The largest medical organization in the US will help conduct a review on the safety and effectiveness of respiratory vaccines as federal health agencies and advisers end vaccine recommendations based on no new information.
“They are filling a void that the government created,” Ezekiel Emanuel, vice-provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, told journalists on Tuesday.
The US government had “abdicated” this responsibility under Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a longtime anti-vaccine critic, Emanuel said.
The American Medical Association (AMA) will partner with the Vaccine Integrity Project to review the evidence on vaccines for influenza, Covid-19 and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) for the fall.
For decades, this was the purview of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which regularly met to discuss the evidence on vaccines and make recommendations to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). States and local health departments would often build policies based on this evidence, and providers and patients depended on it for guidance.
“That system has now effectively collapsed,” the AMA said in a statement.
The ACIP will meet in late February, but the committee chair has indicated that all vaccine recommendations are in the crosshairs despite decades of evidence showing the safety and effectiveness of routine childhood immunizations.
The most recent meeting of the ACIP was plagued with misinformation and more than 60 false or misleading statements, and the committee voted to end the universal advice that all newborns receive the hepatitis B vaccine at birth. In previous meetings, the committee also voted to end recommendations for flu vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal (thiomersal) and for the MMRV (measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox) vaccine.
In January, the HHS stopped fully recommending one-third of the routine childhood vaccines, without input from the ACIP or the public. Officials have also limited the development of new and updated vaccines, with Vinay Prasad, the top US vaccines regulator, reportedly overruling scientists at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to place restrictions on Covid shots and to refuse to review a new, potentially more effective flu vaccine from Moderna.
Nearly 300 children died from the flu last year.
“With a good flu vaccine, we still lose 30,000 to 40,000 Americans a year,” Shaughnessy Naughton, president of 314 Action, an organization working to elect Democratic scientists and doctors, said at the Tuesday press conference. “Think about what happens if we have none. That is a threat when you have a health secretary that is so hostile to evidence and science.”
The Vaccine Integrity Project, which is based at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (Cidrap), released in August its review of more than 16,000 studies on flu, Covid, and RSV vaccines, finding the shots have strong safety records and are vital to protecting against illness and death. Medical organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists used this evidence to issue guidance on vaccines.
The Vaccine Integrity Project also recently reviewed the evidence behind the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine, and it is reviewing data on HPV vaccination.
“Why are they doing this?” Emanuel asked. Because the US government was “not doing a scientifically based analysis of impending infections,” he said. “It’s just that simple. This is a testament to the problems we’ve had over the last year.”
The medical organizations will meet monthly, bringing in other professional groups to set questions – such as whether there is a need for an additional dose of the RSV vaccine – and develop a framework for evaluating the evidence.
The AMA has a “duty” to make sure the American public has an evidence-based process for regularly reviewing vaccines, Sandra Adamson Fryhofer, AMA trustee, said in the statement.
