HHS revives task force on childhood vaccine safety

A longtime federal working group on the security of infantile vaccines is being stimulated, the Ministry of Health and Social Services announced on Thursday.

HHS said in a statement that the working group on safer infant vaccines was restored, which dissolved in 1998, “to improve the safety, quality and monitoring of vaccines administered to American children.”

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, will be president. Other members of the working group will include Susan Monarerez, director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Dr. Marty Makary, Commissioner of Food and Drug Administration, said Andrew Nixon, HHS spokesperson. Nixon said additional members will be announced in the future.

Dr. Howard Koh, professor of public health at the Harvard Th Chan School of Public Health, said: “Everyone wants childhood vaccines to be as safe as possible. But relaunch this panel must now be put in the context of recent HHS actions. ”

Many public health experts have accused the HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of continuing an aggressive anti-vaccine program as a health secretary. Since he took office in February, he reduced $ 2 billion to a program that supports vaccines for vulnerable children, has minimized the importance of measles vaccines in the middle of a record epidemic and has reduced $ 500 million in contracts for research on mRNA vaccines.

In June, Kennedy dismissed members of the Vaccination Practices Advisory Committee (ACIP) – experts in medical health and public health who make recommendations to the CDC on which should obtain certain vaccines – and replaced them with well -known skeptics of vaccines or criticisms of coated vaccines. The new chairman of the Committee, Martin Kulldorff, said that the committee would train two working groups, one to examine the infant vaccination calendar and another to reassess the vaccines that have not been examined for more than seven years.

The workinger working group working group was created in 1986 in the national vaccine vaccine law, which aimed to compensate the small number of children who have had unwanted vaccine reactions and to combat growing threats of dispute on vaccine injuries.

A trial brought in May says Kennedy violated the 1986 law by not being part of a working group dedicated to making infant vaccines safer. The trial is funded by the defense of children’s health, founded the anti-vaccin group. Mary Holland, the group’s CEO, congratulated Kennedy on Thursday for fulfilling his obligation.

“Finally, the secretary follows the law on this critical question. We are grateful,” said Holland in a press release on X.

The working group will work in close collaboration with the advisory committee on infant vaccines, which provides recommendations to the HHS secretary on how to implement a national compensation program for injuries of infant vaccines. According to HHS, groups will regularly give advice on how to improve relationships on adverse reactions and develop infant vaccines that cause less and less serious unwanted reactions.

Vaccine injuries are extremely rare and the United States has robust systems to detect undesirable effects, including the vaccine’s unwanted event reporting system, liaison of vaccine safety data and V-SAFE. Before vaccines never reach the market, clinical trials are looking for safety problems and a break if major problems arise. Then, the independent advisory committees at the FDA and the CDC evaluate the security data and issue recommendations on the vaccines to be approved and which should obtain them.

But Kennedy has repeatedly said that the federal government was not doing enough to monitor the side effects of vaccines.

“At least once a week, he offers a new zinger trying to discredit vaccines, and it is very dangerous,” said Dr. Peter Hooz, co -director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.

HOTEZ said that it is difficult to know why Kennedy would relax a working group on the safety of infant vaccines, since the current system has proven itself to use the rare adverse events.

“What is the interest now, apart from he will use it as an intimate chair to push his Maha and Anti-Vaccin agenda? This is concern,” said Hooz.

“Who will he put on this committee?” He added. “Will it be like Aipic, where he begins to stack him with anti-vaccine activists?”