…and pregnant women, despite lingering gaps in knowledge about vaccine safety and who is susceptible to vaccine harms. Action Alert!
THE TOPLINE
- The CDC’s 2024 vaccine schedule includes additional recommendations for childhood vaccines.
- The full CDC vaccine schedule has never been adequately studied for safety and efficacy, according to government advisory bodies.
- The CDC’s schedule, in practice, becomes mandatory for most children to attend public school; the lack of study regarding safety and efficacy is inexcusable.
For vaccines administered to millions of babies and young children—treatments that are recommended by government health agencies—you’d think the evidence backing up their safety would be air-tight, especially given we can’t sue vaccine makers if our children are harmed. But you would be wrong. Outrageously, the entire vaccine schedule, which has grown substantially over the years, has never been tested for safety or efficacy, meaning that today’s children have, in effect, become experimental guinea pigs. We must demand more to protect our children.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have released the updated immunization schedule for 2024. It includes new recommendations regarding RSV, COVID-19, pneumococcal, and Mpox shots, as well as updates to the recommended list for pregnant women. The new schedule ultimately means that children aged 0 to 18 will likely receive, at minimum, 76 doses of 18 different vaccines. By contrast, consider that in 1983, the CDC recommended just 11 doses of 4 different vaccines, and, top of that, the technology used in the vaccines has changed dramatically so yesteryear’s post-marketing surveillance data cannot be applied to today’s vaccines.
Vaccination is a controversial and emotional subject, one that became even more of a hot-button issue with the release of mRNA COVID vaccines. But the facts are the facts, and the truth is that many questions remain as to the safety and efficacy of the CDC vaccine schedule. This was the determination not of some “anti-vaxxer” group, but of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (or NASEM, formerly the Institute of Medicine), which advises the government on issues relating to medicine and health. In a 2013 report, the Academy concluded, “Key elements of the schedule—the number, frequency, timing, order, and age at administration of vaccines—have not been systematically examined in research studies.” Further, NASEM admitted that “no studies have compared the differences in health outcomes … between entirely unimmunized populations of children and fully immunized children.”
In a 1994 report, NASEM acknowledged the lack of data on adverse events: “The lack of adequate data regarding many of the [vaccine-related] adverse events under study was of major concern to the committee.” In earlier reports, NASEM also bemoaned the lack of data about who might be predisposed to an adverse reaction from a vaccine: “Some of these predispositions may be detectable prior to the administration of vaccine… much work remains to be done to elucidate and to develop strategies to document the immunologic mechanisms that lead to adverse effects in individual patients.”
Shocking as these data gaps are, we can easily see why they exist. It takes no small amount of bravery even to study the subject of vaccine safety, a subject for which there is frighteningly scant research for the obvious reasons—that is, journals won’t publish it, and as a researcher or physician you’re putting your reputation and medical license in jeopardy. This happened to Dr. Paul Thomas, an Oregon physician who published a study in a peer-reviewed journal showing that unvaccinated children had fewer doctors’ visits and diagnoses of chronic disease than vaccinated children. Five days after the study was published, Dr. Thomas’ license was suspended. A month later, the study was retracted.
We’ve written before about some of the reasons that certain vaccines may be unsafe. For example, some vaccines contain aluminum, a neurotoxin linked to an array of negative health outcomes. When you dig deeper into the rationale behind using aluminum in vaccines, you similarly find a paucity of data proving safety.
It really isn’t too much to ask to have robust safety data to back up the safety and efficacy of the CDC’s recommended schedule, especially because, in many cases, it is akin to a mandate. In many states children are required to get the full slate of vaccines to attend public school, and exemptions are either limited, difficult to get, or non-existent. If these treatments are, in practice, forced onto children, shouldn’t we have data that proves them safe beyond any doubt?
Action Alert! Urge Congress and the CDC to conduct robust safety testing on the childhood immunization schedule. Please send your message immediately.
