by Zachary Stieber
The vaccine advisory committee remade by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to look at multiple other vaccines, after it voted to advise officials to stop recommending influenza shots that contain mercury.
Martin Kulldorff, the new chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), said on June 26 that one proposal is to tell the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to make clear that young children should not receive the measles, mumps, rubella, varicella (MMRV) combination immunization.
Instead, the CDC would recommend that children under the age of 47 months receive two separate vaccines: the measles, mumps, rubella shot, and the varicella, or chickenpox, vaccine.
2 New Subcommittees
Kulldorff, an epidemiologist who was fired by Harvard Medical School for declining a COVID-19 vaccine, also announced two new work groups, or subcommittees.One will examine the impact of vaccines on the childhood immunization schedules.
“It is important to evaluate the cumulative effect of the recommended vaccine schedule,” Kulldorff said. “This includes interaction effects between different vaccines, the total number of vaccines, cumulative amounts of vaccine ingredients, and the relative timing of different vaccines.”
Researchers with the CDC and other institutions said in a 2022 paper that exposure to aluminum in vaccines was associated with asthma, although they said that additional investigation was required to confirm a link.
“Unless the mother is hepatitis B positive, an argument could be made to delay the vaccine for this infection, which is primarily spread by sexual activity and intravenous drug use,” Kulldorff said.
Kulldorff declined in an email to The Epoch Times to say whether he'd been directed by Kennedy to look at the measles vaccines, or to reveal any other proposals the committee plans to take up at its next meeting.
The Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC’s parent agency, did not respond to a request for comment, including on whether Kennedy directed the committee to vote on vaccines containing the mercury-based preservative thimerosal.
RSV Antibody, Influenza Vaccines
During the committee’s first meeting since the replacements, it advised the CDC to add a second monoclonal antibody treatment against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) for infants.Dr. Robert Malone, a new ACIP member, told The Epoch Times that there was extensive discussion on the antibody at the subcommittee level and that one of the reasons he voted in favor was to provide another option against the virus, given how stock of the existing antibody ran low in the past.
Retsef Levi, another ACIP member, told The Epoch Times he voted against making the second antibody available to all infants because of concerns over a lack of granular data from clinical trials for both products. He would have supported letting high-risk infants receive the new antibody.
Kulldorff also voted in favor of the antibody. He participated despite being a paid witness in a legal case against Merck, which manufactures the new antibody, in January.
Dr. Joel Lexchin, a professor at the University of Toronto who has studied conflicts of interest, told The Epoch Times via email that Kulldorff “had a clear conflict and should not have voted.”
Kulldorff has not responded to requests for comment about potential conflicts of interest. He said during the meeting he did not have any conflicts related to the issues at hand.
The new advisers also voted to keep in place the CDC’s recommendation that virtually all individuals aged at least 6 months receive an influenza vaccine on an annual basis, before they advised the CDC to stop recommending thimerosal-containing flu shots.
About 5 percent of the flu shots administered in recent months contained thimerosal, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
Members who voted in favor of removing thimerosal said they wanted to cut down on controllable sources of mercury exposure. Dr. Cody Meissner, the only no vote, said he didn’t see a safety issue with the amount of mercury in influenza vaccines and that he was concerned the vote would imperil influenza vaccine access for some.
The FDA and Sanofi, an influenza vaccine manufacturer, said that the supply would be sufficient without the thimerosal-containing vaccines.
The meeting did not involve much debate or discussion on general influenza vaccination, according to Malone.
“We were presented with essentially language that was already approved and and had to make a decision about whether or not to endorse ... a universal influenza vaccine recommendation, as has been the case for decades. The decision was that this was not the time to fight on that hill about the universal influenza vaccine recommendation,” Malone told The Epoch Times.
Immune Imprinting
Malone said at the close of the meeting that he would be part of a subcommittee focused on influenza and that he anticipated considering “the long-standing issue of immune imprinting and original antigenic sin, which may or may not be a concern in the case of routine annual influenza vaccination.”Immune imprinting refers to when previous vaccinations or infections leave behind an immune memory, causing the body to produce antibodies targeting that memory, even if a new variant or vaccine is introduced.
Vaccinating people annually against influenza may be counterproductive due to imprinting, Malone told The Epoch Times.
“It might be tempting to think that vaccinating everybody with the same vaccine every year is the best strategy, but I think there is actually quite a lot of evidence that suggests that that might not be the case,” Levi said.
Levi also said that he’s aware that some people want the remade panel to make radical changes, while others have expressed concern that that the panel will do just that.
“I think that the fact that we are not rushing to make fast decisions on radical changes should hopefully give people some indication that we are going to be very, very thoughtful and thorough in first understanding why people make decisions the way they are now before we are going to recommend changes,” he said.
‘A Welcome Change’
Barbara Loe Fisher, cofounder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, and a former vaccine adviser to the government, told The Epoch Times in an email that historically, most of the ACIP work groups have focused on promoting vaccination rather than examining vaccine safety or effectiveness.“From a consumer perspective, it is a welcome change to see ACIP form work groups to tackle topics that are of concern to increasingly well-educated Americans paying more attention to the impact of vaccine policies on health outcomes,” she said.
Pebsworth is a volunteer director for the center. Fisher said Pebsworth won’t speak to media outlets during her time on the panel.
Some other organizations criticized ACIP’s focus on the childhood schedule and thimerosal.
“Re-examining the childhood vaccine schedule and the use of thimerosal are both politically motivated actions that are not based on science,” Dr. Tina Tan, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said in a statement. “Raising questions without adequate data casts doubt on vaccination, which can further drive down confidence in vaccines. More than any other medications, vaccines are extensively and constantly reviewed and evaluated.”
Kulldorff said during the meeting that Kennedy had given the committee “a clear mandate to use evidence-based medicine for making vaccine recommendations.”
“Vaccines are not all good or bad. If you think that all vaccines are safe and effective and want them all, or if you think that all vaccines are dangerous and don’t want any of them, then you don’t have much use for us—you already know what you want,” he said.
“But if you wish to know which vaccines are suitable for you and your children and at what ages, then we will provide you with evidence-based recommendations.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/whats-next-for-cdcs-remade-vaccine-advisory-committee-5879188
