The Facts on the Vaccines the CDC No Longer Recommends for All Kids
Last week, U.S. health officials slashed the vaccine schedule, doing away with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that all kids get vaccines against rotavirus, meningococcal disease, influenza and hepatitis A. The CDC previously had ended universal childhood recommendations for vaccination against hepatitis B and COVID-19, as we’ve covered before.
The CDC now recommends all children receive vaccines targeting 11 diseases, down from 17 just a few months ago.
The vaccines dropped from the universal schedule are recommended under shared clinical decision-making, a sometimes-confusing designation that was previously uncommonly used. The vaccines will still be covered by insurance after a discussion with a health care provider but are no longer recommended for all.
Our SciCheck team, Jessica McDonald and Kate Yandell, wrote about the often-misleading rationales officials gave for the weakened recommendations.
For example, officials claimed in a Jan. 5 memo — amid a so-far unusually bad flu season — that flu vaccines should not be universally recommended because they had not been proven to prevent hospitalization or death in children in randomized controlled trials.
But this “ignores a large body of evidence that influenza vaccines are effective in children, including substantial protection against severe illness,” Dr. Edward Belongia, a global expert on flu vaccine effectiveness who retired from the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute in Wisconsin last year, told Jessie. He also explained that clinical trials “are not powered to detect rare outcomes such as hospitalization and death.”
In the case of rotavirus — which causes vomiting, diarrhea and fever — the memo also downplayed data showing that vaccines have steeply cut hospitalizations, formerly affecting 55,000 to 77,000 children per year. Today, “most pediatric residents at our hospital have never seen an inpatient with rotavirus dehydration,” Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told Kate.
The memo also misled on the safety of the vaccines, implying that the only way to establish vaccine safety is through a specific type of placebo-controlled randomized trial. This is an anti-vaccine trope that relies on narrowly defining placebos while also ignoring the other types of studies that can establish vaccine safety.
For more, see: “The Facts on the Vaccines the CDC No Longer Recommends for All Kids.”
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