Vaccinate Your Family submitted the following public comment to the Federal Register ahead of the December 2025 meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). It serves as an affirmation of why our organization remains committed to our mission of saving lives from vaccine-preventable diseases and outlines our concerns regarding the current ACIP.
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Vaccinate Your Family (VYF) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that has spent over three decades working alongside families, providers, and policymakers to ensure high vaccine coverage rates in every community. Historically, evidence-based decisions from our nation’s leadership have led to significant drops in diseases. Today, that progress is slipping. Measles cases have reached their highest levels in more than 30 years, and pertussis outbreaks are rising. When we need clarity and evidence-based leadership, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is making decisions that are not grounded in evidence. This meeting threatens to erode access to lifesaving vaccines and promises to create more confusion and fear.
ACIP’s charter is clear: provide advice that prevents vaccine-preventable diseases. Yet recent changes to membership, Work Group (WG) participation, and the Childhood and Adolescent Immunization Schedule WG Terms of Reference raise serious concerns. It appears the ACIP is entertaining the removal or restriction of vaccines from the schedule without new evidence to justify such actions—while ongoing outbreaks of measles and pertussis are not even listed on the agenda.
We are also concerned about the ACIP’s recent lack of use of established, transparent frameworks—such as GRADE and Evidence to Recommendations (EtR)—and the absence of an active hepatitis B WG. For decades, the ACIP has relied on rigorous, months-long review processes, and expert input before issuing recommendations. Moving forward without these safeguards threatens the ACIP’s credibility and Americans’ health.
The stakes could not be higher. Childhood vaccines have prevented 508 million illnesses, 32 million hospitalizations, and over 1.1 million deaths among children born from 1994-2023. The hepatitis B vaccine prevents a virus that becomes chronic in 9 out of 10 infected infants and can lead to liver cancer. Hepatitis B has shaped lives like Alice’s—who learned she had hepatitis B while pregnant, and Alan who lost multiple family members to liver cancer, or Vivian who discovered she had hepatitis B during college. These are real parents, real children, and real futures.
Any disruption to the hepatitis B recommendation would have cascading effects, as the vaccine is part of combination vaccines that also protect against diseases like polio. Furthermore, the ACIP’s recent stance around aluminum—one of the most studied vaccine ingredients—ignores decades of inquiry and established safety data that support its use. Restricting aluminum would disrupt vaccines that protect against 10 of the 18 diseases in the childhood schedule.
Revisiting settled science without new evidence does not build transparency or trust. It threatens vaccination rates, jeopardizes access to no-cost vaccines, and puts children at risk when preventable diseases are resurging.
We represent parents, caregivers, clinicians, and the majority of Americans who want the ACIP to uphold its mission. We urge the ACIP to return to its evidence-based processes, rely on true gold standard science, and make decisions that protect—not endanger—our communities’ health.