Health experts were shocked to see that thimerosal, a preservative that has largely been phased out of U.S. vaccines, was on the ACIP agenda.

U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this month fired the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, some of whom were barely into their appointed terms. The new panel, appointed two weeks ago, includes a number of people known to be vaccine skeptics or “anti-vaccination.”

Data for a new drug showed it can help keep babies out of the hospital with respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. Scientists of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention presented the evidence in a long series of slides to the federal vaccine panel recently remade by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F.