920 - Changes to the CDC's Vaccine Advisory Committee
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.8 • 620 Ratings
🗓️ 17 July 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
About this episode:
The recent dismissal of all members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has stirred questions about vaccine safety and immunization protocols. In this episode: Dr. Grace Lee—a former ACIP chair—shares insights on the committee's crucial role in recommending vaccines uses, the importance of transparent decision-making, and dangers of abandoning strong processes.
Guest:
Dr. Grace Lee, MPH, is the Chief Quality Officer and the Christopher G. Dawes Endowed Director of Quality at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, and Associate Dean for Maternal and Child Health (Quality and Safety) and Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine. She previously served as the Chair of ACIP.
Host:
Dr. Josh Sharfstein is vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a faculty member in health policy, a pediatrician, and former secretary of Maryland’s Health Department.
Show links and related content:
-
Former chairs of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on the panel’s role—STAT
-
Who Decides Which Vaccines Americans Should Get and When?—Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Transcript information:
Looking for episode transcripts? Open our podcast on the Apple Podcasts app (desktop or mobile) or the Spotify mobile app to access an auto-generated transcript of any episode. Closed captioning is also available for every episode on our YouTube channel.
Contact us:
Have a question about something you heard? Looking for a transcript? Want to suggest a topic or guest? Contact us via email or visit our website.
Follow us:
-
Here's our RSS feed
Note: These podcasts are a conversation between the participants, and do not represent the position of Johns Hopkins University.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:05.9 | where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges. |
| 0:16.3 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:23.8 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:30.6 | It's Lindsay Smith Rogers. |
| 0:32.8 | Today, the advisory committee on immunization practices. |
| 0:36.6 | That's the committee at the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention in the news lately. |
| 0:41.3 | Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired all the members, and the new committee voted quickly to take a vaccine formulation off the market. |
| 0:49.3 | Dr. Grace Lee is a pediatric infectious disease specialist who served on the committee from 2016 to |
| 0:55.3 | 2023, including serving as chair during the pandemic. She joins Dr. Josh Starfstein to talk about |
| 1:02.5 | what's changed with the committee and the potential implications for public health. Let's listen. |
| 1:08.1 | Dr. Grace Lee, it's great to see you. Thank you for joining me on Public Health on call. |
| 1:11.6 | Thanks so much for having me, Josh. |
| 1:13.6 | So I wonder if I might ask you to start by introducing yourself to our audience. |
| 1:18.6 | I know that you are a pediatrician and an infectious disease physician, but tell me a little bit more about your career. |
| 1:25.6 | I am trained as a pediatric infectious diseases physician. |
| 1:29.3 | I actually worked in many years in a variety of vaccine safety surveillance systems in the past, |
| 1:36.3 | particularly with CDC and FDA. |
| 1:39.4 | I had the unique opportunity to help support some of the efforts we did around both H1N1 vaccine safety |
| 1:46.4 | surveillance as well as COVID vaccine safety surveillance over the past decade. And I've had |
| 1:51.8 | the privilege of serving the U.S. Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices from 2016 to |
| 1:58.4 | 2023. That is a lot of work about vaccines focused on vaccine safety. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.