What to Know About This Week’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (CDC) Meeting

A new blog series

This is my introduction of a new blog series. The blog series will first cover the three major vaccine decisions made by the committee during their meeting that spanned Thursday, September 18 and Friday, September 19. Then, I will cover how we assess vaccine safety, because a primary strategy of those who want to scare the public into not getting vaccines misrepresents and abuses the data in purposeful ways that sound alarming until you understand how they are manipulating and misrepresenting this data. I will also cover as the final part of this blog series, the private sector response (including some states in private-public partnerships) to counter what appears to be an attempt to undermine decades of vaccine science and the resulting fears, including on the part of the recently fired CDC director that she expressed in her Senate hearing testimony last week (a fear I share), that the end game here is to modify the childhood vaccine schedule in ways that will be to the detriment of childhood health. Many doctors, scientists, and states fear that our children and grandchildren will be less protected against vaccine-preventable diseases resulting in a resurgence of these diseases that most Americans who are younger than me have never seen, with the outcome of more childhood deaths, hospitalizations and complications that will be heart-breaking to parents who realize only then that they were manipulated by disinformation from supposed experts and that we will see over time as these diseases become more prevalent again.

Thus, the outline for this blog series will be:

Part I: The Measles, Mumps, Rubella and Varicella (MMRV) Vaccine

Part II: The Hepatitis B Vaccine

Part III: The COVID-19 Vaccine

Part IV:  Understanding Vaccine Safety

Part V:  The Private Sector (and States) Response

(My hope is to publish Part I tomorrow (Sunday); Part II on Monday; and Part III on Tuesday)

Then, because, as I mention above, most people younger than me have never seen cases of many of these preventable childhood illnesses and don’t understand what the risks of these diseases are, I will then begin another new blog series in which we will cover these diseases in some detail so that parents can better make an informed decision as to how to weigh the risks of vaccinating their child versus taking the chance on them getting infected.

Finally, let me explain that serious-minded physicians, vaccinologists, immunologists, and epidemiologists know how this saga will play out and what will happen because the viruses and bacteria that cause these diseases have not changed in meaningful ways that some who spread disinformation would have you believe – specifically, their claims that the viruses have become less virulent over time. One needs only to look critically at the past few years of measles outbreaks to realize that measles has not become “milder.”

Also remember that while we eliminated a number of these viral illnesses from the United States (e.g., measles, rubella and polio), these viruses did not go away (i.e., they were not eradicated from the world- only two viruses have been eradicated – smallpox in humans and rinderpest in animals [cattle and buffalo]). The success in eradication of these viruses was due to a global commitment to vaccination. We came close to eradicating polio, but unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, we could not get the same degree of vaccination rates in Pakistan and Afghanistan as other countries, and thus, the virus continues to circulate and cause disease and continues to spread to other countries through international travel. Though eliminated from the U.S., we have seen a resurgence of measles outbreaks due to declining vaccination rates such that the virus can now spread in under-vaccinated communities and spread to other under-vaccinated communities through domestic and international travel.

So, as I wrote above, I and others can tell you how this will play out, and those who are spreading disinformation now cannot escape the fact that, eventually, these bacteria and viruses will prove them wrong and expose them for what they are – purveyors of disinformation often for personal gain. We humans can ignore and twist science to suit our ideologies or agendas, but bacteria and viruses have no mindset, agenda, or other way to alter their behavior. They simply will take whatever opportunities are given to them to infect people, which is the only way they can reproduce. We are seeing that now play out with measles because it is the most contagious virus we know of, and therefore, it requires the highest levels of population (herd) immunity in order to keep it from circulating in unvaccinated communities. Other outbreaks are coming, but they have not occurred yet, as they are less contagious, and therefore, vaccination rates don’t have to be quite as high in order to stop their community spread. Thus, what we cannot predict with certainty is when these other diseases will unfold and begin to cause outbreaks, hospitalizations, complications and deaths. That depends on the timeline for when parents stop vaccinating their children for those diseases and how many parents choose to do so within communities in which children interact with each other.

My guess is that with the actions of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices – now and in the future- and with actions of states such as Florida that are removing all vaccine requirements for daycare and schools that the timeline will accelerate.