There’s been increasing concern about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership as Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary, after he fired all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replaced them with many members who share his anti-vaccine views.
The CDC’s Advisory Committee met and voted on Sept. 19 against recommending that a prescription be required to get a COVID-19 vaccination, but opposed recommending the vaccine for all adults, leaving it up to individuals. The panel also voted to change a recommendation on the combined measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox (MMRV) vaccine, supporting separate, instead of combined shots for children under the age of 4.
Experts with the Infectious Diseases Society of America expressed concern about last week’s vaccine advisory board meeting, which they described as chaotic and were alarmed that some committee members presented false claims about vaccine safety. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Elizabeth Jacobs, professor emeritus in epidemiology at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona. Here, she shares her views on President Trump and Kennedy’s recent claim, without evidence, that acetaminophen — the active ingredient in the pain reliever Tylenol — was a cause of autism. She also comments on action taken by Florida state officials to end vaccine mandates for school children.
ELIZABETH JACOBS: Once again, Mr. Kennedy and the other group of people over there in HHS are mistaking correlation or association with causation. The major pediatric groups and obstetric groups have repeatedly said that acetaminophen or Tylenol during pregnancy is safe and effective and in fact much safer than other painkillers. There have been some studies that have indicated an association between the use of painkillers and the later development of autism spectrum disorder.
However, many of those studies do not control for the condition that led to a mother taking acetaminophen in the first place. So if it was a fever, for example, fevers themselves are associated with an increased risk of autism spectrum disorder. So it’s really complicated. And the one study that made me really convinced that acetaminophen is not a cause of autism was a big one that was published last year with more than a million children. They found that there was no association when they used siblings as the control group. And that’s important in short because it controls for both genetic and environmental exposures.
SCOTT HARRIS: Professor Jacobs, I’d like you to comment briefly on what we’ve seen come out of Florida recently where Gov. Ron DeSantis, an unsuccessful presidential candidate, and I believe he’s term limited now. But DeSantis and his public health coordinator are moving forward with the idea that the state of Florida will do away with vaccine mandates for school-aged children. This idea may already be spreading to legislatures across the country and conservative-controlled states. Tell us a little bit about what you see happening in Florida that may spread across the country.
ELIZABETH JACOBS: So what I see happening in Florida is a tragedy. So about 15 years ago when I started studying vaccine exemptions or people who opted out of getting their children vaccinated, one of the conclusions I came to is that the most important barrier to rampant vaccine preventable disease outbreaks are childhood vaccine requirements for school entry.
So in other words, if you want to go to public school, your children do have to be vaccinated against certain diseases and the state sets those requirements, not the federal government. And so, DeSantis is well within his ability to say, “We no longer require any vaccinations for school entry.” That is clearly going to result in infectious disease outbreaks. There’s just no question about it. And with that spreading to other states, again, the lower our vaccination coverages, the less protected we all are and it’s dangerous and it’s tragic. I just can’t understand why this is happening.
SCOTT HARRIS: I think part of the answer to that is that one particular political party, the Republicans, have seen some benefit politically from weaponizing the debate about vaccines. And I’m not sure that any of these folks who are pushing the conspiracy theories that vaccines are horrible and will kill you and all this stuff, I’m not sure they really believe it, but they see a political advantage in pushing that line. Is that something that you’re seeing as well?
ELIZABETH JACOBS: Absolutely. And unfortunately, it’s part of an effort of people to maintain their power and influence at the expense of all of us. It’s a disgrace. And so, when I say I can’t understand it, the chickens are going to come home to roost. There are going to be increases in infectious disease eventually. Unfortunately, the child of people who do believe in vaccines, but perhaps the child is too young to have gotten vaccines is going to become ill and there is no way that they will be able to hide at that point. What they have going for them is that it may take three or four years for the level of vaccination coverage to drop low enough that we start to see really significant infectious disease spread. So they may actually be calculating that, which is even more just repellent.
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