A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
A committee that helps craft vaccine policy in the U.S. has become a source of controversy under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Yesterday, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices wrapped up its two-day meeting. Here's NPR's Will Stone.
WILL STONE, BYLINE: This meeting of advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was unusually high-profile, largely because of Secretary Kennedy's decision to purge the entire panel of experts just a few weeks ago - in their place, his handpicked roster of seven members, some with a history of making inaccurate claims about the safety of COVID vaccines. The chair of the committee, Martin Kulldorff - an epidemiologist who's worked on vaccines - began the meeting with a call to rebuild public trust and an announcement that a new working group would reexamine the childhood vaccine schedule.
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MARTIN KULLDORFF: The number of vaccines that our children, our - and adolescents receive today exceed what children in most other developed nations receive and what most of us in this room received when we were children.
STONE: Another group, he said, would look at vaccines that have not been subject to review in more than seven years. All of this makes Yale Professor Jason Schwartz, who studies vaccine policy, very nervous.
JASON SCHWARTZ: They're already signaling their interest in revisiting long-settled questions around vaccine safety, opening up issues that have been focal points of critics of vaccines for decades.
STONE: On the second day, a majority of the panel reaffirmed the CDC recommendations that anyone over six months get the annual flu shot. Other votes, however, focused on essentially banning flu vaccines with a mercury-containing preservative called thimerosal. Theories that chemical could cause autism have long been disproven. Even so, manufacturers voluntarily removed it from childhood vaccines years ago. It's rarely used in flu shots anymore. And yet the panel heard a presentation on alleged safety concerns from the former head of Children's Health Defense, a group that Secretary Kennedy founded. It's questioned vaccine safety and spread misinformation. Dr. Cody Meissner, a pediatrician at Dartmouth, was the only panel member to vote against the recommendations.
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CODY MEISSNER: I'm not quite sure how to respond to this presentation. This is an old issue that has been addressed.
STONE: The meeting of the group, called ACIP for short, was at times chaotic. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics decided not to attend. Dr. Jim Campbell, who's with the academy, says they thought there would be no room for real participation, and the votes on thimerosal prove that.
JIM CAMPBELL: The vote was based on a single talk, without any work group or other expert input. That is not the way that ACIP typically works, so we're just disappointed.
STONE: And the meeting has raised big questions about the future of vaccine policy for Dr. Andy Pavia, a pediatrician at the University of Utah.
ANDY PAVIA: I think hundreds of physicians, epidemiologists, pediatricians watched with some degree of horror.
STONE: Pavia points out this panel helps shape insurance coverage of vaccines, and he worries what they decide going forward could ultimately reduce access to them.
Will Stone, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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