich, said the committee’s lack of members was its best feature. “You can’t pressure a panel that isn’t there. You can’t buy it a lunch. I looked into it,” he said. “I tried. It didn’t eat.”
At 10:41, a delivery truck pulled into the lot, and the committee adjourned to allow it to pass.
The Footnotes
No part of the story has proved harder to report than the footnotes.
The department’s 2025 report on children’s health was released as a model of what its supporters called radical transparency. It contained hundreds of footnotes, and, according to reporters who examined them, at least seven pointed to studies that could not be found. The White House said the problem was formatting. The department later issued a corrected edition in which at least 18 citations had been edited or replaced. The new footnotes, in some cases, cited articles with similar titles.
The Reporter attempted to reach Footnote 4, one of the seven. It was reached through its attorney, Dolores Vance of Vance & Pruitt, who said her client had no comment “at this time, or at any time at which it might exist.”
“My client is a footnote. It has never been in a room,” Vance said. “It has been placed at the bottom of things, where it does its work. It has not been treated with the respect that a number deserves. It would like that noted. In the footnotes.”
Asked whether Footnote 4 had ever existed in the sense that a study exists, Vance said it had existed “in the sense that someone typed it.”
A spokesman for the Society of Footnotes, a trade group that the Reporter was able to reach, said that the profession was “troubled” by the department’s response. “A footnote is a promise,” he said. “If you break it, we all feel it. Some of us feel it at the bottom of the page.”
Public Trust Declines to Be Interviewed
The Reporter also requested an interview with public trust, which the department had said was restored. Public trust, through counsel, declined.
“My client has not been consulted,” said an attorney for public trust, Gerald Penhallow, in a statement. “It has been removed, restored, and reconstituted, in that order, and it has been informed of each step by press release. It asks that the restoration be paused. It would like its previous settings returned, which it describes as ’earlier.'”
Penhallow said that public trust had not been told which 17 it was restored from, or which 13 it was restored to. “It reads the news like everyone else,” he said. “It is not feeling restored. It is feeling reconstituted, which is different. Reconstituted is what happens to orange juice.”
Kessler said she was “disappointed” by public trust’s statement and believed that it was “upset about something else.”
The Experts
Dr. Marjorie Teller, director of the Center for Measured Outcomes, said the Center had attempted to measure the restoration directly. “We took three readings of public trust, one before the removals, one after, and one after the court,” Teller said. “The first was 100.0 percent. The second was also 100.0 percent, according to the department. The third was also 100.0 percent, according to the court. We have never recorded a measurement that agreed with itself so consistently without being the same measurement. Further study is needed.”
Prof. Desmond Achterberg, who holds the Prewitt Chair in Comparative Annoyance at Ellery State University, said the department was not the first body to restore confidence by removing everyone who held it. “In 1611, a council of 17 in a Venetian republic was dissolved to restore confidence in the council,” Achterberg said. “It was reconstituted as 13, which a magistrate stayed. The scholarship records that the council was eventually replaced by a ladder, which has been in continuous operation since. I wrote the scholarship, and I stand on the ladder.”
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said the approach followed a simple principle. “You can’t have a rubber stamp if you have no stamp at all,” Brickhouse said by phone from a hardware store. “It’s just common sense. If there’s no panel to agree with anyone, no one can say it agreed.”
By the Numbers
- 17: members removed from the panel in June 2025.
- 13: members appointed to replace them.
- 13: appointments stayed by a federal court on March 16, 2026.
- At least 7: studies in the department’s 2025 children’s health report that reporters could not locate.
- At least 18: citations later edited or replaced in the corrected version.
- 1: lawsuit joined by New York on Oct. 5, 2026.
- 0: members present at the Wednesday meeting of the Restored Advisory Committee in Garnet Ridge, Ind.
- 100.0 percent: public trust, according to the department. Public trust has not been consulted.
What Comes Next
HHS has said it expects to prevail on appeal. Citizens for Radical Transparency said it would hold a rally on Saturday in the same parking lot, to celebrate what Kessler called “the most transparent panel in history, which has no members, no meetings, and no minutes.”
“You can’t hide anything from a panel that doesn’t exist,” she said. “That’s the whole idea of radical transparency. You see all of it. There isn’t any.”
Footnote 4 is expected to continue declining to comment.
Glenn Whitacre filed this report by phone from the parking lot, where he said the meeting was still in session and he could not tell who had called it to order.