Today, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) announced that it will continue to advise routine childhood immunization against 18 diseases rather than follow the greatly pared vaccination schedule released early this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Just days before, Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the anti-vaccine group founded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, said it had filed a lawsuit in US District Court accusing the AAP of engaging in “a decades-long racketeering scheme to defraud American families about the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule.”
Kennedy, who has long claimed that US children receive “too many” vaccines, modeled the CDC’s new vaccination schedule after that of Denmark, drawing criticism from medical experts who say the two countries have different populations and public health needs.
CDC recommendations ‘depart from longstanding medical evidence’
In a policy statement published today in Pediatrics, Sean O’ Leary, MD, MPH, who chairs the AAP’s infectious disease committee, and colleagues wrote, “At this time, the AAP no longer endorses the recommended childhood and adolescent immunization schedule from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
AAP’s routine childhood vaccine schedule includes those against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), influenza, hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, and meningococcal disease, all of which are reserved in the CDC guidance for high-risk groups or “shared clinical decision-making.”
Recent changes to the CDC immunization schedule depart from longstanding medical evidence and no longer offer the optimal way to prevent illnesses in children.
In a news release, the AAP said, “Recent changes to the CDC immunization schedule depart from longstanding medical evidence and no longer offer the optimal way to prevent illnesses in children. By contrast, the AAP childhood and adolescent immunization schedules continue to recommend immunizations based on the specific disease risks and health care delivery in the United States.”
In a media briefing today, Andrew Racine, MD, PhD, president of the AAP board of directors, noted that 12 leading professional organizations, including the American Medical Association and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, have endorsed the AAP immunization schedule.
For 95 years, “pediatricians have been guided by a single overriding principle: The commitment to optimize the health and the well being of all of this country’s children,” he said. “That commitment has not changed. It’s who we are. What has changed is the environment around us, an environment where health decisions are being increasingly politicized, and where pediatric, clinical, and scientific expertise is being derided.”
Lawsuit mischaracterizes National Academy findings
In a news release, CHD claimed that the AAP violated the Racketeeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act by making false claims about the safety of vaccines while receiving funding from vaccine makers and financially rewarding pediatricians who achieve high vaccination rates.
AAP “is a front operation in a racketeering scheme involving Big Pharma, Big Medicine and Big Media, ready at every turn to put profits above children’s health,” CHD CEO Mary Holland, JD, said in the release. “It’s time to face facts and see what the AAP is really about.”
In the lawsuit, CHD alleges that the AAP has tried to obscure the findings of comprehensive childhood immunization safety reviews published by the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine), including a paper on multiple immunizations and immune dysfunction in 2002 and one on scientific findings and stakeholder concerns about vaccine safety published in 2013.
“The IOM called for more research after concluding that no studies had ever been conducted to compare the health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated children,” CHD claimed.
However, that is a mischaracterization of the review conclusions, which instead called for staying the course with continued policy analysis, research, and communications strategy development in the absence of adverse safety signals.
“The committee does not recommend a review by national and federal vaccine-related advisory bodies of the licensure or schedule of administration of the vaccines administered to infants in the United States on the basis of concerns about immune dysfunction,” the authors of the 2002 review wrote.
Similarly, the 2013 review concluded that, “The lack of conclusive evidence linking adverse events to multiple immunizations or other ‘schedule, exposures suggests that the recommended schedule is safe.”
The lawsuit seeks financial damages for the individual plaintiffs and asks the court to mandate that the AAP disclose the “lack of comprehensive safety testing” of vaccines, and prevent the AAP from making “further unqualified safety claims” about vaccines, CHD said.
