RFK Jr., CDC Alter Childhood Vaccine Schedule To Mimic Denmark’s
from the comparing-apples-and-universal-healthcare dept
The Trump administration’s war on vaccines continues, it seems. We’ve already written extensively about all the bullshit RFK Jr. is pulling when it comes to public health around vaccines. From his dismantling the CDC’s ACIP committee and rebuilding it full of anti-vaxxer allies, pulling public funding for research on new and better RNA vaccines, to rescinding the recommendation for vaccine schedules for diseases such as COVID and hepatitis B, it’s an absolute nightmare. And what is particularly cruel about the nightmare is how it will be chiefly visited upon the most vulnerable possible population: children.
I can’t say for sure that Kennedy is purposefully endangering children, but it’s difficult to think of what he’d do differently if that were his intention. The latest example is the CDC changing the childhood vaccination schedule recommendations out of the blue to mimic Denmark’s, for some reason.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday announced an unprecedented overhaul of the childhood vaccine schedule that recommends fewer shots to all children.
Under the change — effective immediately — the vaccine schedule will more closely resemble Denmark’s, recommending all children get vaccines for 11 diseases, compared with the 18 previously on the schedule.
From all the reporting, this wasn’t something that came out of the current iteration of ACIP. There was no meeting between the CDC and FDA to discuss changes to the schedule. There were no public hearings in which experts could weigh in and the public could get a glimpse into any reasoning for the changes. Instead, there was just the announcement, as though Kennedy himself wrote up the press release after finishing off some half pullups in his Levi’s.
The changes are significant and may have a downstream impact on what is covered by insurance and what is not. Vaccines that used to be universally recommended for children, but which will now be recommended only for “high risk” individuals and/or be recommended based on “shared clinical decision-making” are extensive.
Vaccines recommended for high-risk groups are shots for RSV, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, dengue and two types of bacterial meningitis.
The vaccines that are recommended based on shared clinical decision-making are for rotavirus, the flu, hepatitis A, hepatitis B and bacterial meningitis. The Covid vaccine was moved to shared decision-making last year.
So what is the problem Kennedy is ostensibly trying to solve for by reducing the total number of childhood vaccinations? It’s nothing new, as it turns out. Instead, this is all about reducing exposure to aluminum, which is a common ingredient in vaccines used to produce a better immune response to the shots themselves, thereby increasing the protective response to the vaccines. Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers have long blamed aluminum in vaccines for all sorts of ailments, autism being but one of them.
Interestingly, a recent study out of Denmark itself indicated there was no risk from exposure to the aluminum in vaccines.
A major study from Denmark, published in July, found that aluminum exposure from vaccines isn’t harmful. Kennedy demanded the journal retract the study, calling it “a deceitful propaganda stunt by the pharmaceutical industry”; the journal didn’t issue a retraction.
As per usual, Kennedy is absolutely all over the place with this sort of thing.
There is something else that everyone should keep in mind when you hear that we are modeling the vaccination schedule after Denmark, which has admittedly good health outcomes generally for its population: America isn’t Denmark. And while that may sound flippant, it isn’t and it really, really matters.
Anders Peter Hviid, the senior author of the Danish study on aluminum in vaccines and a professor in the department of epidemiology research at Statens Serum Institut in Denmark — that country’s equivalent of the CDC — wrote in an email in December that Denmark has a more homogeneous population than the U.S., with greater trust in public health institutions, universal and free health care and lower rates of serious outcomes from infectious diseases that it doesn’t vaccinate against but the U.S. does.
Denmark’s robust public health system, for example, makes it much easier for the country to test pregnant women for hepatitis B and ensure that babies born to women who test positive are vaccinated against it. A similar approach, now endorsed by the CDC, hadn’t been successful in the U.S. at cutting infection rates in children.
There’s a reason why public health experts are suggesting the changes Kennedy has made are dangerous. Context-free claims that we’re just modeling the vaccine schedule after another successful industrialized European nation entirely miss the point. The state of healthcare and the complexity of the population in each country are wildly different. And smart healthcare professionals understand the implications of those differences.
Kennedy understands none of this. Nor does he seem particularly interested in becoming educated on the matter. He’s an anti-vaxxer who has been given enormous power to foist his misguided personal conspiracy theories onto the American people.
There can be no doubt that there will be unhappy consequences to this.
Filed Under: cdc, denmark, rfk jr., vaccine schedules, vaccines
Comments on “RFK Jr., CDC Alter Childhood Vaccine Schedule To Mimic Denmark’s”
Any number of dead kids are irrelevent when you value your ego more
I can’t say for sure that Kennedy is purposefully endangering children, but it’s difficult to think of what he’d do differently if that were his intention.
I’m not willing to be nearly as generous. Whether or not Kennedy is intentionally putting the lives of countless children at risk there’s no chance in hell that he hasn’t had expert after expert telling him that his actions will do so with supporting evidence to back them up, so whether he’s deliberately trying to maim and kill kids with his actions he’s at the very least indifferent to that outcome so long as he never has to ever admit that he’s wrong.
Re:
Grey’s law:
“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”
It doesn’t matter in the end what he intends. He is morally responsible regardless of the intent or cause. Knowing which it is might only be useful if one gives you an angle of approach towards leverage or influence to change the behavior.
Magical thinking:
It’s a bureaucratic version of a cargo cult — superficial imitation of form, without actual knowledge or substantive understanding.
They’re gonna peel MMRV back to MMR. MMW.
You also see the people who just don’t understand this (and don’t want to) in the COVID doomer crowd. They’ll point to the US outcomes and extrapolate that to other countries.
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Well, the U.S. was unique in that it had a first-class pharmaceutical/medical science reaction also supported by politics (you have to give Trump substantial credit for “Operation Warpspeed”) that was ruined by third-rate local politics that also ended up poisoning national politics through idiot-pandering (you have to give Trump substantial blame for that).
A really mixed bag.
Now the bag is no longer mixed. It is idiots at the top and the bottom, and the sanity is being squezed out at the middle ranks from both sides.
Re: Re:
Australia, by and large, managed COVID a lot better (though some of the measures we took during that time – especially in Victoria where the impact was hardest – are debateable in terms of how over the top they were). But still we have far too many crying about mask wearing and ventilation as if the US experience (which was an utter shitshow) was the same in Australia.
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How so? The data supporting its success seems mixed at best. For example: “Pfizer’s head of vaccine and research and development, Kathrin Jansen, had said on November 8 [2020] that they ‘were never part of the Warp Speed’…. Albert Bourla of Pfizer stated [he] had launched his own company’s Project Lightspeed nearly two months before Operation Warp Speed got underway…. Experts disagreed whether the U.S. government’s conditional advance order played an important role in expediting Pfizer’s vaccine development process.” And Moderna had been developing their technology for a decade already, and a COVID-19 vaccine for several months before the announcement.
The general idea for such a government plan was good. But everyone in vaccine development was already well aware of the potential pandemic—and then the declared actual pandemic—and would’ve seen the necessity and the potential profit. So, would anything had gone substantially differently without that “Operation”? Maybe the U.S. would’ve had less vaccine availability and development while other countries would’ve had more. Certainly the world would’ve gotten vaccines, masks, test kits, and so on, probably on a broadly similar timeline.
On the other hand, O.W.S. co-proposer Robert Kadlec was credibly accused by immunologist Rick Bright of retaliation for Bright’s early warnings about a pandemic and for speaking against pseudoscience. Kadlec was also accused of undue delay in acquiring masks, swabs, and other important supplies, and of improper bias regarding contractors. The other co-proposer, Peter Marks, was told to fire or resign by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in March 2025. Perhaps Trump was just going along with what seemed politically expedient in 2020 (and not working against common sense and the public, as is happening now—so I’ll give some credit).
A case of a tar pit calling a kettle black
“Deceitful propaganda stunts” are definitely in ample supply these days, and RFKj’s fingerpointing is definitely right on target once you figure out which end of the finger to look at.
It is really indicative of Congress abdictating its responsibilities that there has not yet been impeachment articles for this lethal clown show.
Denmark has universal healthcare, it’s outcomes will inevitably be better than a nation where they’re more than willing to leave children to die.
Re:
Or doubling ACA premiums price because building a ballroom to commemorate the hard work of ICE seems a better investment.
I’m sure this change will be accompanied by Danish healthcare standards, no? US citizens will have free and almost personalized healthcare to the point any disease outbreaks will be readily identified and contained, right?
The next pandemic will start in the US.
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‘Will’ start? I’d argue you should be using the past tense of ‘has started’ given the resurgence of measles.
Pandemic should also probably be chance to pandemics, since I’m sure measles is only the first in a wave of infections that will ravage the country with a pro-plague psychopath in charge of the US’ health.
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Pro-plague is a very apt adjective. And I agree with you. It has probably already started.
US healthcare may be nowhere near the best, but it is the most expensive!
Re: Mass shootings, health care costs and avoidable deaths...
America strives to be #1 in all the wrong categories.
"Other countries are doing it"
Feel like a theme with this administration…
All the possible headlines you could have chosen and that’s what you went with, huh?
Medical experts in the federal government are being laid off medical insurance costs have gone up 100 per cent in the last few months
Demark has a public healthcare system that will never exist in the USA
America has a very diverse population and the healthcare you can access depends on your wage job medical insurance and where you live .local hospitals and medical clinics are shutting down due to cuts in medical insurance
Rfkjr does not like vaccines he is leaving the most vunerable population children vunerable to measles and other diseases which can be stopped by widespread early vaccination
He is not following the advice of medical experts that formerly would recommend a wide range of vaccines especially to mothers and children
For Christopher
When I was eleven, myself and two other classmates came down with meningitis. The year was 2000, and it would be five more years until routine vaccination against meningococcal infections began for adolescents and teens. One of us, Christopher, never recovered. He passed away at the age of eleven. Meningitis wasn’t common when Chris was growing up. His death was a rare occurrence even then, but the confusing grief it left in its wake sure wasn’t. That grief ripped through our entire community faster than any case of measles ever could. Vaccines save the lives of children. They also save communities (including other children) from experiencing the profound agony that comes when a child dies a meaningless death. Christopher died from an infection that he most likely would not have contracted had he been born only a few years later. The removal of the meningococcal vaccines is an insult to his memory. It will ensure that other children die in the same painful manner and guarantee more tech dirt posts like this from their grown up friends still bewildered all these years later. RIP, Christopher. Turkey sure does sound like a funny name for a country when you only understand English.