CDC vaccine advisers will review immunization schedule for children : Shots

Martin Kulldorff, chairman of the Vaccination Practices Advisory Committee, said it was time to “rebuild public confidence” in federal health establishments at a meeting Wednesday at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mike Stewart / AP

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Mike Stewart / AP

During his first meeting with a whole new list, a federal panel that helps to create vaccination policies in the United States revealed its plans to examine the security of the calendar of infantile vaccines and other priorities which reflect long-standing concerns for the Secretary of Health and Social Services Robert F Kennedy Jr.

The advisory committee for vaccination practices, or ACIP, launched its two -day meeting on Wednesday morning at the siege of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The Committee of Independent Experts, which offers recommendations to the CDC on the vaccine calendar and the country’s vaccination policy, has recently become a flash point.

Earlier this month, Kennedy Started the 17 members of the existing panel, which had been appointed by President Joe Biden, and replaced them with a smaller selection, including several who have acquired an audience to, sometimes, Promote an error and inaccurate information on COVVI-19 vaccines.

New Workgroup will examine the vaccine calendar for children

The meeting began with Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist before at the Harvard Medical School who is now the president of the AIPI, calling for the need to “rebuild the public’s confidence” in federal health establishments following the pandemic and what he called “swollen promises” concerning the vaccines and mandates of Cavid.

In this vein, he declared that the AIPI would establish a new working group to study and assess the cumulative effects of the calendar of recommended vaccines, including “interaction effects between different vaccines, the total number of vaccines, the cumulative quantities of vaccine ingredients and the relative moment of different vaccines”.

“The number of vaccines that our children and adolescents receive today exceed what children in most other developed countries receive and what most of us in this room have received when we were children,” said Kulldorff.

Older vaccines will receive another look

Another new working group will specifically examine “vaccines that have not been subject to exam for more than seven years,” he said. The subjects they will approach include the universal recommendation to administer hepatitis B drawn on the day of birth; How children are immune to measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox or chickenpox; As well as the moment of the measles vaccine to resolve religious objections among some parents.

These new areas of interest already make some that study nervous vaccines with regard to the future orientation of the ACIP.

“They point out the interest in revisiting long -term questions on vaccine safety, to open problems that have been focal point for vaccines for decades and to give them the legitimacy that comes with this advisory committee of the government previously respected,” said Jason Schwartz, an aggregated professor at the Yale School of Public Health “.

Kennedy’s unprecedented decision to serve the AIPI embodied its assertions that conflicts of interest compromised the committee, Although NPR has found That a government report Kennedy often quotes to assert his file does not support it.

With Kulldorff, Dr. Robert Malone – another member of the ACIP chosen by Kennedy – were both paid to serve as experts in litigation against the Merck vaccine manufacturer. The two said they had no conflict of interests concerning the subjects discussed at Wednesday’s meeting.

Malone said he had followed “three months of verification and training” and that any conflict of potential interest was “declared missing” by the Ministry of Health and Social Services and the CDC.

The commentary suggests that Kennedy’s efforts to revise ACIP can be in preparation for some time, even if only two weeks ago, the new members of the committee were appointed.

A large part of the first morning in the meeting was devoted to the information of CDC scientists concerning COVID data and diseases against disease. Part of the presentation seemed to directly challenge the recent decision of Kennedy and the Trump administration To delete the recommendation To vaccinate healthy children and pregnant women.

A slide summarizing the epidemiology said that most children under 2 years old who are hospitalized did not have underlying medical conditions and that the results in children can be “serious, with 1 in 4 admitted to intensive care”. The data also underlined the risk for children under 6 months which “are counting on the transfer of maternal antibodies” because there are no approved photos.