Retsef Levi, a member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, spoke at the panel’s meeting on Sept. 19. Maya Homan/Georgia Recorder
ATLANTA — The top vaccine advisory committee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted Friday to change long-standing recommendations around COVID-19 vaccine access for children and adults, though a proposal to require prescriptions for all individuals seeking the shot narrowly failed.
If approved by CDC leaders, the recommendations will also place a new emphasis on the risks of COVID-19 immunizations, despite the agency’s own data demonstrating that the vaccines are safe and effective for most people.
CDC vaccine panel votes to limit use of a childhood vaccine as COVID, hepatitis B decisions loom
The panel, known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, is charged with setting national guidelines around which people should be vaccinated against a wide range of preventable diseases and when those vaccines should be administered. Several states —including Georgia, where the CDC is headquartered — have codified the committee’s recommendations into law, allowing the panel to play a key role in determining which vaccines are covered by insurance companies and how accessible immunizations are for the general public.
Though the panel did not withdraw an existing CDC recommendation that individuals between the ages of six months and 64 years get vaccinated, it does require “an emphasis that the risk-benefit of vaccination is most favorable for individuals who are at an increased risk for severe COVID-19 disease and lowest for individuals who are not at increased risk.” For adults ages 65 and older, vaccine recommendations will be “based on individual decision-making.”
COVID-19 vaccine uptake among Americans is currently much lower than that of other immunizations, such as the flu shot. Only 13% of U.S. children were up to date on their COVID-19 vaccines as of April, according to Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, who serves as the acting chief medical officer for CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. Among adults ages 65 and older, that number hovers around 43%.
The CDC’s own data showed that COVID-19 vaccines reduced serious disease and emergency department visits among both children and adults. But during Friday’s meeting, some ACIP officials questioned — without evidence — whether COVID-19 vaccines provide any advantage to the people who chose to get them.
“What is the true efficacy and true benefits that these vaccines provide?” said Retsef Levi, an ACIP member and professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Robert Malone, an ACIP member and biochemist who has previously said he views the label of anti-vaxxer as “high praise,” also pushed back on data showing that COVD-19 vaccines provide protection for the general public.
“There is no established correlative protection for COVID, period, full stop, and stop saying otherwise,” he said in a tense exchange with a fellow committee member.
Other public health officials criticized the proposed rule change that would have required patients to obtain a prescription before receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.
“If we start asking for prescriptions for vaccines, which are again, a primary prevention public health strategy, we are going to overwhelm physicians’ offices,” said Dr. Amy Middleman, who serves as a liaison member on behalf of the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine. “It’s alarming to me that for a primary preventive strategy, we are actually adding access concerns and barriers, rather than diminishing them.”
The committee also signaled that it would be open to revising current CDC recommendations that advise all pregnant Americans to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Current guidelines state that mRNA vaccines are safe and effective for those who are pregnant, and can help provide immunity to babies under six months of age, who are too young to get vaccinated.
But Levi, who delivered a presentation that centered on the risks of COVID-19 vaccines, argued that current guidelines do not fully underscore the risk of adverse effects from vaccines.
“We decided not to bring it to a vote today, but we do hope that the FDA and the CDC will look much more carefully into this,” he said. “Most of us are extremely concerned about the safety and the lack of robust evidence for not only pregnant women, but their babies.”
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