Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has named eight new members to a key advisory panel that shapes which preventive health services millions of Americans can get for free.
Kennedy’s picks for the 16-member U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — which has met only once since he took office — include a pediatric oncologist, two cardiologists, a radiologist and a gastroenterologist in a shift from previous administrations who have largely appointed only general practitioners.
Instead of having three co-chairs, the task force will be chaired solely by Seth Corey, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic.
The seven other appointees are Florida pediatrician Patrick Hunter, cardiologists Ronald Karlsberg and Venkatesh Murthy, family doctor Goldie Stands-Over-Bull, gastroenterologist Louis Wilson, radiologist Dennis Wulfeck and healthcare delivery researcher Stephen Parente.
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Hunter voted to restrict children from receiving gender transition care such as puberty blockers and surgeries when he served on the Florida Board of Medicine in 2022.
The task force is one of several groups of outside advisers to the Department of Health and Human Services that Kennedy has sought to reshape. He has taken a more active approach than previous health secretaries in selecting advisers he views as likely to advance his priorities on vaccines, autism research and preventive health.
“Prevention is one of our most powerful tools for confronting chronic disease,” Kennedy said in a statement. “We are strengthening the task force to ensure it asks hard questions, follows the evidence wherever it leads, and maintains the highest standards of scientific integrity.”
Primary care doctors have generally been considered most appropriate for the task force, which plays a major role in determining how easily people can access screenings for cancer and other illnesses. The panel issues recommendations and grades them based on the level of confidence in their net health benefit.
State Medicaid expansion programs and most private insurers must cover services graded “A” or “B” without charging patients any copays or deductibles. Recommendations with these high grades include mammograms, colonoscopies, pap tests and screenings for a range of other conditions.
The announcement “raises questions” about who is on the task force, how they were vetted and how the panel will work, said Aaron Carroll, president of Academy Health, a nonpartisan group that supports evidence-based health policymaking including research by the Health and Human Services office that oversees the task force.
Five of the eight new members, Carroll noted, are specialists in fields that perform the screening tests the task force grades.
“The public should know how potential conflicts were screened and how they’ll be managed,” he said.
Last year Kennedy upended the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which issues vaccine recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That panel has been suspended since March, when a judge ruled some of Kennedy’s 13 appointees to it weren’t sufficiently qualified.
In the case of the USPSTF, members rolled off naturally over the last year and a half as their terms expired. The eight new members announced Thursday join eight existing members.
The Washington Sun previously reported the administration was considering appointing Mark Shirley, whose daughter Malia Shirley works at HHS and is involved in the appointment process.
Former vice chairs John Wong and Esa Davis, who the administration abruptly fired in May, had reapplied for their positions, but neither were among the new members named Thursday.
As vice chairs, Wong and Davis would normally have been involved in choosing new members to the group. Instead, the interviews were conducted only by staff within the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which oversees the USPSTF.
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