These particular shots were only added to the schedule in February 2023, following a committee vote the previous year. They have been dogged by controversy simply because the basis for their inclusion has always been sketchy at best. Their withdrawal is a concession to reality that portends a resurgence of evidence-based medicine and responsible public health measures.
This schedule is marked as “recommended,” but that is a bit misleading. Most schools, and nearly every hospital, clinic, and medical provider, convert many recommendations into mandates.
Resisting them can be hard. In some states, the exemptions are so hard to obtain that people who doubt them have to move away. Even so, some states are tightening rules (Massachusetts), while others are embracing health freedom (Idaho is the first state to legislate consistent medical freedom in law).
This is not a subject the Trump administration can ignore. Fortunately, the new public health team in Washington is the most informed and independent ever assembled. Among their first big steps is removing this shot from the schedule completely. Meanwhile, uptake among the adult population continues to fall in light of vast evidence of adverse outcomes.
The childhood vaccine schedule has blown up in size ever since the change in the law in 1986 that exempted vaccines from liability for harm. It became a gold rush. Just a few shots for two infections became up to 85 doses for 12 and more possible maladies, because many shots are configured to pertain to several diseases at once. Revenues for the industry soared to $89 billion in 2021 from $750 million in 1986.
Meanwhile, the kids keep getting sicker. It is clearly a crisis at this point. It is impossible to not suspect that the explosive growth of the childhood vaccine schedule might be an issue. As with many issues of medicine and health, the seeming solution might, in fact, be part of the problem.
The COVID-19 shot was added to the schedule with no justification whatsoever. The infection danger for children is vanishingly small, approaching nonexistent. The dangers of the shots are well-known. Meanwhile, even if they worked perfectly, they likely do not protect against new variants, and their effectiveness wears off rather quickly, thus requiring a long string of boosters. Even with shots and boosters, you can still get infected and pass on the virus to others.
Uptake is very low as it is. It seems obvious and even wholly unobjectionable to simply take them off the schedule. That said, many people from the pharmaceutical industry lobby oppose this passionately. This is because any shot that is on the list is automatically indemnified against liability by law.
This particular shot has two levels of liability projection: one from its status as part of the Emergency Use Authorization and another due to its inclusion on the childhood schedule. Removing it from the schedule takes away one layer of legal protection against complaints of harm. The Emergency Use Authorization will time out at some point, which will likely unleash a flood of litigation.
So on one hand, removing this shot seems like a tiny step. Many complain that this is not nearly enough and that the shots need to be completely withdrawn.
On the other hand, consider that no shot has ever been removed from the schedule absent eradication or replacement by something considered to be better. Removing this shot means that health authorities are effectively saying that infection is safer for children than the shot itself.
Nothing like this has happened in the entire history of the childhood schedule. The significance cannot be overstated.
Consider what this means for other vaccines on the schedule. What if that standard were rigorously applied throughout? I don’t have the answer to that, but one suspects that the schedule might look more like it did in 1984 than it does today.
That’s why this is a huge move and one worthy of celebration. It would signal clearly that the Trump administration is capable of doing the right thing, even against the objections of the pharmaceutical industry. That would be a step toward the restoration of public trust in the agencies.
These kinds of mandates disguised as recommendations are common in U.S. life. If you think back to all of the COVID-19 controls, it is truly difficult to know how it came to be that so much coercion was deployed throughout. The closures, the protocols, and the bans were shocking by any historical record. And yet, if you check the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), what you find is that they were all just guidelines, not laws.
Public health agencies on the lower levels saw CDC guidelines as marching orders and implemented them with more teeth. On the county and city level, enforcement became intense. But if you looked into the legal basis, there was none: They were merely following the CDC, which, in turn, claimed that it was merely following the World Health Organization.
It is a very similar situation with the vaccine mandates and the whole of the childhood schedule. They are mere recommendations that get converted in real life to hard coercions against bodily autonomy. In the United States, we just assume that every country does this. In fact, there are exactly zero vaccine mandates in the whole of the UK today. None. Somehow the country is not consumed by infectious disease plagues.
Here is the key: the primacy of human choice over mandates. This must be the touchstone. As part of that, there must be a greater respect shown for the diversity within the human family on matters of health. All health is individual health. The term “public health” can and should only pertain to issues such as the commons: water and air. Once it begins to apply to individual medical products, the term “public health” is potentially deployed as a weapon of compulsion.
This is why the recent statement from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in congressional testimony was so thrilling.
He said very plainly, “I don’t think people should take medical advice from me.”
There was wailing and gnashing of teeth following that comment. This is because it has long been the presumption in political culture that the whole point of this position is to give medical advice.
Kennedy said no. This is not the job of public health. Public health pertains to making the commons safe and clean. Otherwise, medical decisions should be left up to individuals and their doctors. For this reason, his statement might be the most important statement from a public health official in a century.
If we take this statement seriously, we could fix many problems of the existing system, from the vaccine schedule to the mandatory benefits of health insurance to the exclusion of non-allopathic medicine from coverage. It’s all about trusting the judgments of individuals, including parents, over the captured system that is in place now.
Such progress away from the baseless status quo deserves one or several cheers.
