The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, whose members recommend vaccination policy to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are set to meet on Thursday and Friday to review recommendations for three childhood vaccines: those for Covid-19, hepatitis B and measles, mumps, rubella and varicella.
Indications are that they will recommend against vaccinating children until the age of four.
For more than 30 years, the CDC has advised that infants get the first of three shots of the hepatitis B vaccine at birth. In that time, the potentially fatal disease has been virtually eradicated among American children. Between 1990 and 2022, case rates plummeted 99 percent among people age 19 and younger.
Pediatricians warn that waiting until age 4 to begin vaccination opens the door to more children contracting the virus.
"Age four makes zero sense," said pediatrician Eric Ball, who practices in Orange County, California. "We recommend a universal approach to prevent those cases where a test might be incorrect or a mother might have unknowingly contracted hepatitis. It's really the best way to keep our entire population healthy."
He is also a physician and liver specialist.
He is seemingly aghast at the new direction.
He thinks that the once respected body is completely losing credibility.
Yesterday he noted that vaccinating newborns against hepatitis B had brought the number of children with liver disease from 20,000 cases annually down to around 20.
Andrew G. Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, rejected the idea that the advisory committee would rework the vaccine recommendations without sound evidence.
He said that any decision would be approved by the acting C.D.C. director, Jim O’Neill, and “be based on the latest available science.”
Mr. O’Neill was brought in after Dr. Monarez was fired. A former Silicon Valley executive, Mr. O’Neill has no medical or scientific training.
What a conundrum!
In an email, a Health and Human Services spokesman, Andrew Nixon, wrote, "ACIP exists to ensure that vaccine policy is guided by the best available evidence and open scientific deliberation. Any updates to recommendations will be made transparently with gold standard science."
Now who are you supposed to believe to provide you with "Gold standard science?" Career physicians, medical researchers and scientists or handpicked businessmen and political partisans with no training in science or medicine?
You tell me.
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