The ACIP Committee: Vaccines, the Patient’s Choices, and the Failure of Expertise for Public Health and Public Health

Kennedy’s new selections rose to prominence during the COVID-19 PAIN when they criticized government policies such as school closings and lock downs. The National Vaccine Information Center is an advocacy group that warns against vaccine risks, and one of its members has served on the board.

The members of ACIP meet at least three times a year to sift through the scientific data on vaccines and determine which ones are recommended for different age groups. If the CDC approves ACIP’s recommendations, that can lead to a vaccine becoming part of the official immunization schedule for children and adults.

“This is a disaster for public health,” says Adam Ratner, a paediatric infectious diseases physician in New York City. It has the potential to set us back a long time. The HHS did not respond to the request before it was published.

Even those who can pay for vaccines out of pocket might not be able to because overall demand for the shots will decrease. That, in turn, could lead some pharmacies to stop stocking them.

There were no conflicts of interest when reviewing previous ACIP members, according to Offit. “Now, the conflict of interest is real because these folks are indebted to RFK Jr, who just gave them this position,” he says.

Researchers are also concerned about the loss of expertise. The committee’s new lineup is “disturbing”, says Nancy Bennett, a public-health specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York.

In the past, members were nominated, vetting and sent to the CDC for approval before being forwarded to the head of the HHS. Bennett says the process can take a long time. The ACIP was supposed to include people with deep expertise in the area. “That’s what we have lost.”

COVID-19 Vaccines are Important for Children’s Health: Comment on a Psychiatrist and Neuroscientist About the Great Barrington Declaration

At the US National Institute of Health, he was a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist. His recent papers1 have focused on the connection between nutrition and various disorders, including mental-health conditions, and his LinkedIn profile states that twenty-first-century diets are contributing to “inadequate brain nutrients and are likely contributing to the high burden of mental illnesses worldwide”. He did not find anything about vaccine or infectious disease in the database of biomedical papers. He did not respond to a request for comment.

A senior scientist at the Brownstone Institute in Connecticut, Kulldorff is interested in libertarians and is against the policies instituted by public officials during the COVID-19 Pandemic. The Great Barrington Declaration was written by the current head of the US National Institutes of Health along with other people, and called for against COVID-19 lockdowns except for vulnerable populations.

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. One2 was the only one that expressed concerns about the effects of the COVID-19 vaccines. Levi said on social-media platform X that the evidence is mounting that MRNA vaccines cause serious harm and death to young people. We have to stop giving them immediately!” Levi did not reply to the 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.

It’s less likely a medical provider will keep stock of a vaccine if it’s labeled as so. Most doctors and medical professionals in the U.S. participate in the vaccine program, and are obligated to keep the recommended immunizations 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 understand what the proper thing to do is in a ten-minute office visit? O’Leary says so.

It makes it more difficult to talk to families in a clear and direct manner, says O’Leary, also a professor of medicine.

Reply to the Conference on Vaccines for Children (Volatile Diseases), edited by Dr. Walter Orenstein, MD, J.D. Kennedy Jr

The Vaccines for Children program was launched in the wake of a huge outbreak of measles in 1989 to 1991 that resulted in tens of thousands of cases and over 120 deaths. Many of the kids who got sick had not been vaccinated 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 group will review the current vaccine schedule and demand definitive safety and efficacy data for new vaccine recommendations, according to the statement.

“Imagine if you took all the air traffic controllers in the U.S. and just fired them and you replaced them with people that not only didn’t really know how to be air traffic controllers, but several of them didn’t even believe in flying,” he says.

Walter Orenstein was the CDC’s Director of the U.S. immunization program from 1988 to 2004, and is now a professor of infectious diseases at the school of medicine. “I have spent a career of more than 50 years in vaccinology, and I have never seen the names of most of those people.”

The panel of 17 members were dismissed on Monday by the Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. Two days later, he announced the names of eight of the people he has chosen to replace them.

Some immunization and infectious disease specialists worry that the newly constituted committee is skeptical of vaccines and could vote to downgrade the importance of some shots, and ultimately make it more difficult for families to get them.