{"id":1201,"date":"2026-03-20T22:45:06","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T22:45:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinosentinel.com\/?p=1201"},"modified":"2026-03-21T17:40:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-21T17:40:16","slug":"cdc-no-longer-a-reliable-source-for-vaccine-information-says-noted-pediatrician","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinosentinel.com\/en\/california\/cdc-no-longer-a-reliable-source-for-vaccine-information-says-noted-pediatrician\/","title":{"rendered":"CDC No Longer a Reliable Source for Vaccine Information, Says Noted Pediatrician"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sunita Sohrabji<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are major efforts taking place around the country to remove vaccination requirements for children going to school. To me, that is one of the most frightening ideas that I’ve seen in my lifetime. \u2014 Dr. Richard Besser, CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(Jonathan Borba image via Unsplash\/copyright free)<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is no longer a credible source for vaccine information, said pediatrician Dr. Richard Besser, CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt is absolutely heartbreaking to me to say. I worked at the CDC for 13 years with dedicated employees. But I do not recommend looking to the CDC for information around vaccines,\u201d stated Besser, speaking at a Feb. 20 American Community Media news briefing<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replaced them with a panel of his choosing. \u201cThe new panel is loaded with anti-vaccine zealots,\u201d noted Besser. He added that few of the new members<\/a> have public health or vaccination expertise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Measles Re-Emerge<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

ACIP Chair Dr. Kirk Milhoan has said that both the polio and the measles vaccines should be optional. Neither are the threats they were several years ago due to better sanitation and other factors, he said on the Jan. 22 episode of the podcast \u201cWhy Should I Trust You?\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Measles were declared eradicated in the year 2000, but are making a comeback in the US, due to lower vaccination rates. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health\u2019s vaccine tracker<\/a> reports 1099 reported measles cases in just the first two months of 2026. The data includes a major outbreak in South Carolina, with 674 cases, and a smaller outbreak in Utah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the full year of 2025, 2213 cases of measles were recorded in the university\u2019s vaccine tracker. The numbers include severe outbreaks in Texas, Utah, South Carolina, and Arizona.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere are major efforts taking place around the country to remove vaccination requirements for children going to school. To me, that is one of the most frightening ideas that I\u2019ve seen in my lifetime,\u201d said Besser. \u201cWhat it will mean is that if you\u2019re sending your child to kindergarten and you\u2019ve decided to vaccinate, you don\u2019t know that they\u2019re not going to be sitting next to a child who is unvaccinated, who could potentially give them something quite serious and severe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lawsuits<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

ACIP was scheduled to meet Feb. 25-27, but that meeting was cancelled. On Jan. 13, the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP) filed a separate lawsuit<\/a> stating that a CDC memo on vaccine recommendations were not based on scientific evidence and bypassed ACIP recommendations. The lawsuit sought to cancel the February meeting and block changes to the existing vaccine schedule for children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cChildren\u2019s health depends on vaccine recommendations based on rigorous, transparent science,\u201d said AAP President Andrew D. Racine, M.D., Ph.D., FAAP. \u201cUnfortunately, recent decisions by federal officials have abandoned this standard, causing unnecessary confusion for families, compromising access to lifesaving vaccines and weakening community protection.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lawsuit seeks to restore the CDC\u2019s immunization schedule to where it stood on April 15, 2025, before Kennedy\u2019s panel kicked in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Several states\u2019 attorneys general filed a lawsuit<\/a> Feb. 24 against Kennedy and CDC Acting Director Jay Bhattacharya stating similar concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Credible Recommendations<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The American Association of Pediatrics puts out a vaccines<\/a> schedule each year. In most cases previously, its recommendations matched those of ACIP. This year, however, AAP\u2019s recommendations differ, most prominently on vaccines for Hepatitis A and B, Covid-19, RSV, and measles, mumps, rubella and varicella \u2014 MMRV. Besser recommends looking at the AAP schedule rather than relying on the CDC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are excerpts from the Feb. 20 news briefing, edited for brevity:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/strong>Dr. Besser, what do you say to parents who are simply unsure of what to believe right now?<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

What I say is I don\u2019t recommend taking your medical advice from politicians. My advice is if you\u2019re fortunate enough to have a medical provider who you know and trust, ask them what you should do. It\u2019s really challenging to sort through all the noise that\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the challenges, however, is that not everybody has a doctor. And the number of people who have a doctor is actually declining. So we\u2019re going to see issues of health disparities based on that and that alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What ACIP did was it moved a number of vaccines from a category of being recommended for all children to a category that they call shared decision-making. I find that strange because every decision I made with a family was shared decision-making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyone should feel that their health is something that they have control over and any decision with a healthcare provider should involve shared decision-making. You have a right to have your questions answered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did the pandemic give rise to overall vaccine skepticism, as so many people dutifully took their shots, but got COVID nonetheless<\/strong>?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

During COVID-19, CDC was shut off from the public. They weren\u2019t allowed to talk directly And so you had politicians framing every new recommendation as a flip-flop and that \u2018public health doesn\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With any new public health crisis, many of the things experts believe at the beginning will change and their recommendations will change with that. But there was no opportunity to bring the public along and maintain trust during that pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the challenges with vaccines is that they impact your risk of getting a disease. And so with the COVID vaccine, if you get the vaccine, you are far less likely to get severe COVID, to be hospitalized or to die than if you didn\u2019t get the vaccine. But that doesn\u2019t mean that there weren\u2019t people who got the vaccine, who got sick, who got hospitalized and died. It was just a smaller percentage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please discuss ACIP Chair Milhoan\u2019s recommendations for making polio vaccinations optional.<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

As a global community, we have come very close to wiping polio off the face of the planet. The only disease in humans that we have been successful at doing that for is smallpox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And there\u2019s a global effort to wipe out polio. That effort, I don\u2019t think is going to be successful. One of the big reasons it\u2019s not going to be successful is that here in the United States, we are backing away from the commitment to ensuring that every child in every community has access to the vaccines that can help protect their health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea that polio could come back to our country is just devastating. I visited a polio hospital in India and saw the outcome of what happens in communities that have not had the same access to vaccination. And it\u2019s debilitating. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please discuss the new recommendations for Hepatitis B vaccinations. Hepatitis, as you know, disproportionately affects South and East Asians, as well as Black people.<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The Hepatitis B vaccine to me is pretty miraculous. This is a vaccine that not only reduces hepatitis B infection, it reduces liver cancer and cirrhosis. It is, it is, an anti-cancer vaccine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ACIP recently removed the recommendation that hepatitis B vaccine be given to newborns. And that is, I think, a very unwise decision. By vaccinating at the newborn period, we pretty much knocked out hepatitis B in America. And so I worry now that we are going to start to see a rise in hepatitis B, but we\u2019re not going to see it probably for decades. We vaccinate against hepatitis B is to prevent the cancers that occur later in life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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