LEILA FADEL, HOST:
A federal vaccine advisory committee is following through with a pledge to change vaccine policy.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The panel advising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was chosen by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
FADEL: NPR's Pien Huang is attending the meeting in Atlanta and joins me now. Good morning, Pien.
PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: Good morning, Leila.
FADEL: Tell us about the changes in this panel and why that matters.
HUANG: Yeah, so this has been a highly unusual meeting, Leila. There are 12 members. They're new since June, when Kennedy fired all the previous members. And they have come with a new approach. They're challenging years of established vaccine science and they're digging deep into old data to try and find evidence of harms. And throughout the meeting, there's been clashes between the new members and with members of the medical establishment, like Dr. Jason Goldman, who's president of the American College of Physicians.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JASON GOLDMAN: I urge this committee not to change the recommendations if they truly want to give the power to the parents to decide what is best for their child.
HUANG: But the committee did vote to change a long-standing recommendation on the MMRV vaccine.
FADEL: OK, so that's the measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox vaccine, diseases that are very contagious in kids. How did the recommendation change?
HUANG: Yeah, that's the combo shot for all of them. And they voted to recommend that kids under 4 should no longer be able to get it. Instead, they should be getting the MMR vaccine and the chickenpox vaccines separately. So that's a subtle change because most kids, 85% of them, already do get the shot separately, and that's because of a slightly higher risk of something called febrile seizures which come with the combo shot. That's something that's been known for a long time. And while I know they sound scary, pediatricians say they're mostly harmless. Here's Dr. Cody Meissner from Dartmouth. He's the only member who served on this committee before.
CODY MEISSNER: This discussion is really a deja vu for me because we had extensive discussions on this very topic, oh, 15 years ago, approximately.
HUANG: And he was one of three members who voted against the change, but he was overruled. And this recommendation could have implications for insurance coverage.
FADEL: Like what kind of implications?
HUANG: So they're still sorting it out. I mean, this vote could mean that the combo shot is no longer covered by Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program for kids under 4. It could also mean that private insurers can maybe choose whether they cover it or not. Now, HHS did send out a statement after the meeting saying they were going to review what this means for insurance coverage before the final decision is made by the CDC's acting director.
FADEL: And what do you expect to happen today?
HUANG: So today they're going to be voting on making changes to the hepatitis B vaccine, which is also a vaccine that's been around for decades. It's been recommended at birth for every baby since 1991, and it seems like they're going to try to delay that first dose. They're also going to be voting on COVID vaccines. So these discussions are going to be led by committee member Retsef Levi, who's a professor of operations management at MIT.
He's said that COVID vaccines are killing people, despite safety monitoring programs that have found this not to be true. So the committee could agree with the FDA's current recommendations for people 65 and older or those at higher risk. They could expand on it. But based on yesterday's discussions, doctors' groups are worried that they're going to be voting to make them harder to get.
FADEL: That's NPR's Pien Huang in Atlanta. Thank you, Pien.
HUANG: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
