Experts say a U.S. plan to drop some childhood vaccines to match Denmark’s plan will put children at risk
The United States is reportedly planning to overhaul the country’s childhood vaccination schedule. Experts say this move could set public health back decades
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent vaccine skeptic, has championed efforts to change the vaccine schedule in the United States.
Tasos Katopoudis/Getty Images
The United States is reportedly planning to overhaul the country’s childhood vaccination schedule. This step, First reported by CNNIt would change the number of vaccines to protect against different diseases that children get and when they receive those immunizations.
Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, is a longtime vaccine skeptic and supports changing the vaccine schedule. Recommendations for several vaccines currently routinely offered to children in the United States — including shots for rotavirus, varicella (chickenpox), hepatitis A, meningococcal bacteria, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) — could be scrapped entirely under the plans, according to CNN.
Childhood vaccines collectively protect children and the U.S. population as a whole from diseases, such as measles and hepatitis B, that used to sicken, hospitalize, or kill hundreds or even thousands each year. Currently, children in the United States are recommended to be vaccinated against 18 diseases, compared to 10 diseases in Denmark.
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Changing the type of vaccines children get would be a “huge mistake,” says Jessica Malate-Rivera, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of California, California. Public health advocacya volunteer organization sponsored by a non-profit organization. As a result, more children could get sick and die from preventable diseases.
For example, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the leading cause of hospitalization for infants, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Between 58,000 and 80,000 children under the age of five are hospitalized each year in the United States due to the disease. The two available doses, which are not technically vaccines but are antiviral drugs that protect against respiratory syncytial virus, are approved for 2023 and 2025 and are more than 90 percent effective at protecting against hospitalization. Malate Rivera points out that many of the vaccines said to be targeted for elimination are those that were recently approved.
People have a random line of “old school” vaccines, such as the polio and measles vaccines, and “new school” vaccines, such as the chicken pox and human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines, Malate Rivera says. But these newer vaccines have been around for decades, and have been shown to be highly effective, she says.
The Trump administration has mentioned previously It wants to model US vaccine policy after other developed countries, specifically Denmark, which recommends fewer vaccines than the United States and recommends them at different times in life. The comparison was a key focus of discussion at a recent meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vaccine Advisory Committee. But it doesn’t make sense to compare the United States to countries, like Denmark, that have a vastly different health care system.
Such a comparison “is not apples to oranges, it is apples to steak,” says Malate Rivera. “I cannot underestimate the value of universal health care and the highly regulated health care infrastructure” in Denmark.
“We can learn a lot from some of the studies that come from other countries, but we have to use a critical mind to figure out what applies to our context and what doesn’t,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Epidemiology at Brown University.
The main difference between the United States and Denmark that Kennedy and other US health officials seem to avoid is that the European country has a national health care system that covers everyone for free while the United States does not.
“Denmark and other places have universal health coverage where people don’t fall into health care gaps like in the United States,” Nuzzo says. “The reality of our health system is that people fall into health care gaps.”
In the United States, the changing vaccine schedule will also affect who will be able to get the vaccine. Whatever the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends affects what private health insurance companies will cover and what federal programs, such as the Vaccines for Children Program, will support.
“When changes are made to the schedule, that will have consequences for who can get vaccines, whether you want them or not,” Nuzzo says. “It’s not about letting you opt out. It’s about making it more difficult for you to opt in.”
The plan may change, according to CNN. The Department of Health and Human Services had scheduled a press conference on children’s health on Friday, but has since postponed the announcement until next year.
If these additional changes occur, Nuzzo says, they will weaken collective protection against deadly infectious diseases. Individual medical providers and states may step up their efforts to maintain access to vaccines, but people could still slip through the cracks of an increasingly patchwork public health system.
“We have to make public health recommendations that are useful to everyone,” Nuzzo says. “Obviously there are people who can’t spend the bulk of their time trying to find reliable sources of information.” “I’m concerned about the people who won’t get the life-saving protection they need.”
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