Tag: cdc

Vaccine panel avoids big changes to childhood immunizations, COVID shots

The panel that develops vaccine recommendations for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proposed one change to childhood immunizations but tabled a vote for another before turning their attention to the hotly debated COVID-19 vaccines.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices continued its two-day meeting Friday after voting Thursday to recommend a standalone chickenpox vaccination in toddlers to reduce their risk of febrile seizures.

A combination MMRV vaccine is available, which includes measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chickenpox) immunizations.

All of those vaccines are recommended for kids at 12 months and again between 4 and 6 years.

The panel recommended a separate MMR and chickenpox shot for children on the initial doses.

The panel on Friday decided to table a vote on delaying the first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine, which is currently recommended at birth.

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CDC panel votes to push back MMRV vaccine recommendation to 4 years old

The vaccine advisory panel for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) voted Thursday in favor of delaying the administration of the vaccine for measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chickenpox), commonly called the MMRV. 

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is scheduled to vote on three questions during Thursday’s meeting. Five of the members were appointed to the committee just this week. 

First, the panel was asked to consider whether the MMRV vaccine should not be recommended for children younger than 4. The panel voted 8-3 to approve the change, with one member abstaining.  

This vote would have meant that children who receive their vaccinations through the Vaccines For Children federal program will not be able to receive the MMRV shot until they’re 4 years old. The committee voted, however, in a follow-up motion against aligning the VFC with the recommendation, changing nothing in terms of what the program covers for the time being.

Children can normally get the MMRV vaccine beginning at 12 months of age.

ACIP members Hillary Blackburn, Cody Meissner and Joseph Hibbeln were the three members to vote no on the recommendation.

The panel decided to delay the votes on hepatitis B vaccine guidance until Friday, when they will also vote on COVID-19 vaccine guidance.

The meeting Thursday was tense, with panel members very aware of the heightened attention on their vote following the firing and resignation of top CDC officials and the growing scrutiny of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Capitol Hill. 

“We are currently experiencing heated controversies about vaccines. And a key question is, who can you trust? Here’s my advice, when there are different scientific views, only trust scientists who are willing to engage with and publicly debate the scientists with other views,” ACIP Chair Martin Kulldorff said at the start of the meeting. 

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RFK Jr’s hand-picked CDC advisory panel recommends against combo vaccine for kids 

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s overhauled vaccine panel voted on Thursday to no longer recommend a combination shot protecting against chickenpox, measles, mumps and rubella for young children. 

In an 8-3 vote, with one member abstaining, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) decided against recommending the MMRV vaccine for children under the age of 4. 

The panel, which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on which vaccines to recommend to the American public, said children younger than 4 should instead be immunized for varicella (the virus that causes chickenpox) separately from a combined shot for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR). 

Concerns over the rare risk of fever-induced seizures related to MMRV vaccines were brought up by some members of the panel. 

Committee member Dr. Cody Meissner, who voted to continue recommending the MMRV vaccine for young children, described so-called “febrile seizures” as “a very frightening experience” for parents during the ACIP meeting. 

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RFK Jr. Plans to Change Childhood Vaccine Schedule, Ousted CDC Director Says

Susan Monarez said during a Senate Health Committee hearing in Washington that Kennedy said during an Aug. 25 meeting that the childhood vaccine schedule would be changed in September.

“We got into an exchange where I had suggested I would be open to changing childhood vaccine schedules if the evidence or science were supportive, and he responded that there was no science or evidence associated with the childhood vaccine schedule,” Monarez said.

“Any potential changes to the childhood vaccine schedule will be based on the latest available science and only after the ACIP recommends it and the Acting CDC Director reviews and approves those recommendations,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC’s parent agency, told The Epoch Times in an email.

Monarez said, “The childhood vaccine schedule has been vetted and validated through science and evidence.”

Every vaccine on the schedule is important, she said.

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Rand Paul Dismantles Ex-CDC Chief in Brutal Senate Showdown

Ex-CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez testified today before the Senate HELP Committee in a desperate attempt to smear RFK Jr.’s name and build pressure for him to resign.

But things didn’t go according to plan. Senator Rand Paul wasn’t about to let that happen. After Monarez got a few softball questions from Bernie Sanders and others, Paul stepped in with the tough ones.

He started with the basics—asking if the COVID vaccines actually stop transmission.

PAUL: “Does the COVID vaccine prevent transmission?”

MONAREZ: “The COVID vaccine can reduce viral load in individuals who are—”

PAUL: “Does it prevent transmission?”

MONAREZ: “When you have reduced viral load… you will have reduced transmission.”

PAUL: “But in other words, it DOESN’T prevent transmission. You can still transmit the virus if you’ve had the vaccine.”

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Fugitive Vaccine Researcher Behind Infamous ‘No Autism Link’ Study ARRESTED for Stealing $1 Million from CDC

Breitbart News has reported that Poul Thorsen, the Danish researcher whose work has been used for two decades to dismiss any link between vaccines and autism, has finally been arrested in Germany after more than a decade as a fugitive.

Thorsen, 64, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Atlanta in 2011 on 22 counts of wire fraud and money laundering. Prosecutors allege that from 2004 to 2010, he stole more than $1 million in CDC research funds—money intended to study autism, infant disabilities, genetic disorders, and fetal alcohol syndrome. According to the indictment, Thorsen funneled funds into his own accounts using fraudulent invoices on CDC letterhead.

He has been on the HHS “Most Wanted” list for over a decade. Acting on an INTERPOL red notice, German authorities finally took him into custody in June. The Department of Justice is now working with Germany to extradite him for trial in the United States.

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The CDC Needed A Thorough Housecleaning

For 715 consecutive days — every single day — I put on full protective gear in the ICU at Houston’s United Memorial Medical Center, fighting Covid-19 on the frontlines.

I never took a day off, because when lives hang in the balance, doctors don’t get the luxury of excuses. We act. We fight. We serve.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was created to serve with that same urgency — to protect Americans from infectious disease through science, transparency, and rapid response.

But what the public got instead during the pandemic was an agency more obsessed with narratives and control than with saving lives.

During the pandemic, the CDC didn’t just make mistakes — it fundamentally betrayed its mission. It manipulated data, censored debate, and colluded with Big Tech to silence dissenting physicians. That isn’t science — that’s politics and narrative-control masquerading as public health, and it comes at a dear cost to this nation.

That’s why HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. must enact a forceful and immediate, top-to-bottom house cleaning.

Consider just a few of the documented failures.

  • The CDC released Covid-19 test kits with internally known fundamental defects, contributing to catastrophic delays in detecting the virus.
  • It shifted guidance back and forth on whether to require masks — not based on any evidence but under political pressure. This helped destroy public trust.
  • Then there’s the data manipulation — at least 25 documented statistical errors, 80 percent of them exaggerating the severity of the pandemic.
  • The agency suppressed transparency, refusing to release full vaccine injury data because the public “might misinterpret it.”
  • It colluded in censorship, training Facebook, X, and Google employees to erase posts from experienced physicians who challenged CDC orthodoxy.
  • It surveilled US citizens, buying massive location-tracking databases to monitor lockdown compliance.
  • It also buried risk data, scrubbing evidence of myocarditis risk from the vaccine and overcounting child deaths from the virus. This fueled destructive school closures and unnecessary child masking.

These are not minor missteps. They represent institutional malpractice — an agency actively choosing political control over scientific honesty.

It has cost countless lives.

Even as frontline doctors treated wave after wave of patients, the CDC insulated itself behind bureaucratic walls, doubling down on arrogance and ideology.

Instead of humbly correcting course, the agency turned inward, obsessed with power and control.

The result? Americans no longer know if they can trust the very institution designed to protect them.

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COVID-19 Is No Longer A Top 10 Cause Of Death, CDC Report Says

COVID-19 is no longer a top 10 cause of death in the United States, according to a report released on Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The overall death rate dropped to 722 per 100,000 in 2024 from 750.5 per 100,000 people in 2023, the CDC said.

“Suicide replaced COVID-19 as the 10th leading underlying cause of death,” the agency said in its report.

According to data released by the CDC, the COVID-19 death rate appeared to peak in early 2021. Other significant peaks in COVID-19 deaths were observed in mid-2021 and in early 2022, as well as in April 2020 and August 2020.

In the report released this week, the CDC said that heart disease, cancer, and unintentional injury were the leading causes of death. COVID-19 had been ranked as the third-leading cause of death in the United States in 2020, when the pandemic first emerged, federal data show.

After heart disease, cancer, and unintentional injury, the other causes of death listed in the agency’s report were stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, kidney disease, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, and suicide.

“The death rate decreased from 2023 to 2024 for all demographic groups except infants,” the CDC also wrote in the report, adding that “death rates also decreased for all race and ethnicity groups.”

A report released in May by the CDC shows that the national infant mortality rate dropped to about 5.5 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in 2024—from about 5.6 per 1,000 live births, where it had been the previous two years. Federal health data show that Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate in the country.

In late August, Mississippi’s health department said it declared a public health emergency because of rising infant mortality rates in the state. Data released by the state show that the mortality rate increased to 9.7 per 1,000 live births last year, it said in a statement at the time.

Meanwhile, the U.S. suicide rate has steadily risen, increasing by 37 percent between 2000 and 2018, according to the CDC’s data. That rate dropped slightly between 2018 and 2020 before it returned to a peak rate of around 14.2 suicides per 100,000 people in 2022, the last available data.

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Trump FDA to Present Data Linking COVID Jabs to Child Deaths at Upcoming CDC Meeting

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will present data linking COVID-19 vaccines to the deaths of dozens of children.

According to several media reports, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will meet Thursday and Friday to review and recommend several vaccines, including this fall’s updated Covid shots.

The FDA is basing its claim on data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a public database run jointly by the FDA and CDC.

The reports come after FDA Commissioner Marty Makary told CNN last week that the agency is investigating reports of healthy children dying after receiving Covid vaccines.

“We’ve been looking into the VAERS database of self-reports that there have been children that have died from the Covid vaccine,” Makary said.

“We’re going to release a report in the coming few weeks and we’re going to let people know. We’re doing an intense investigation.”

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STUNNING TESTIMONY: Political Economist and Brownstone Fellow Dr. Toby Rogers TORCHES CDC’s Autism Narrative Before U.S. Senate — Exposes “Genetic Myth,” Shredded Studies, and Hidden Data Proving Vaccines Drive the Autism Epidemic

The U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was rocked on Tuesday by jaw-dropping testimony from political economist Dr. Toby Rogers, Ph.D., M.P.P., who dismantled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) long-standing narrative on autism.

Dr. Rogers, a Brownstone Institute Fellow and leading researcher, testified that the autism epidemic in America is being fueled by toxic exposures, most notably vaccines, and not by “bad luck genetics,” as government health officials have claimed for decades.

Rogers recounted how his then-partner’s son was diagnosed with autism in 2015, prompting him to dig into the CDC’s claims. As a PhD student trained to scrutinize primary sources, he discovered the agency’s story simply didn’t add up.

Rogers explained how the CDC has leaned on three flimsy excuses for the explosion of autism cases since the 1970s: genetics, parental age, and obscure drugs like valproic acid and thalidomide. But none of these can explain the staggering reality:

Rogers:
“On July 4, 2015, my then-partner’s son was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. I was in a Ph.D. program in Political Economy at the University of Sydney where I had access to almost all current scientific and medical journals.

I wanted to better understand what was happening, so I went to the CDC’s webpage on the causes of autism.

As a Ph.D. student I was trained to focus on primary source documents, so I read all of the references in their footnotes. To my surprise, I quickly discovered that the CDC’s narrative did not add up:

  • Claims that autism is genetic don’t make sense because autism prevalence was rising too fast — there’s no such thing as a genetic epidemic.
  • Then the CDC blamed valproic acid, a treatment for epilepsy that is contraindicated in pregnancy, and thalidomide, which was never approved for use in the U.S. — so those factors could only explain a handful of cases stemming from inadvertent use.
  • Finally, the CDC pointed to advanced parental age; however, the effect sizes were modest and the increase in the proportion of older parents is insufficient to explain the surge in autism prevalence.

Rogers changed his doctoral thesis to focus on the political economy of autism, analyzing over 1,000 studies.

Rogers detailed how 22 studies claiming “vaccines don’t cause autism” are essentially worthless because not a single one used a true unvaccinated control group.

Meanwhile, over $2.3 billion has been poured into genetic research with virtually nothing to show for it.

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