Mar. 22 at 12:15 AM
$ICU Kids lives matter. Adults, as well, don’t get me wrong. God Bless the Children. The current state of our USA health care, as overseen by our national government, is abysmal.
Dorit Reiss- Professor of Law, UC San Francisco
"As things stand, the CDC’s national immunization schedule—and the primary committee that shapes it—is in a kind of purgatory. The current roster of the panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), should never have come to exist at all, the judge wrote, because it violated the Administrative Procedure Act: When Kennedy fired all 17 of the panel’s former members last spring and replaced them with a more vaccine-skeptical group, he eschewed the “rigorous screening that had been the hallmark of ACIP member selection for decades.” Kennedy’s ACIP, the ruling says, may also fail to fulfill a requirement of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which calls for the membership of such panels to have “balanced” points of view. The ruling temporarily suspended the appointment of 13 of the 15 current ACIP members, most of whom lack “meaningful experience in vaccines,” the judge wrote. (The other two members were appointed in late February, after the plaintiffs filed their motion, and so were excluded from the decision.) As a result, the panel has been forced to postpone a meeting originally scheduled for this week.
All of that effectively leaves the U.S. without the advisory group that has most influentially shaped American vaccine policy for the past 60 years. “There is no functioning ACIP as of now,” Richard Hughes IV, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, told me. The nation has never been so suddenly stripped of its vaccine advisers, with no backup plan. Experts told me they’re unsure who, if anyone, will advise the CDC on its recommendations for vaccines in the coming months, when the agency might need to weigh in on brand-new immunizations against diseases that have so far lacked them, as well as as this fall’s slate of vaccines against COVID and flu, which are typically reformulated annually to keep up with viral evolution.
In theory, Kennedy or the CDC director—a position temporarily held by Jay Bhattacharya, who also leads the National Institutes of Health—could simply make a unilateral decision about future vaccine recommendations. But the judge also faulted Jim O’Neill, the CDC’s previous acting director, for doing exactly that in January, when O’Neill signed a memo announcing major changes to the agency’s immunization schedule that downgraded recommendations for several vaccines at once, without seeking ACIP’s advice. “The CDC cannot simply bypass ACIP in altering the immunization schedules,” the judge wrote. And because part of the judge’s ruling criticized the hurried way in which the current ACIP was assembled, Kennedy might have a difficult time summoning a fresh panel to replace most of his picks on short notice."
{Quelimmune SCD-PED……..Quelimmune SCD- Adult}
Hopefully, they’ll keep their hands off of the life saving device medicine which has been coming down the pike for more than a year and 2 months. TIA.
