\n<\/p>\n
US health officials appear to be shying away from voicing negative views of vaccines in public as November\u2019s midterm elections loom and key polling indicates anti-vaccine views are a liability.<\/p>\n
Health officials have made unprecedented changes to routine vaccine recommendations in the past year \u2013 slashing one-third of the US childhood schedule, including the recommendation for hepatitis B immunization at birth. But even before a federal judge essentially invalidated these moves, officials haven\u2019t championed their dramatic changes after Donald Trump\u2019s pollsters recommended veering away from anti-vaccine ideology ahead of the midterms.<\/p>\n
The elections seem top-of-mind for US health officials. At a conference on women\u2019s health in March sponsored by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Marty Makary, commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), referenced support from the \u201cMake America healthy again\u201d (Maha) movement in the 2024 election.<\/p>\n
\u201cMoms showed up to vote for the Maha agenda,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
At the conservative CPAC conference at the end of March, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the HHS secretary and longtime vaccine opponent, didn\u2019t explicitly mention immunizations once in his 30-minute \u201cfireside chat\u201d with Mercedes Schlapp, one of the organizers of the conference. When Schlapp asked Kennedy what advice he would give to \u201cMaha moms\u201d or \u201cMaha parents,\u201d Kennedy didn\u2019t default to his two decades of rhetoric about toxic exposures and vaccines. Instead, he said: \u201cThe biggest threats that we\u2019re facing now are cell phones and social media.\u201d<\/p>\n
When asked about his successes in the past year and priorities moving forward, Kennedy talked about bringing back the food pyramid and flipping it, and removing nine synthetic food dyes. Though updating baby formula is a stated priority, health agencies have made little progress on it.<\/p>\n
The administration hasn\u2019t gotten to the \u201croot cause\u201d of health issues, said Katelyn Jetelina, founder of Your Local Epidemiologist; instead, they\u2019ve been \u201cheadline wins\u201d, she said. The health secretary\u2019s Maha loyalists were also thrown into tumult earlier this year when Trump signed an executive order on glyphosate, an herbicide sold as Roundup that the Maha movement opposes.<\/p>\n
Among the Maha grassroots, vaccines aren\u2019t as big a concern as environmental and nutritional issues, Jetelina said.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously it\u2019s something that\u2019s really personal to RFK, who\u2019s built a career and history around that,\u201d she said. Yet for the average Maha voter, \u201cit sure seems like they\u2019re moving away\u201d from opposition to vaccines, she added.<\/p>\n
Among voters surveyed in the 35 most competitive congressional districts, there was \u201cstrong bipartisan support for routine childhood vaccines\u201d, Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward wrote in December \u2013 and that holds across the Maha movement, they found, with most Maha voters rejecting changes to childhood immunizations. These \u201chigh levels of trust in vaccines\u201d mean \u201cskepticism toward vaccine requirements is politically risky for both parties\u201d, they concluded.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy perception is absolutely that messaging has gone out to downplay anti-vaccine messaging,\u201d said Elizabeth Jacobs, an epidemiology professor at the University of Arizona and a founding member of Defend Public Health. \u201cIt seems like somebody has advised him to stop doing anti-vaccine stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Kennedy did make quiet references to his long-held anti-vaccine ideologies. He \u201chad been watching this deterioration in the health of our children, the rise of chronic disease, since 2005\u201d, he said. That\u2019s the year Kennedy penned an explosive article for Rolling Stone and Salon \u2013 later retracted by Salon \u2013 claiming vaccines cause autism.<\/p>\n
The reference is \u201ca major glaring sign that he is talking about vaccines, for sure\u201d, said Jacobs. Kennedy has blamed higher recognized rates of autism \u2013 widely believed to be the result of improvements in diagnoses \u2013 upon vaccines, despite dozens of studies finding no link.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never knew anybody with autism,\u201d Kennedy said at CPAC. \u201cSuddenly they\u2019re everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
He did not mention the changes in how autistic people receive support, with a greater emphasis on providing care within the community instead of institutionalizing them out of sight, as was common during Kennedy\u2019s childhood.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd when I started talking about it, I got censored. And I prayed every day for 19 years that God would put me in a position to change this,\u201d he said. Under Kennedy, the US ended full recommendations on shots to protect against the flu, rotavirus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and others.<\/p>\n
Kennedy in the past year \u201cwas a bull in the china shop. They just broke everything,\u201d Jacobs said.<\/p>\n
Jay Bhattacharya, head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), only mentioned shots once at CPAC \u2013 to highlight the potential for shingles vaccination to protect against developing Alzheimer\u2019s disease.<\/p>\n
\u201cResearchers are investigating whether a shingles vaccine, a vaccine that I took a while ago, might actually reduce the risk of Alzheimer\u2019s disease,\u201d he said. But he also repeatedly echoed Kennedy\u2019s rhetoric on \u201cchronic disease\u201d, a phrase Kennedy frequently uses to refer to autism. \u201cDespite all our scientific progress, I know we are in the middle of a chronic disease crisis,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Ideological allies have continued to push publicly against vaccines, with Mark Gorton, president of the Maha Institute, recently calling for an end to all immunizations in the US.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe childhood vaccination schedule needs to be eliminated. And all vaccines need to be removed from the market until they can be proven to be both safe and effective,\u201d Gorton said in March.<\/p>\n
At the same Maha Institute event, Del Bigtree, a longtime Kennedy ally and prominent anti-vaccine activist, said: \u201cWe\u2019re winning,\u201d and urged followers to \u201cbe loud and more proud than you\u2019ve ever been\u201d. Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer at Children\u2019s Health Defense, the organization led by Kennedy until recently, told NPR that anti-vaccine ideology is \u201cin the forefront\u201d and \u201con the agenda\u201d for US health officials.<\/p>\n
Even if officials have temporarily cut back on direct discussion of vaccines, misinformation continues to spread alongside measles and other preventable illnesses as vaccination levels drop, Jetelina said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are going to lose lives over this,\u201d she said. \u201cWe are going backwards on a lot of things, and we don\u2019t have time to be spinning our wheels.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US health officials appear to be shying away from voicing negative views of vaccines in public as November\u2019s midterm elections loom and key polling indicates anti-vaccine views are a liability. Health officials have made unprecedented changes to routine vaccine recommendations in the past year \u2013 slashing one-third of the US childhood schedule, including the recommendation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47932,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[794,505,13684,37,10739,2969,3488,213,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-47931","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-administration","9":"tag-ahead","10":"tag-antivaccine","11":"tag-health","12":"tag-midterms","13":"tag-officials","14":"tag-shy","15":"tag-talk","16":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/47932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}