STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Vaccine advisers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention meet today and tomorrow, and they're expected to question how pediatricians vaccinate children for more than a dozen diseases.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
NPR health correspondent Pien Huang is with us now to tell us more about it. Good morning.
PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: What's this meeting about?
HUANG: So this is the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. This is a panel that's been making recommendations on how vaccines should be used since 1964. And back in June, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed all the previous members, and he replaced them with members who have shown that they are not, generally speaking, all that familiar with the details of vaccine policy or how this group shapes it. At their last meeting in October, the committee's chairman said that they were rookies when they had to redo a vote. That chairman was replaced just this week, and the new chair is Dr. Kirk Milhoan. He's a pediatric cardiologist and a fellow with the Independent Medical Alliance, which is a group that still recommends people use drugs like ivermectin to treat COVID, even though studies have shown it does not work.
MARTIN: So what will be covered in this meeting?
HUANG: So a few things. First of all, the group is going to be voting on whether to drop the recommendation that hepatitis B vaccines be given to babies at birth. This is a policy that's been in effect for more than 30 years, and it's something that came up at the last meeting where some members wanted to push the vaccine back to when kids are older, and others said it would be a mistake. Now, since that meeting, independent researchers have found that delaying the hep B vaccine by even a couple of months could lead to hundreds of preventable deaths each year. That's from liver cancers and health problems that are prevented by getting this $15 vaccine. Also they're going to be discussing the overall vaccine schedule, which is who gets which vaccines and when and also what goes into vaccines.
MARTIN: What are their concerns about the vaccine schedule?
HUANG: So Milhoan, the new committee chair, told The Washington Post that they're going to be looking into whether vaccines are causing asthma, eczema and other autoimmune diseases in children. This is even though large long-term studies have found no evidence for this. Dr. Sean O'Leary, with the American Academy of Pediatrics says that every vaccine on the schedule is vetted.
SEAN O'LEARY: And it's based on the age at which a child's immune system can provide optimal protection after vaccination, balanced with the age the child is at highest risk for a disease.
HUANG: Now, Kennedy has also enraged the public health community recently by ordering changes to the CDC's website, suggesting that vaccines and specifically an ingredient containing aluminum might cause autism. This is also not supported by scientific consensus, but it's also a topic for this meeting.
MARTIN: And just for folks who might be interested, why is aluminum in vaccines?
HUANG: Yeah. So it's not the aluminum metal by itself. These are chemicals that contain aluminum, and they're used to boost the immune system to make the vaccine more effective. Now, they've been used in vaccines since the 1930s, and they're currently used in more than a dozen of them in very small amounts. But if these ingredients get banned, as some advocates have pushed for, there are no substitute vaccines without them that are ready to go. It could take years for replacements to be developed and to be made.
MARTIN: So there is a lot at stake in this meeting.
HUANG: There is. Yeah. And a lot of people in medicine, public health are going to be watching very closely. And while doctors groups and some state health departments are making their own independent vaccine recommendations now, this panel still influences what insurance covers, and with these public meetings, they have a big megaphone to shape what people hear and think about vaccines.
MARTIN: That's NPR health correspondent Pien Huang. Pien, thank you.
HUANG: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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