In the days before Christmas, as measles, whooping cough and influenza continued to spread and surge across the United States, the Department of Health and Human Services came perilously close to scrapping the nation’s long-standing list of recommended childhood vaccines.

The number of US children catching measles is rising. Credit: Sydney Morning Herald

As CNN reported, the agency’s plan was to go with a shorter list, along the lines of what Denmark recommends. As Politico reported soon after, that plan was jettisoned at the last minute over legal and political concerns.

Sources in and around the department have since suggested that something far worse may still be in the offing. “They could still move to align us with a country like Denmark,” said Dr Demetre Daskalakis, a former director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s respiratory disease division. He resigned in August in protest of the agency’s politicisation of vaccine policy. “But they could also just scrap the list altogether, so that there are no official recommendations, only vague suggestions.”

Either of those changes would be unconscionable. Among other things, the CDC list, also known as the childhood vaccine schedule, helps determine which vaccines are covered by insurance, which are included in the Vaccines for Children Program that supplies crucial shots to the un- and underinsured, and which are protected from certain liabilities that might otherwise drive vaccine makers from the US market. Altering those recommendations, or downgrading them to “shared clinical decision making,” would upend those protocols, and could make it nearly impossible for millions of families to receive certain lifesaving vaccines, even if they still want them.

However, neither move would be surprising.

In the 11 months since he was confirmed as health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has wreaked steady havoc on the nation’s vaccination policies and programs. He cancelled hundreds of millions of dollars in federal investment for mRNA vaccines, including ones that would have improved our ability to fight the next flu pandemic. He chased away doctors and scientists at the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC who oversaw federal vaccine policy for decades.

Perhaps worst of all, he fired the entire 17-member Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices, known as ACIP. It is responsible for advising the CDC on which vaccines to recommend for whom. It now consists of a mix of ideologues and incompetents handpicked by Kennedy himself. Already, it has:

None of these changes are evidence-based. All run counter to what the CDC’s own experts (and most of the nation’s leading medical groups) have........

© The Sydney Morning Herald