New members of CDC vaccine committee, ACIP, meet amid controversy : Shots

A group of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisers meet this week to discuss the vaccine policy.

Pointer Alyssa for the Images of the Washington Post / Getty

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Pointer Alyssa for the Images of the Washington Post / Getty

An influential committee that helps to develop a federal vaccine policy and recommendations for centers for Disease Control and Prevention begins a two -day meeting in Atlanta on Wednesday.

The advisory committee for vaccination practices, or ACIP, often meets in darkness, but was thrown under the spotlight two weeks ago when the health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. dismissed the 17 seated members of the panel and replaced them with a smaller selection.

The Committee meets on the objections of senators Bill Cassidy, R-La., And Patty Murray, D-Wash., President and former president of the Senatorial Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, both of which have asked that the meeting be postponed concerning the concerns about the new members of the Committee.

The Committee generally meets three times a year in public meetings to discuss and vote on how vaccines, approved by Food and Drug Administration, should be used to protect public health.

The slowdown in this week’s meeting was chaotic and controversial, according to several members of the current and former CDC staff who participated in the preparation.

He will be closely monitored by people concerned by the Directorate of Vaccination Policy under Kennedy. “It will be difficult to look away,” said Jason Schwartz, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health. “We will see a lot about what this next chapter looks like the vaccination policy looks like.”

The Ministry of Health and Social Services has not responded to the request for NPR comments on this story.

Politicization fears

The dismissal and replacement of Kennedy everyone of the advisers moves the group’s fundamental goal, explains Schwartz.

“It is an apolitical group of civil servants, volunteers from the scientific and medical community who followed their terms regardless of changes in political administration and in CDC leadership,” he said. “That we think of” members of Biden Acipi “and” members of Trump ACIP “, that this is seen – as the Supreme Court – in terms of which has a majority, is unprecedented in the history of the committee.”

The AIPI has played a key role in American vaccine policy since its training in the 1960s. At the time, new vaccines for measles and polio were recently put online, and national health leaders felt the need for a regular panel of experts to determine the best way to use these products and others to protect the public.

They therefore brought together specialists in medicine, public health and children’s health to weigh and discuss the available evidence.

Now the committee makes recommendations which, with the approval of the CDC director, become a policy. Committee members help establish the national vaccine calendar on which the courts and doctors of the states and premises count. Their votes affect the vaccines that insurers will cover and the federal government will pay for low -income children.

A break with a previous

At the end of May, Kennedy announced that he was modifying the vaccine calendar without the contribution of the ACIP – a violation of the transparent manner and consensus, the calendar was established for decades.

He ordered the CDC to delete the recommendation that pregnant children and women obtain Routine Vaccines COVID-19.

“No one of the CDC working on vaccine policy was involved in this process. No one knew that it was going to happen,” said Dr. Fiona Havers, a former senior CDC who left the agency in June. “For RFK Jr. unilaterally dictates to CDC what the recommendation of the vaccine should be shocking.”

For Havers, who managed the team who analyzed the hospital data for COVVI and RSV and previously was to present this week’s meeting, the dismissal by Kennedy of each member of the ACIPS was the last straw.

“I knew I was finished at the time,” she said. “For my own scientific and personal integrity, I did not have the impression of being able to present to this committee and to help to legitimize them.”

New members with a questioning file of vaccines

Many of the eight new members of the panel have no deep and current expertise in vaccines. Some have taken importance in recent years by disseminating false claims about them.

For example, Retsef Levi, professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, said on social networks that vaccines have been killing young people and should be arrested. Dr. Robert Malone, who had worked on early research on mRNA technology but who is now criticizing mRNA vaccines, suggested that ceremony vaccines could cause cancer. None of these statements are true.

Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologist and biostatistician formerly at Harvard who will serve again president of the ACIP, was paid to serve as expert witnesses against the pharmaceutical company Merck, just like Malone.

Supporters of vaccines fear that this panel will reject the vaccines and discourage their use.

“I do not feel like I can trust the information and recommendations of the ACIP now,” said Dr. Alexandra Cvijanovich, pediatrician in Albuquerque, NM, and a spokesman for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The mixed HHS messaging led by Kennedy is confusing for patients, she adds.

“People who have always trusted vaccines are now starting to guess them,” she said. “And then the people who have had fully confidence in our vaccine system now fear that it has been dismantled with the dissolution of the original ACIP committee.” Parents asked him questions about the accessibility and safety of future vaccines, she said.

Articles on the agenda of the meeting increase the flags

In the past, the public meetings of the APIP have been reassuring. The members of the Committee sit on data presentations, ask thoughtful questions and vote when asked. This tends to go well because it takes months of work behind the scenes – by committee members, CDC staff and other stakeholders – before presenting a final analysis and voting a product.

Certain subjects have been abandoned on the agenda of this week’s meeting, such as discussions on vaccines that protect against cervical cancer and pneumonia. The brutal dismissal of the previous committee prevented the related working groups – which cannot meet without active members of the ACIP – to complete their work, according to the current CDC staff, who asked for anonymity because they were not allowed to speak to the agency.

Instead, these subjects have been replaced for certain long -standing priorities for people who question the vaccines.

There is a planned vote on Thimérosal, a curator used in antigrippal vaccines. Back from the middle to the end of the 1990s, there were theories that this could be a cause of autism in children.

This statement has long been refuted. Despite this, the manufacturers voluntarily removed it from infantile vaccines.

It is rarely used today and there has not been a lot of new research for years, according to a CDC briefing published in the ACIP meeting equipment before the meeting.

However, the group will be invited to vote on a recommendation on the subject, after having examined a presentation by Lyn Redwood, authorized nurse and former president of the defense of children’s health, the anti-vaccine advocacy group that Kennedy used.

The inclusion of the MMRV vaccine (measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox, aka chicken pox) on the agenda is also surprising for vaccine experts in the vaccine integrity project, a hosted initiative at the University of Minnesota which works to protect the policy and access to vaccines.

Years ago, there was evidence that the MMRV vaccine was linked to crises during fever in some young children. The committee then approached it by recommending that young children be vaccinated separately for chickenpox – a policy that has not changed for over 15 years.

“It is possible that there are new data, but CDC experts with decades of experience have not seen it,” said a briefing of the vaccine integrity project. However, it is to discuss this meeting.