The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, will gather this week for its second regular meeting of the year, but this won’t be a typical meeting.

ATLANTA — U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s new vaccine advisory committee backed another option to protect infants against a dangerous virus — before turning to questions about fall flu vaccines and a preservative in a small fraction of them that some antivaccine groups have falsely tied to autism.

He has since fired the entire 17-member panel of outside vaccine experts that reviews data for the CDC and recommends who should get them, saying they had conflicts of interest wi