Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday named a Maui children’s physician who used unapproved drugs to treat Covid to serve on a powerful federal advisory panel on vaccine policy.

Dr. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist and pastor at Calvary Chapel South Maui, provided the livestock drug ivermectin and the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to prevent and treat the coronavirus during free house calls for Maui residents.

He and four others named Monday join the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at a fraught moment in public health. In June, Kennedy fired all 17 sitting members of the panel that makes recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about how vaccines should be used, saying that a clean sweep is necessary to restore public trust in vaccination. 

Some of the health secretary’s picks have already been contentious, however. 

ACIP member Robert Malone has been a vocal critic of Covid mRNA vaccines, blaming two deaths of unvaccinated children in the Texas measles outbreak on “medical mismanagement” without citing any evidence. He and Milhoan are among several anti-vaccine voices on the panel.

In Hawaiʻi, Milhoan’s embrace of discredited Covid treatments has made him a controversial figure. He did not require masks or social distancing at Calvary Church of South Maui during the height of the pandemic, saying the church’s mission must continue.

His use of discredited drugs during the pandemic was widely condemned by Hawaiʻi officials, including former Gov. David Ige and former Hawaiʻi Health Director Libby Char.

He and Dr. Lorrin Pang, the state’s top medical adviser for Maui County, co-founded The Pono Coalition for Informed Consent, a website that called the Covid vaccines experimental and advocated instead for the use of unproven drugs. 

The Hawaiʻi Medical Board filed a complaint against him and Pang in August 2021 that, if substantiated, could have led to the loss of their state medical licenses. The state Regulated Industries Complaints Office dropped the complaint eight months later and took no disciplinary actions against them.

More recently, Milhoan participated in a 2024 hearing hosted by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, a Republican from Georgia, on Covid-19 vaccine injuries. During the hearing he advocated against vaccinating children, alleging the Covid vaccine had triggered cardiac problems in some pediatric patients he’d seen.

Milhoan and his wife operate For Hearts and Souls, a nonprofit Christian medical ministry which provides medical care to children around the world with cardiac problems who lack access to treatment. He is a senior fellow at the Independent Medical Alliance, a group formed in March 2020 that advocates for dubious Covid treatments.

He has an active medical license in Hawai‘i, Montana, Wyoming and Texas.

Reached by email Monday, Milhoan, who traveled to Washington, D.C., for his appointment, declined to be interviewed. He cited a request made by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that all interviews be coordinated by the agency’s media team. The HHS media team did not respond to phone and email requests for comment or for an interview.

Revisiting Guidance

The newly configured panel is being convened as public trust in routine vaccines continues to decline nationally. One in six parents reported delaying or skipping at least one vaccine, other than Covid or the flu, for their children in a new KFF-Washington Post survey published Monday of more than 2,700 parents.

The next ACIP meeting is scheduled for Thursday and Friday, when the panel is expected to discuss vaccines against Covid, hepatitis B, measles, mumps, rubella and varicella, the virus that causes chickenpox. 

As with flu shots, there are new Covid formulations each fall, to account for changes in which strains are circulating. The committee has not yet voted on whether to recommend this season’s Covid shots.

In June, Kennedy’s ACIP members suggested they wanted to revisit the guidance on Hepatitis B, which can cause serious liver infections. In adults, the virus is spread through sex or through sharing needles during injection-drug use. The virus also can be passed to a baby from an infected mother, and as many as 90% of infected infants go on to have chronic infections.

A hepatitis B vaccine was first licensed in the U.S. in 1981. In 2005, the ACIP recommended a dose within 24 hours of birth for all medically stable infants who weigh at least 4.4 pounds. Infant vaccinations are stressed for women who have hepatitis B or who have not been tested for it. The infant shots are 85% to 95% effective in preventing chronic hepatitis B infections, studies have shown.

Newborn hepatitis B vaccinations are considered a success, and no recent peer-reviewed research shows any safety problems with giving kids the shots on their first day of life, said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University vaccines expert.

The government first recommended that all children get a chickenpox vaccine in 1995, leading to a dramatic drop in cases and deaths.

Chickenpox was once a common childhood annoyance, causing an itchy skin rash and fever. But the highly contagious virus can also lead to complications such as skin infections, swelling of the brain and pneumonia. Severe cases are more common among teens and adults who get it for the first time. The virus also can reactivate later in life and cause the painful illness called shingles.

The other new panel members announced on Monday, bringing the total to 12, are Dr. Catherine Stein, an epidemiologist and professor at Case Western Reserve University; Dr. Evelyn Griffin, an obstetrician-gynecologist from Louisiana; Dr. Hillary Blackburn, director of medication access and affordability at AscensionRx; and Dr. Raymond Pollak, an organ transplant surgeon with a background in immunology. 

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported in part by the Atherton Family Foundation and its coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.