The last meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in June abandoned the use of its rigorous evidence-to-recommendation framework for making vaccine policy decisions, which structures decisions around key factors, including the balance of benefits and harms, the type or quality of evidence and health economic analyses, among other elements. The meeting also included new members making inaccurate statements about both vaccine safety and efficacy and included a presentation by a well-known anti-vaccine advocate that was filled with errors.

Now, the committee is set to include even more vaccine skeptics when it meets later this week, according to published reports, including multiple anti–COVID mRNA vaccine activists. (On Monday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) confirmed five new ACIP members.)

ACIP meetings have always been treated by the press and the public as sincere efforts to present and discuss vaccine-related information in a public forum. But what happens when the exercise isn’t genuine, and is instead ideological? When it’s vaccine policy theater with the outcome already decided, instead of scientific discussion?