Party Politics Is Said to Have Played a Role in Kennedy’s Firing of Vaccine Advisers

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has promised to make decisions rooted in “gold-standard science,” fired an entire committee of vaccine advisers in part because all were appointed by a Democratic president and some had made donations to Democrats, according to a White House official and another person familiar with Mr. Kennedy’s thinking.

When he announced the firings on Monday, Mr. Kennedy cited the members’ financial ties to industry and their “immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives.” But according to the White House official and the other person, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an internal matter, Mr. Kennedy was also concerned with “political conflicts.”

The mass firing was another example of the unusually muscular — and sometimes chaotic — way that Mr. Kennedy has exercised his authority, often while setting vaccine policy. Like President Trump, Mr. Kennedy inserts himself in policy matters ordinarily left to underlings, and sometimes announces new policies on social media, with scant or no evidence to support them.

Delegates to the American Medical Association, the nation’s largest doctors group, which is holding its annual meeting in Chicago this week, adopted a resolution on Tuesday calling for Mr. Kennedy to immediately reverse his decision, and directed its leadership to ask the Senate Health Committee to investigate it.

Two public health law experts said on Tuesday that Mr. Kennedy had the authority to fire all 17 members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, or A.C.I.P., which gives guidance to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But both said that federal law required him not to act in an arbitrary manner.

“The secretary has ultimate authority, but he can’t exercise that authority arbitrarily, casually, haphazardly — he actually needs to use a deliberative process,” said one of those experts, Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. “I think he’s very vulnerable to a judicial challenge.”