Kennedy Jr. this week launched an agency-wide effort to study and document any health problems reported after vaccination, the Department of Health and Human Services said on Thursday. U.S. Health Secretary Robert F.
In January, the CDC announced a revamped childhood vaccine schedule that reduced recommended vaccines, dropping universal recommendations for flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B at birth, some forms of meningitis and respiratory syncytial virus. opened on Monday to treat and study patients reporting health problems after receiving vaccines, HHS said in a statement. Other measures include a proposal by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to reimburse physicians for reporting suspected injuries to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS; a CDC effort to update VAERS; and HHS requiring electronic health records to capture vaccine-related adverse events.
In his first year heading HHS, he fired all 17 independent expert members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee and selected new panelists, many of whom shared his anti-vaccine views.
The initiative is the latest step by Kennedy, who spent years questioning vaccine safety and founded an anti-vaccine group before taking office, to reshape federal immunization policy. The effort centers on a National Institutes of Health clinic The federal Vaccine Injury Table lists 14 compensable injuries across 16 vaccine types under the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a no-fault system in which claimants file against the government, not vaccine makers. Since 1988, it has awarded roughly $5 billion across about 12,300 injury and death claims.
The American Academy of Pediatrics says childhood vaccines are studied in placebo-controlled and comparison-group trials and monitored for safety after approval.
The new moves, which appear to be part of Kennedy’s decades-long efforts to sow skepticism about vaccines, come as he faces legal challenges to his attempts to alter US childhood vaccination schedules and growing concern among public health experts about falling immunisation rates, particularly against measles, which has seen a resurgence in the US since last year.
