The CDC’s new advisory committee today announced plans to look at the cumulative effect of all vaccines given during childhood.
Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., the committee’s new co-chair, said:
“The number of vaccines that our children and adolescents receive today exceeds what children in most other developed nations receive — and what most of us in this room received when we were children.
“In addition to studying and evaluating individual vaccines, it is important to evaluate the cumulative effect of the recommended vaccine schedule. This includes interaction effects between different vaccines, the total number of vaccines, cumulative amounts of vaccine ingredients, and relative timing of different vaccines.”
A new committee work group will look into these issues, Kulldorff said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently recommends at least 70 doses of 15 different vaccines for children and adolescents up to age 18.
Another new work group will look at vaccines that have not been subject to reviewed in more than seven years, he added. “This was supposed to be a regular practice of the ACIP, but it has not been done in a thorough and systematic way. We will change that.”
ACIP began its two-day meeting today despite a call from Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) late Monday to delay the meeting until the committee “is fully staffed with more robust and balanced representation.”
On June 11, U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named eight researchers and physicians to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory panel, two days after removing all 17 ACIP sitting members.
However, according to The New York Times, one of the new members, Dr. Michael A. Ross, a physician licensed in Virginia and a former professor of obstetrics and gynecology, withdrew from the committee.
Kennedy reconstituted the committee to “avoid conflicts of interest,” citing past members’ financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, he said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed about the change.
According to Cassidy, although the new committee members “have scientific credentials, many do not have significant experience studying microbiology, epidemiology or immunology. In particular, some lack experience studying new technologies such as mRNA vaccines, and may even have a preconceived bias against them.”
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