STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
U.S. health officials announced a major overhaul to vaccine recommendations for children.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Yeah. It reduces the number of vaccines that are routinely recommended. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made the changes in response to a directive from President Trump.
INSKEEP: NPR's Pien Huang is covering this story. Good morning.
PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: Good morning.
INSKEEP: OK. Just talk us through. What are the changes?
HUANG: So all U.S. children are now recommended to get vaccines against 11 diseases, which is six fewer than there were yesterday morning. What remains on that everyone-should-get-this list includes vaccines against measles, polio, chickenpox, HPV. But other shots that used to be recommended for all kids, like those for rotavirus, meningitis, hepatitis A and B and flu, are now recommended only for children at high risk or only after talking with a health care provider. Dr. Sean O'Leary with the American Academy of Pediatrics says this will lead to fewer children getting vaccinated against diseases, and some of these effects will be seen years down the line, but seasonal flu is spreading now.
SEAN O'LEARY: The flu vaccine this year actually is working very well to protect children. So to back off on a flu recommendation in the midst of, you know, a pretty severe flu year seems to be pretty tone deaf.
HUANG: And these changes were done in an unusual way.
INSKEEP: Unusual how?
HUANG: So there were no new scientific developments behind it. There was no public comment period. Vaccine makers were not involved. And it sidestepped the CDC's vaccine advisory committee.
INSKEEP: Just trying to apply my common sense here. You mentioned flu. I mean, somebody in my family had the flu the other day. Meningitis - another one that there's no longer a recommendation for everyone to get vaccinated. Sounds like a pretty serious disease. So what is this based on?
HUANG: Yeah. They are, Steve. And early in December, President Trump issued a memo directing health officials to align the U.S. vaccine schedule with those in what he called peer-developed countries like Germany, Japan, Australia. And that kicked off a review led by two senior officials. Tracy Beth Hoeg of the FDA and Martin Kulldorff, both of them were hired by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and both were closely involved with his vaccine changes last year. And they put out this report yesterday, which focused a lot on the vaccine schedule in Denmark, which requires fewer vaccines than any of the other countries reviewed. Dr. Jesse Goodman, a former FDA official now at Georgetown University, says that is not the best comparison.
JESSE GOODMAN: Most well-off Western countries are recommending these vaccines for their citizens, and it really is Denmark that's an outlier.
HUANG: Denmark has a smaller population than New York City. It's quite homogeneous, and they have universal health care. And to Goodman's point, some of the shots the U.S. just took off the universally recommended list, like rotavirus, meningitis and hepatitis B, are recommended for all kids in most of the other countries that were reviewed.
INSKEEP: I'm just interested by the concept that this administration would say we should do something because a European country, of all countries, does this. But what does this mean for parents? How do they make sense of this?
HUANG: So it's very confusing. I mean, health officials say all the vaccines are still available for free for any parent that wants them. That's because all the vaccines are still technically on the schedule. They've just shifted to some different categories, like shared clinical decision-making, which means that parents should get a medical consult before deciding to get them. But parents who want vaccines may need to advocate for them, and some clinicians may be thinking there's more paperwork involved, and a lot of doctors' offices historically don't stock vaccines that require these extra consultations.
INSKEEP: NPR's Pien Huang. Thanks so much.
HUANG: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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