Recent weeks have brought good news about vaccines, with studies indicating that flu vaccination reduces heart disease, shingles vaccines can prevent or slow dementia, and a single human papillomavirus shot protects a girl from cervical cancer for the rest of her life. But in the upside-down world of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., vaccines are on the ropes. A vaccine committee dominated by skeptics he chose for the panel voted 8-to-3 Friday to end a 34-year recommendation to inoculate newborns against hepatitis B, a practice that helped reduce childhood infections of the virus by 99%, from around 16,000 in 1991 to only seven in 2023. While the committee went about its deliberations, the peril of abandoning vaccines was plain to see. The country’s worst year since 1992 for measles — an entirely vaccine-preventable illness — continued with flare-ups in Utah, Arizona, and South Carolina. A two-year outbreak of whooping cough, which vaccines can also check, has caused about 60,000 reported cases — including at least six infant deaths. But neither of those diseases was discussed on the first day of the meeting by members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The panel’s chartered purpose is to determine vaccination policies to counter such risks, but under Kennedy, it has focused on responding to doubts from vaccine skeptics and opponents. Like previous gatherings of the committee, which was handpicked by Kennedy after he fired the panel’s 17 incumbent experts in June, the session was chaotically at odds…
