What Is Really Happening With Vaccination Policy?

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The national press was overtaken with hullabaloo following the recent meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). This is a committee that serves under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), providing a check of outside expertise on what would otherwise be a bureaucratic edict.

It brings together outside experts from academia and medicine to provide guidance on how the CDC should advise doctors and parents on vaccines. As part of the new committee formed by Health and Human Services director Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., there are strict rules against conflict of interest.

The new committee has voted to make a small, common-sense change in the childhood vaccination schedule. It is seen as hugely significant because it has taken issue with a particular shot that has been on the schedule since 1991.

The shot concerns Hepatitis B. Instead of a universal recommendation, the committee suggested that it should not pertain in the first months of life provided the birthing mother has tested negative for the disease. After that time, the shot should only be given when there is informed consent.

Stated that way, it does not seem even slightly controversial. Indeed, one wonders why the shot was ever on the schedule, especially given the paltry data on effectiveness and safety. On March 1, 1991, the New York Times reported on its addition to the childhood schedule: “If adults won’t go for the shots, then give them to babies.”

As part of the childhood schedule, they are automatically granted immunity from liability, as legislated in 1986 on fear that lawsuits could bankrupt the whole industry. With such a shield in place, there was a gold rush to move shots from targeting adults to being given to children. Most kids in the United States since those days have taken the shot, even those at no risk of the disease in question.

That it should be removed from the schedule for mothers testing negative would seem entirely non-controversial. It certainly does not warrant panic that the entire schedule is being shredded or that the industry will collapse. The response of the industry is entirely disproportionate to the threat. In addition, the committee had open public debate for two full days. It was hardly ill-considered.

The committee had invited a variety of perspectives. One was from a schedule skeptic, attorney Aaron Siri, who is a lawyer and author who has testified widely on the topic. To balance that out, ACIP invited Paul Offit, of the Vaccine Education Center in Philadelphia, and Peter Hotez of Texas Children’s Hospital. Both are famous for their uncritical attitude.

The trouble is that Drs. Offit and Hotez refused the invitation. That is strange. They were invited to speak for up to 45 minutes without interruption to the entire world because the meeting was livestreamed. This was the perfect opportunity for them to make their case to the committee, to the CDC, and to the world. They said, each in his own way, that they did not want to legitimize the committee by honoring it with their testimony.

This is taking place even as a coalition of coastal states have pushed a secessionist measure to impose their own vaccine schedule against the efforts of the HHS, CDC, and ACIP to pare back some recommendations to pre-1986 levels.

Donald Trump has meanwhile weighed in on the controversies.

“Today, the CDC Vaccine Committee made a very good decision to END their Hepatitis B Vaccine Recommendation for babies, the vast majority of whom are at NO RISK of Hepatitis B, a disease that is mostly transmitted sexually, or through dirty needles. The American Childhood Vaccine Schedule long required 72 ‘jabs,’ for perfectly healthy babies, far more than any other Country in the World, and far more than is necessary. In fact, it is ridiculous! Many parents and scientists have been questioning the efficacy of this ‘schedule,’ as have I! That is why I have just signed a Presidential Memorandum directing the Department of Health and Human Services to ‘FAST TRACK’ a comprehensive evaluation of Vaccine Schedules from other Countries around the World, and better align the U.S. Vaccine Schedule, so it is finally rooted in the Gold Standard of Science and COMMON SENSE! I am fully confident Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the CDC, will get this done, quickly and correctly, for our Nation’s Children.”

Thus can we see that Trump himself wants to go much further.

We are confronted with a fascinating historical paradox here. Trump has said many times that he is very proud of Operation Warp Speed that brought a shot for COVID to market in record time. Many of his supporters, however, do not agree with this opinion. And to be sure, the effectiveness and safety of this injection has not scored high marks on anyone’s scale.

That said, Trump is now leading the charge for a full rethinking of the place of vaccines and shot mandates in national life. His own Food and Drug Administration has sounded the alarm on the COVID shots for kids, which were never necessary in the first place. They were often mandated for school attendance. It turns out that there were at least 10 deaths definitively traceable to this shot and probably many more. People are understandably scandalized.

Beneath all this debate, there is a much broader meta-narrative at work. Vaccines had long expanded in use without too much public debate. It was the COVID response and the mandates for millions to accept an untested technology (modified mRNA) else lose their jobs. This was a bridge too far. To top it off, the shot did not stop transmission or infection and has revealed a poor safety profile.

As a result, many aspects of the entire system of public health have come into question. What’s on trial here is not just one shot or the childhood schedule or even vaccines only. What’s come into question is the credibility of the expert class of medicine men who shepherded this entire regime into operational legitimacy. If anyone believes that there would be a return to the status quo ante following all of this, that person is woefully naive about the relationship between the public mind and structures of governance.

What is unfolding right now is the consequence of a loss of trust. That does not mean that everything government has said is thus rejected. What this does mean is a dramatic shift in the burden of proof. The Hepatitis B shot needed to prove that it was necessary, safe, and effective for all newborn children, even those of mothers who have tested negative. Under that standard, the shot simply could not survive.

As we look at the entire schedule, it is true that there are other formulas and diseases that will be subjected to what is called shared decision-making between parents and medical doctors. Which is to say: We are watching the emergence of choice and volunteerism to primacy of place where they should have been all along.