ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — Florida plans to become the first state to eliminate vaccine mandates, a longtime cornerstone of public health policy for keeping schoolchildren and adults safe from infectious diseases.
State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who announced the decision Wednesday, cast current requirements in schools and elsewhere as “immoral” intrusions on people’s rights that hamper parents’ ability to make health decisions for their children.
Comments closedCalls are growing louder in Alberta for the COVID-19 vaccine to be covered free of charge for all residents, following the province’s decision Tuesday to partially reverse its vaccine policy and expand coverage to some health-care workers.
While the move has been welcomed by workers and unions, public health experts and critics say it doesn’t go far enough, leaving many Albertans uncertain about access to the vaccine.
“The government has now taken a step towards admitting that they had the wrong approach,” said Chris Galloway, executive director at Friends of Medicare.
Comments closedEDMONTON – In a partial policy reversal, Alberta’s government said Tuesday it will cover the cost of COVID-19 vaccinations for health-care workers.
Maddison McKee, spokesperson to Primary and Preventative Health Services Minister Adriana LaGrange, said in an email that COVID-19 vaccine coverage will be extended to all health-care workers this fall under the first phase of the province’s vaccination rollout.
“Immunization will remain voluntary,” said McKee.
Comments closedTORONTO – Canadian doctors and scientists say Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s defunding of mRNA vaccine research and development projects will have negative health effects in Canada and around the world.
“I think that Canadians do need to understand that this and a lot of the changes that Kennedy is making to vaccination policy in particular are definitely going to affect Canadians,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization.
Unlike other vaccines, mRNA vaccines can be made very quickly. They can also be easily modified to fight new viruses and adapt to changing strains — something that we saw as new variants emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rasmussen said.
Comments closedIn what experts say will hobble pandemic preparedness, US Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. yesterday announced the dismantling of the country’s mRNA vaccine-development programs—the same innovation that allowed rapid scale-up of COVID-19 vaccines during the public health emergency.
The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) is terminating 22 mRNA vaccine-development contracts totaling just under $500 million, including an award to Moderna/University of Texas Medical Branch for a vaccine against the H5N1 avian flu now sweeping the world. That grant was terminated in late May.
Contracts awarded to Emory University and Tiba Biotech were cancelled, and agreements with Luminary Labs, ModeX, and Seqirus have been scaled back.
Comments closedWASHINGTON (AP) — The Department of Health and Human Services will cancel contracts and pull funding for some vaccines that are being developed to fight respiratory viruses like COVID-19 and the flu.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in a statement Tuesday that 22 projects, totaling $500 million, to develop vaccines using mRNA technology will be halted.
Kennedy’s decision to terminate the projects is the latest in a string of decisions that have put the longtime vaccine critic’s doubts about shots into full effect at the nation’s health department. Kennedy has pulled back recommendations around the COVID-19 shots, fired the panel that makes vaccine recommendations, and refused to offer a vigorous endorsement of vaccinations as a measles outbreak worsened.
Comments closedAlberta Premier Danielle Smith’s radical new rules for COVID immunization pose a genuine threat to the elderly, the working poor and pregnant moms.
Smith, who revived her ailing political career by peddling conspiratorial COVID theories, has designed a program that is not only punitive but discriminatory, bureaucratic and Soviet in nature.
“This policy is so bad that it’s actually worse than their usual failure to plan properly,” said James Talbot, the province’s former chief medical officer of health. “In fact, it is so bad it looks like they are actually planning to fail.”
Here are the three basic tenets of any successful public health program: make it available, make it accessible and make it affordable. Smith turns all three upside down.
Comments closedJOHANNESBURG (AP) — Just a week had remained before scientists in South Africa were to begin clinical trials of an HIV vaccine, and hopes were high for another step toward limiting one of history’s deadliest pandemics. Then the email arrived.
Stop all work, it said. The United States under the Trump administration was withdrawing all its funding.
The news devastated the researchers, who live and work in a region where more people live with HIV than anywhere else in the world. Their research project, called BRILLIANT, was meant to be the latest to draw on the region’s genetic diversity and deep expertise in the hope of benefiting people everywhere.
But the $46 million from the U.S. for the project was disappearing, part of the dismantling of foreign aid by the world’s biggest donor earlier this year as President Donald Trump announced a focus on priorities at home.
Comments closedAs US regulators restrict Covid mRNA vaccines and as independent vaccine advisers re-examine the shots, scientists fear that an unlikely target could be next: cancer research.
Messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccines have shown promise in treating and preventing cancers that have often been difficult to address, such as pancreatic cancer, brain tumors and others.
But groundbreaking research could stall as federal and state officials target mRNA shots, including ending federal funding for bird flu mRNA vaccines, restricting who may receive existing mRNA vaccines and, in some places, proposing laws against the vaccines.
The Trump administration has also implemented unprecedented cuts to cancer research, among other research cuts and widespread layoffs at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Comments closedSix leading medical organizations filed a lawsuit on Monday against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, and the federal Department of Health and Human Services, charging that recent decisions limiting access to vaccines were unscientific and harmful to the public.
The suit, filed in federal court in western Massachusetts, seeks to restore Covid vaccines to the list of recommended immunizations for healthy children and pregnant women.
Mr. Kennedy has been on a “decades-long mission” to undermine vaccines and to portray them as more dangerous than the illnesses they are designed to prevent, said Richard H. Hughes IV, a lawyer who teaches vaccine law at George Washington University and is leading the effort.
“The secretary’s intentions are clear,” Mr. Hughes said: “He aims to destroy vaccines.”
Comments closedIcarus had a problem: Desperate to escape from prison, he made wings out of feathers and wax. His father warned him not to fly too close to the sun, but Icarus couldn’t resist the freedom of soaring. His wings melted and he plunged to his death.
Like Icarus, public health is given advanced warning, but struggles between freedom and rules. And as in Greek myths, each failure offers a “moral.”
Here are five examples:
COVID-19 is still spreading in unpredictable waves. Although hospitalizations are currently low, the virus landed over 1,000 Ontarians in hospital and killed nearly 500. New variants keep emerging, including the latest NB. 1.8.1, also known as “Nimbus.” It took just three months to become Canada’s dominant variant. Each time a new variant takes over, it threatens built-up immunity from vaccines and previous infections. Although Nimbus isn’t deadlier than previous variants, there’s no guarantee that future variants won’t cause more severe disease.
Comments closedThe authors are the presidents of American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Physicians, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Let us introduce ourselves. We are the doctors you trust with your health and the health of your family across every stage of life, from the first checkups in infancy and childhood, to health care during pregnancy and adulthood, through management of chronic illness and aging. We are family physicians, pediatricians, internal medicine physicians, OB-GYNs, and infectious disease experts. Our commitment is not to politics, but to the absolute well-being of our patients and populations, and to providing them with best evidence-based health care.
We have an urgent, united message: Immunizations work, they are very effective and safe, and they save lives. Vaccines are among the most rigorously studied and effective tools in public health. Through widespread immunization, we have eradicated debilitating and fatal diseases that once caused serious illness, hospitalization, and death for millions of people.
But today, that legacy is at serious risk.
Comments closedThis week’s meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is likely to mark its end—for now—as a vaccine advisory body.
Regardless of which party controlled the White House and who served as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), ACIP—a federal advisory committee of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—held meetings that included presentations of vetted, evidence-based data and used a structured framework for moving from scientific evidence to vaccine recommendations.
Based on what we have learned about the new committee members appointed by the secretary, the meeting agenda and presenters, however, the purpose of the meeting appears to be an opportunity to deemphasize vaccine benefits—many of which are largely invisible to the public and taken for granted—and emphasize the potential risks of vaccines.
Comments closedComments closedI think we are on the verge of losing vaccines for this country, from this country. And the reason is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will hold up a paper, in the next four or five months, that says it’s aluminum in vaccines that are causing a whole swath of problems, including autism. I think he is about to destroy vaccines in this country. I do.
On May 27, the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics published a patient information page about Long COVID in children. It states “Long COVID is common, affecting up to 10 per cent to 20 per cent of children with a history of COVID-19. With almost six million U.S. children potentially affected, this is higher than the number of children with asthma, the most common chronic health problem in children.”
Two weeks later on June 13, Danielle Smith’s UCP, famously fans of the anti-science Trump government, highlighted horrifically unscientific new FDA guidance suggesting healthy children and pregnant women are not recommended for COVID vaccination, while announcing a new policy where most Albertans have to pay for immunization.
Beyond the obvious inequities and loss of access that payment for prophylaxis presents, the UCP introduced a new four-phase rollout plan whereby those under age 65 without qualifying conditions cannot be vaccinated until the final phase. This means kids will likely head back to schools months before they are eligible for vaccination, ensuring they are exposed to the latest COVID strains before becoming eligible for updated vaccination. It also leaves the UCP an opening to not buy pediatric vaccines at all and claim “low demand.”
Comments closedWith two extraordinary moves, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has upended the certainty that American children will always have cost-free access to lifesaving vaccines.
For decades, a little-known scientific panel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended which shots Americans should get and when. The group’s endorsement means insurance companies must cover the costs and helps states decide which vaccines to mandate for school-age children.
The panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, also determines which shots are provided for free through the Vaccines for Children program, which serves about half of the children in the United States.
On Monday, Mr. Kennedy, long a vaccine skeptic, fired all 17 members of A.C.I.P., claiming that the group was rife with conflicts of interest and that a clean sweep was needed to restore public trust. Mr. Kennedy also reassigned C.D.C. staff scientists who oversee the panel’s work and vet its members.
Comments closedPediatric infectious disease expert Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos of the U.S. CDC resigned on Tuesday as co-leader of a working group that advises outside experts on COVID-19 vaccines and is leaving the agency, two sources familiar with the move told Reuters.
Panagiotakopoulos said in an email to work group colleagues that her decision to step down was based on the belief she is “no longer able to help the most vulnerable members” of the U.S. population.
In her role at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s working group of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, she co-led the gathering of information on topics for presentation.
Her resignation comes one week after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time vaccine skeptic who oversees the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, said the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women had been removed from the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule.
Comments closedHealth and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy’s proposal to end the government’s existing Covid vaccine recommendation for healthy pregnant women, if enacted, will be a major setback to decades’ worth of efforts to advance the health of pregnant people and their babies.
It also profoundly unethical.
Pregnant people are consistently left behind in biomedical R&D in ways that are deeply harmful to the health of both mother and child. In the decade before the Covid pandemic, consensus reports emerged denouncing this pregnancy evidence gap and providing road maps for how to ethically generate evidence during pregnancy within the confines of existing research regulations. I co-led one of these efforts, the PREVENT project, initiated in response to the Zika epidemic and completed in fall 2019. PREVENT specifically focused on how to ethically include pregnant women in the development and deployment of new vaccines for emerging pandemic threats.
Comments closed