Vaccinate Your Family submitted the following public comment to the Federal Register ahead of the June meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). It serves as a reaffirmation of why the organization remains committed to our mission to saving lives from vaccine-preventable diseases and outlines our concerns regarding the entirely new panel of ACIP members appointed by the HHS secretary.
To add your voice in support of vaccines, use this Action Alert to send an email to your elected officials urging the President to use his power to protect American families by maintaining access to vaccines.
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Vaccinate Your Family is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to saving lives from vaccine-preventable diseases. For more than thirty years we have relied on CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ recommendations to guide our work in educating the public. For our organization, preventing unnecessary death from disease is personal. In 2009, our colleague Serese Marotta lost her healthy five-year-old son Joseph to flu.
Our organization works closely with parents and family members who have lost loved ones to diseases that are preventable through vaccination. We honor the memories of: Kimberly and Emily, young women who died from meningococcal B virus just a few years before a vaccine was available; Callie, Carter, Brie, and Brady who died as infants from whooping cough before a vaccine for pregnant women became widely available; Teresa, a ten-year-old who lost her life to COVID one month before a vaccine became available for kids.
We also work with patient advocates who are survivors who have suffered serious medical outcomes from vaccine-preventable diseases. People like Mindy, who was a healthy mom of two when she suffered severe flu complications and spent 28 days on life support, remind us that these diseases can have serious consequences. And let us not forget people like Henry, a pediatric cancer patient, whose compromised immune system during treatments meant he had to rely on others around him to be protected against vaccine-preventable diseases.
These are just a few of the personal stories we honor today – there are sadly many, many more. And there will be many more stories like this if access to lifesaving vaccines is no longer available due to changes in recommendations that affect insurance coverage, or cause confusion amongst providers and the public.
We are deeply concerned about the expertise, credibility, and conflicts held by many of the newly appointed members of this Committee. All but one of the new members appear to lack experience administering vaccines in clinical practice, treating patients with vaccine-preventable diseases, researching vaccines through randomized controlled trials, nor public health expertise.
Our organization, along with vaccine advocates throughout the nation, will be listening closely as the new ACIP members review data on the safety and effectiveness of current and future vaccines.
We will be watching to understand how the members handle their new responsibility to protect the American people and keep America healthy. We call on HHS and CDC to demand that committee members avoid any cherry-picking of data in order to draw conclusions that fit their previously conceived notions about vaccine safety. We call on HHS and CDC to ensure that members set aside personal beliefs and ideologies and base their conclusions and recommendations on the preponderance of available, credible scientific data.
If access to lifesaving vaccines is compromised in any way, more children, adolescents and adults will die. More people will suffer needlessly from preventable diseases. More families will be devastated by preventable tragedies as Americans become needlessly ill from diseases that decades ago crippled public health. We need only to look to history to see what will befall us if vaccines are no longer a part of preventive healthcare. The work entrusted to the ACIP is critically important and must not compromise the ability of families to vaccinate their loved ones.
We are parents, caregivers and public health advocates who have a shared interest in assuring that all recommended vaccines remain safe and effective. We are confident that the vaccines available today are the result of decades of scientific research, ongoing safety monitoring, and global collaboration. We respect the gravity of the decisions that have been made by the ACIP and must be able to trust the scientific rigor behind the recommendations.
Vaccines need to remain available, accessible, and affordable. Lives depend on it.
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To add your voice in support of vaccines, use this Action Alert to send an email to your elected officials urging the President to use his power to protect American families by maintaining access to vaccines.