By MIKE STOBBE, Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. health officials have told more than a half-dozen of the nation’s top medical organizations that they will no longer help establish vaccination recommendations.
The government told the organizations on Thursday via email that their experts are being disinvited from the workgroups that have been the backbone of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
The organizations include the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
“I’m concerned and distressed,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University vaccine expert who for decades has been involved with ACIP and its workgroups.
He said the move will likely propel a confusing fragmentation of vaccine guidance, as patients may hear the government say one thing and hear their doctors say another.
One email said the organizations are “special interest groups and therefore are expected to have a ‘bias’ based on their constituency and/or population that they represent.”
A federal health official on Friday confirmed the action, which was first reported by Bloomberg.
The decision was the latest development in what has become a saga involving the ACIP. The committee, created in 1964, makes recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how vaccines that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration should be used.
CDC directors have traditionally almost always approved those recommendations, which are widely heeded by doctors and greenlight insurance coverage for shots.
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement before becoming the U.S. government’s top health official, and in June abruptly fired the entire ACIP after accusing them of being too closely aligned with manufacturers. He handpicked replacements that include several vaccine skeptics.
The workgroups typically include not only committee members but also a number of experts from medical and scientific organizations. At workgroup meetings, members evaluate data from vaccine manufacturers and the CDC, and formulate vaccination recommendation proposals to be presented to the full committee.
The structure was created for several reasons, Schaffner said. The professional groups provide input about what might and might not be possible for doctors to implement. And it helped build respect and trust in ACIP recommendations, having the buy-in of respected medical organizations, he said.
Workgroup members are vetted for conflicts of interest, to make sure than no one who had, say, made money from working on a hepatitis vaccine was placed on the hepatitis committee, Schaffner noted.
Also disinvited from the groups were the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Physicians, the American Geriatrics Society, the American Osteopathic Association, the National Medical Association and the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.
In a joint statement Friday, the AMA and several of the other organizations said: “To remove our deep medical expertise from this vital and once transparent process is irresponsible, dangerous to our nation’s health, and will further undermine public and clinician trust in vaccines.”
They urged the administration to reconsider the move “so we can continue to feel confident in its vaccine recommendations for our patients.”
Some of the professional organizations have criticized Kennedy’s changes to the ACIP, and three of the disinvited groups last month joined a lawsuit against the government over Kennedy’s decision to stop recommending COVID-19 vaccines for most children and pregnant women.
In a social media post Friday, one of the Kennedy-appointed ACIP members — Retsef Levi — wrote that the working groups “will engage experts from even broader set of disciplines!”
Levi, a business management professor, also wrote that working group membership “will be based on merit & expertise — not membership in organizations proven to have (conflicts of interest) and radical & narrow view of public health!”
HHS officials have not said which people are going to be added to the ACIP workgroups.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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