Expert panel chosen by RFK Jr. will investigate the vaccine schedule for children

In the first meeting with a completely new schedule, a federal panel revealed that helps to make vaccine policy in the US, his plans to investigate the safety of the vaccine of children and other priorities that are a reflection of the long-term care of health and human services Robert F Kennedy Jr.

The advisory committee for immunization practices, or ACIP, started his two -day meeting on Wednesday morning at the headquarters for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The Independent Experts Committee, which offers recommendations to the CDC on the vaccine schedule and the Nation’s immunization policy, has recently become a flash point.

Earlier this month, Kennedy All 17 members started of the existing panel, which was appointed by President Joe Biden, and replaced it with a smaller selection of his own selection, including several who have sometimes received a supporter promoting misleading and inaccurate information about COVID-19-vaccines.

New working group will investigate the vaccine schedule for children

The meeting started with Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist formerly at the Harvard Medical School who now serves as the ACIP chairman, who called for the need to “rebuild public trust” in federal health institutions in the aftermath of the pandemic and what he called the “inflated promises”.

In that spirit, he said that ACIP would set up a new working group to study and evaluate the cumulative effects of the recommended vaccine schedule, including the “interaction effects between different vaccines, the total number of vaccines, cumulative quantities of vaccine ingredients and the relative timing of different vaccines.”

“The number of vaccines that our children and adolescents receive today exceeds what children receive in most other developed countries and what most of us received in this room when we were children,” said Kulldorff.

Older vaccines will get a different look

Another new working group will look specifically at “vaccines that are not subject to assessment in more than seven years,” he said. Topics they will take over are the universal recommendation to administer the Hepatitis B shot on the birthday; How children are immunized against measles, mumps, rubella and varicella or chickenpox; As well as the timing of the measles vaccine to resolve religious objections from some parents.

These new areas of attention already make some who nervous studying vaccines about the future direction of ACIP.

“They identify the interest in re -visiting long -sided questions about the safety of vaccine, opening issues that have been central to critics of vaccines for decades and giving the legitimacy associated with this previously respected government advice committee,” says ” Jason SchwartzAssociate teacher at the Yale School of Public Health.

Kennedy’s unprecedented decision to purify Acip quit his claims that conflicts of interest have affected the committee, Although NPR has found The fact that a government report often quotes Kennedy to make his case do not support this.

Together with Kulldorff, Dr. Robert Malone – another ACIP member chosen by Kennedy – both paid to serve as expert witnesses in lawsuits against the vaccine maker Merck. Both said they had no conflicts of interest on the topics that were discussed during Wednesday’s meeting.

Malone said that he had undergone “three months of screening and training” and that any conflicts of interest “are missing” were explained by the Ministry of Health and Human Services and CDC.

The comment suggests that Kennedy’s efforts to revise Acip may have been in the making for a while, although it was only two weeks ago that the members of the new committee were actually appointed.

Much of the first morning of the meeting was devoted to information from CDC scientists about the data on COVID and vaccines against the disease. Part of the presentation seemed to be challenging the recent decision of Kennedy and the Trump administration directly To delete the recommendation To vaccinate healthy children and pregnant women.

One slide that summarizes epidemiology indicated that most children younger than 2 years who were admitted to the hospital had no underlying medical conditions and that the results in children “can be serious, with 1 in 4 recorded IC.” The data also underline the risk for children under 6 months that “rely on the transfer of maternal antibodies” because there are no approved recordings.