6 days ago
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The Trump administration will slash routine vaccine recommendations during childhood from 17 to 11 jabs – the biggest change to vaccines yet under the purview of longtime vaccine critic Robert F Kennedy Jr.
The changes, which US health officials announced on Monday afternoon and are effective immediately, will erode trust and reduce access to vaccines while allowing infectious diseases to spread, experts said.
“The goal of this administration is to basically make vaccines optional,” said Paul Offit, an infectious diseases physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a former member of the advisory committee on vaccines for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). “And we’re paying the price.”
The changes are a “systematic attempt” by health officials “to erode public confidence in childhood vaccines”, said Peter Hotez, dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
“Their longer range goal is to make vaccines unavailable by making impossible demands on the vaccine producers,” like breaking up the components of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) into separate shots or casting doubt on the safe and effective components, like aluminum adjuvants, in other childhood immunizations, Hotez said.
Some of the previously recommended vaccines will now only be available for “high-risk” individuals, while others are to be designated as “shared clinical decision-making,” which are usually only available with a doctor’s recommendation.
The jabs to prevent influenza, rotavirus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and other vaccines are no longer fully recommended.
The revised vaccine schedule will look similar to that of Denmark’s, though there are a few differences.
“Because this is coming from HHS, the public, who is only so hooked into this, will say that ‘maybe these aren’t such a big deal. I can reasonably choose not to get a vaccine, and it’s burdensome to get a vaccine, so great,’” Offit said. “Now we’ll just see this continue to worsen.”
The US is on the cusp of losing its measles elimination status amid the biggest outbreak in three decades. There have been more tetanus cases in the past year than more than in a decade, and more pertussis deaths than the US has seen in years.
Nearly 300 children died from the flu last year, and several more have died this flu season.
The fact that Kennedy is changing the recommendation for the flu vaccine “in the midst of a very bad flu season tells you who he is, which is someone who is so virulently anti-vaccine that he’s willing to ignore all the harm that is occurring around him”, Offit said.
Donald Trump in December ordered changes to the immunization schedule to be more like peer countries. Trump directed Kennedy and the CDC to “review best practices from peer, developed countries for core childhood vaccination recommendations – vaccines recommended for all children — and the scientific evidence that informs those best practices, and, if they determine that those best practices are superior to current domestic recommendations, update the United States core childhood vaccine schedule to align with such scientific evidence and best practices from peer, developed countries while preserving access to vaccines currently available to Americans”.
