Why is the ACIP Committee so Disappointed? A Physician’s Perspective of Vaccines for Public Health Patients and OB/Gyn
An emergency-room doctor, vaccine critics and an OB/Gyn are some of the advisers picked by Robert F. Kennedy to provide advice on vaccines to the federal government.
The wording of the committee’s recommendations matters too. A routine recommendation calls for all people within a given age or risk group to get a specific vaccine, unless there is a medical reason not to. Under common clinical decision-making, a doctor and patient decide together if it makes sense to have a vaccine.
“This is a disaster for public health,” says Adam Ratner, a paediatric infectious diseases physician in New York City. It has the potential to be a problem for a long time. The HHS did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
Arthur Reingold of the University of California, Berkeley believes that without an ACIP recommendation, even people who can pay for vaccines out of pocket, will find it harder to get them. That could cause some pharmacy to stop stocking them.
Offit says several independent groups have reviewed previous ACIP members and found no conflicts of interest. RFK Jr., who just gave them this position, is indebted to these folks and the conflict of interest is real.
Researchers are worried about the loss of expertise. Nancy Bennett is a public-health specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York and she says the committee’s new lineup is disturbing.
Before being approved by the head of the HHS, members had to be nominated and then checked by staff at the US Centers for Disease Control. Bennett says that the process can take years. “The ACIP was meant to be composed of people with deep expertise in the area,” Ratner says. That is what we have lost.
On COVID-19 Lockdowns and Vaccines for Children: A Comment on a Workmanship of the US National Institute of Health
A person who once worked for the US National Institute of Health is now a psychiatrist. The links between nutrition and disorders like mental-health conditions and the high burden of mental illnesses in the world are the focus of his recent papers. A search of PubMed, a database of biomedical papers, did not turn up any papers he has authored about vaccines or infectious disease. He did not respond to the request.
Kulldorff has been a senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute in West Hartford, Connecticut and is against the policies that public officials have put into place to protect themselves against the COVID-19 Pandemic. Along with Jayanta Bhattacharya, the current head of the US National Institutes of Health, Kulldorff wrote the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, which advocated against COVID-19 lockdowns except for vulnerable populations, and drew much pushback from the medical community.
Last year, Kulldorff wrote in City Journal that he was fired from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for refusing a COVID-19 vaccine even though he already had immunity from being infected. He also wrote that “vaccines are a vital medical invention, allowing people to obtain immunity without the risk that comes from getting sick,” but suggested that trials of COVID-19 vaccines early in the pandemic were not properly designed. Kulldorff did not respond to Nature’s request for comment.
Levi is a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He has published several papers on COVID-19, including one2 expressing concerns about side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines. The evidence is mounting that MRNA vaccines cause harm, especially among young people, Levi said in a post. We have to stop giving them immediately!” Levi did not respond to a request for comment.
“Already it’s very challenging for a lot of mostly family medicine physicians in rural areas to stock vaccines because it financially is very challenging for them,” O’Leary says.
He says making it less likely that a medical provider will keep a vaccine in stock can be caused by that designation. O’Leary notes that most pediatricians and many other health care providers in the U.S. participate in the Vaccines for Children program and are required to keep routinely recommended vaccines in stock. But that’s not the case when a vaccine is recommended under shared clinical-decision making.
“What I’ve heard anecdotally from pediatricians is, what [families will] say is, well, you guys are the experts. How do you expect me to do that in a ten-minute office visit if I’m not able to figure it out? O’leskey says.
It makes it difficult to have a clear, direct conversation with families when you’re a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
The ACIP Panel Report on Measuring Children’s Immunization with Vaccines for Children, Revealed by Orenstein
He was one of the first people to help launch the Vaccines for Children program in the wake of the huge resurgence of the measles from 1989 to 1991 that led to tens of Thousands of cases and 120 deaths. Many children who got sick did not have access to vaccine because their families couldn’t afford it.
ACIP’s recommendations also determine which vaccines get covered by the Vaccines for Children program, a federally funded initiative that provides free access to low-income and underinsured children. Around half of all children in the U.S. are eligible for free vaccines from the program, says Orenstein.
The statement said that the group “will demand definitive safety and efficacy data for any new vaccine recommendations,” and that they will review the current vaccine schedule.
He says if you fired the air traffic controllers, replace them with people who weren’t good at their job, and then bring in new people who didn’t really believe in flight, you’d have a problem.
“I am very concerned,” says Dr. Walter Orenstein, who served as director of the U.S. immunization program at the CDC from 1988 to 2004 and is now professor emeritus of infectious diseases at Emory University School of Medicine. I’ve worked in vaccinology for more than 50 years but have never seen the names of most of the people.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the unprecedented step of dismissing all 17 members of the panel on Monday. Two days later he revealed the names of the eight people he has chosen to replace them.
It is thought that the new committee may vote to make it harder for families to get vaccines, and also that it may be less important for some shots than previously thought.