The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's vaccine advisory committee is set to meet for the first time since Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed the entire panel and appointed his own hand-selected members.

The extraordinary effort to create a parallel system of recommending and perhaps even providing vaccines faces major challenges.

A former leader of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense will present this week on thimerosal in flu vaccines at a meeting of the newly appointed vaccine advisers to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,