For years, members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s powerful vaccine advisory committee have provided detailed agendas for their meetings, usually weeks in advance. Those documents included descriptions of presentations and names of experts who would lead them. They also provided language for what the committee would vote on, giving the public time to prepare and submit informed comments.
Compare that with the sparse draft agenda for a major meeting this Thursday, which provides no meaningful information aside from general topics of discussion. That might seem like a minor bureaucratic oversight. Who really cares about getting an early look at a meeting agenda? In fact, it’s emblematic of the Trump administration’s anti-vaccine campaign.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), composed entirely of members handpicked by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is expected to recommend a delay in when to give the first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine. It’s currently given shortly after an infant’s birth. Because the CDC’s recommendations affect insurance coverage, that means many families would be forced to wait to protect their babies from the dangerous viral disease, which can cause lifelong health implications, or pay about $150 out of pocket.
This would represent the administration’s most disruptive change to national vaccine policies to date.
Hepatitis B is a serious disease. Babies are most likely to contract it from their mother, but they can also pick it up from family members who are unaware they carry it. Those who become infected at early ages are vulnerable to developing chronic liver disease or liver cancer later in life. The vaccine, first approved in the 1980s and recommended universally at birth in 1991, has been credited with reducing infections in children and teens by 99 percent.
Yet misinformation about the disease and the shot has grown rampant in recent years, largely thanks to anti-vaccine activists such as Kennedy. They resort to vague notions of potential harms that vaccines might cause, despite decades of studies showing they are safe. Some claim that the universal strategy is unnecessary for infants whose mothers do not test positive, ignoring evidence of other means of infection. That view also ignores the reality that many mothers — especially low-income women who struggle to access prenatal care — are not screened for the virus.
But there is little hope Kennedy and his fellow travelers will acknowledge such facts. Not when President Donald Trump pronounces from the White House podium that vaccines cause autism, contrary to dozens of studies. And not when the government’s top vaccine regulator casually uses an internal memo to announce that coronavirus vaccines have killed at least 10 children, without any data to back it up. It’s dogma, without scientific scrutiny.
This is probably why Kennedy’s appointees are not releasing much information ahead of their meeting. Or they simply don’t know what they’re doing. During their last meeting, in September — when they first attempted to delay the hepatitis B shot before ultimately tabling the issue — many seemed bewildered by simple matters of process. This week, the committee’s newly installed chair, Kirk Milhoan, told The Post’s Lena H. Sun that he plans to finish the job, though exactly how long the first dose will be delayed is “still being finalized.”
The post The CDC gears up for another anti-vaccine clown show appeared first on Washington Post.
