HHS Vaccine Task Force Misses Report Deadline

Now that the deadline has passed for an HHS vaccine task force to issue its report on the timing and sequencing of vaccines, public health advocates are concerned about what happens when the report eventually comes out.
“The overarching concern with this report, should it ever materialize, is that it will be more textual squid ink that accomplishes nothing other than reinforcing unfounded doubts about vaccines that have been cultivated by the HHS secretary for decades,” Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD, professor emerita of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Arizona in Tucson and a founding member of Defend Public Health, said in an email. “In fact, this may be its only real purpose.”
The report grew out of an executive order issued Aug. 10 by President Donald Trump. The order directed HHS to, within 90 days, present plans to “offer options to administer core childhood vaccines, starting with MMR , as single vaccines rather than combination products/doses” while still guaranteeing continued availability of combination vaccines, and to “assess the ideal timing and sequencing of all core childhood vaccines and adjust the federal childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule as appropriate based on gold standard science.” It also directed the agency to “improve vaccine safety monitoring, transparency, and research.”
The focus on the MMR vaccine is particularly unhelpful now, “when we are in the midst of an uncontrolled measles outbreak that is likely to result in the U.S. losing its measles elimination status this week or next,” said Jacobs, adding that in a just world, “the focus right now would not be on making it more difficult to complete vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella. It would be on rolling out a rigorous public health campaign to ensure that all people in the U.S. are protected with the only measles vaccine we have at our disposal — the safe and effective MMR vaccine.”
Asked Tuesday about the missed deadline, an HHS spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the agency “is actively implementing President Trump’s Executive Order on Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations. The HHS Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines is working to strengthen vaccine safety research, improve transparency, and expand options for American families. This work requires careful scientific review, and HHS remains committed to advancing the President’s priorities through gold standard science and informed parental choice.”
The process of using a task force to recommend changes to the vaccine schedule does not sit well with the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

“Any changes to vaccine recommendations should be made by a legitimate, legal ACIP whose members have the relevant expertise and who have been thoroughly vetted and appointed through the standard process,” Amanda Jezek, the society’s senior vice president of public policy and government relations, said in an email.
“Changes to the childhood immunization schedule that have previously been proposed by the administration lack scientific justification and would cause significant confusion among clinicians, patients, and families and could jeopardize insurance coverage and access to vaccines,” she said. “Some of the vaccines that have been discussed to be offered separately are not even manufactured as separate vaccines and there is no scientific justification to separate them.”
The task force is just part of a plan by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to undermine vaccines, Paul Offit, MD, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said in a phone interview. “He thinks there’s gaslighting, that parents who have seen their children hurt by vaccines are dismissed,” he said. “So he’s going to get to the bottom of this.”
“Kennedy has created a four-pronged initiative that will have an NIH clinic devoted to vaccine safety; that will mine electronic medical records to try and find data showing that vaccines are causing harm; that will pay doctors to report harms to the Vaccines Adverse Event Reporting System ; and that will expand and modernize it because he is of the belief that these safety issues are being , which they’re not,” said Offit.
“Whenever a vaccine comes into the market, it’s very quickly subjected to analysis through vaccine safety data,” specifically through the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink, he said. “You see who’s gotten vaccines and who hasn’t, and you can very quickly determine whether there’s a problem.” For example, that system helped public health researchers figure out that the COVID vaccine caused myocarditis in rare cases.
Offit also scoffed at the idea of paying doctors to report vaccine adverse events — “as if that’s the only way they’d be motivated to do it.”
He predicted that eventually, Kennedy “will do the same thing as when he testified at the Senate HELP Committee … he held up a paper that had never been published it was horribly flawed and horribly confounded. And he said, ‘Look, here’s a paper that shows, using the Florida Medicaid data system, that vaccines cause permanent neurological harm.'”

Under the current plan, Kennedy will point to a series of studies to say, “I was right all along,” Offit said. Under a worst-case scenario, “he will try and add some of these harms to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. … If he does that, if he breaks the vaccine compensation program, we’ll be right back to where we were in the 1980s when companies left the business.”