Vaccine advisers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are expected this week to consider softening or eliminating recommendations for some routine childhood immunizations — which doctors say could significantly depress vaccination rates and trigger more infectious disease outbreaks.
Any decisions by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — now mainly composed of members who share Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine skepticism — will be closely scrutinized, given the dramatic events at the Department of Health and Human Services and in Congress in recent weeks.
At a Senate Finance Committee hearing earlier this month, Democrats and some Republicans grilled Kennedy about his vaccine policy decisions. The interrogation followed the uproar just days before over Kennedy’s ouster of former CDC Director Susan Monarez, who said she refused a request that she rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations — a charge Kennedy denies. Monarez is now expected to testify under oath about her firing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on the eve of the advisory committee meeting, which is scheduled for Sept. 18-19.
Richard Besser, CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting CDC director when Barack Obama was president, noted that the panel’s meeting was announced in the Federal Register the day after Monarez’s removal.
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