Washington D.C. – CNN reports today that the Trump-Kennedy HHS plans to dramatically reduce vaccine recommendations for US children in the new year: “The proposed new schedule would recommend fewer shots … The expectation is that the US schedule will be close to, if not identical to, recommendations in Denmark.”
Public Health Watch, a project of Protect Our Care, blasted the planned radical shift from long-standing, well-founded policy that will leave American children at greater risk of preventable diseases that could be deadly, all motivated by political whims and conspiracy theories, not peer-reviewed science. How do we know? In August, anti-vax HHS Secretary Kennedy disinvited half a dozen of the nation’s top medical organizations out of the workgroups for the administration’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
“The Trump-Kennedy scheme to gut the child vaccine schedule is clearly not based on any credible data or science after denying a seat at the table for the nation’s leading medical experts on the issue,” said Kayla Hancock, Director of Public Health Watch, a project of Protect Our Care. “Trump and Kennedy instead packed their advisory committee with likeminded vaccine skeptics who latch onto unfounded pseudoscience to fulfill their ideological agenda. But while the administration plays politics, millions of American children will be left far more vulnerable to preventable and dangerous diseases,like hep B. Secretary Kennedy takes every opportunity to stoke fear with unfounded claims about vaccine safety yet never bothers to show the receipts. The fact that the Trump HHS is moving ahead with this reckless retreat on vaccine recommendations without first showing any peer-reviewed research justifying it is a clear indication that such evidence does not exist.”
Among the key medical groups Kennedy shut out from the vaccine working groups in August was the American College of Physicians, which last week laid out why the expected Trump administration policy shift on the vaccine schedule makes no sense.
As The 19th reported: Dr. Jason M. Goldman, president of the American College of Physicians, said … the United States trying to replicate Denmark is like comparing apples to oranges.: “You’re looking at a population smaller than New York. You’re looking at a universal health care system where everyone has access to care. You’re looking at a different homogeneity versus [the] United States: We have more people, more diversity. We do not have universal health care. We do not have the same level of access.”
###