Just before the meeting, CDC staff were apparently told that Lyn Redwood would join ACIP, and will give a presentation ostensibly about the safety of thimerosal in vaccines on Thursday. Redwood used to run a group dedicated to undermining vaccination called Children’s Health Defense; guess who founded it. On Tuesday, Reuters reported that the presentation Redwood was set to give, uploaded to the CDC website, included a reference to a study that does not, in fact, exist. As always with these incompetent weirdos, the stench of ChatGPT floats around their heads like Pig-Pen; surely the rest of Redwood’s presentation, since updated to excise the fake study, will be carefully fact-checked and not at all rife with misinterpretations, misinformation, and outright lies.
Along with examining the “cumulative effect” of the very, very well studied vaccine schedule, ACIP will apparently reevaluate hepatitis B immunization recommendations. The first dose of that vaccine is given at birth; the world collectively has four decades of experience with it, during which time it “led to sustained decline in mother-to-child transmission, chronic hepatitis B, and [hepatocellular carcinoma],” per a 2024 review by experts at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases’ Liver Diseases Branch. The available vaccines, they added, “have excellent safety profiles.”
More broadly, letting a few kooks mess with the CDC’s vaccine recommendations is going to wreak havoc. Per the agency’s own accounting, routine childhood vaccinations — meaning, basically, when we follow that schedule — likely prevented more than 500 million cases of illness among children born between 1994 and 2023 alone, along with 32 million avoided hospitalizations and 1,129,000 avoided deaths. Aside from the obvious benefit, that comes out to a direct economic savings of $540 billion and a societal savings bottom line of $2.7 trillion. Keeping up with the best available science is fine; ACIP was already doing that. This zombie ACIP, filled with the Lyn Redwoods of the world… won’t.
The CDC’s schedule has already changed, at least in one case. The absurd announcement that the Covid-19 vaccine is no longer recommended for “healthy children and healthy pregnant women” is now reflected in the available schedule; here’s a Wayback Machine version before that shift, because we’re probably going to want to look at it more and more pretty soon.
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