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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s handpicked slate of vaccine advisers voted to no longer recommend a combined shot for measles, mumps, rubella and varicella for children under age 4.
[…]
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a key panel under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, voted 8-3, with one abstention, to no longer recommend MMRV, a combined shot immunizing against measles, mumps, rubella and varicella, also known as chickenpox, for children under 4. Parents would instead be recommended to get their young children one vaccine for varicella and a second known as the MMR vaccine that inoculates against the other three diseases, under the committee’s new guidance.
Seems pretty innocuous, kind of like the “reasonable” restrictions that the Roberts court put on abortion before they had the votes for Dobbs. Well:
Some public health leaders criticized the committee for revisiting the issue. “The only reason they would be reopening this discussion is they want to scare people basically and smear vaccines,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
My old man will be 95 at the end of the month, dios mediante. One of the more interesting sets of stories I’ve heard about his long medical career was when he visited an old friend. Dad and this guy had done their pediatric rotations at an Indian Health Service hospital in Gallup, NM. This was in the late 50’s. Sometimes parents waited to bring their sick children to the hospital until after a “sing”, causing at least a day’s delay, and by the time the kids got to the hospital, they were often severely dehydrated. Not only did they have to start IVs on kids, they had to do their bloods by looking at the colors of flames in metal pieces dipped in the kid’s blood and heated over a bunsen burner. (Today the same tests can be done by machines in moments using only a small amount of blood.)
So, kids died on their service. They died of complications of measles. They died of complications of mumps. They died of regular old gastroenteritis.
Towards the end of his career, Dad made a frustrated comment about a pediatrician who he asked for a consult on a sick child: “It’s like they’ve never seen a child die.” (I think he was talking about timidity and reluctance to offer an opinion about a tough case because they were too scared of being wrong.)
That remark stuck with me — he’s a harsh guy, obviously. Knowing him, I’m sure his frustration was because he had a sick kid on his hands, 100 miles from the closest referral center, and even further from the closest children’s hospital. He expected a specialist with far more training than him to give him some insight on how to save a child’s life.
The bad news here is that more and more healthcare professionals are going to know what it’s like to watch a child die. More parents, who have nothing but the best intentions for their kids, will also have that experience. All because some leather faced testosterone abusing failson thinks he knows better than a group of some of the world’s best scientists.
The good news on the vaccine front is that blue states are banding together to issue and enforce their own vaccination advice. Northeast states: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island have started a “public health collaborative.” So have Western states: California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii.
New Mexico and Colorado should do this, too, but it’s not clear what our libertarian dude bro governor, who thinks RFK has some good ideas, will end up doing. Perhaps he has a taste for dead children, too.
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