As an alternative to new federal vaccine recommendations, the Itasca-based American Academy of Pediatrics released its own childhood vaccine schedule Monday with the backing of a dozen of the nation’s most prominent medical groups and associations.
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ vaccine schedule differs from the new federal one in a number of ways, largely sticking to previous recommendations. For example, it continues to recommend routine flu vaccinations, hepatitis B vaccinations for all infants and COVID-19 vaccines for all children from the ages of 6 to 23 months, whereas the new federal schedule does not, instead leaving it up to parents and doctors whether to vaccinate individual children, in most cases.
“The recommendations from the CDC, I think, are confusing for parents and for pediatricians,” said Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and a member of the Academy’s committee on infectious diseases. “These recommendations … are very different from what CDC recommended a year ago or two years ago or five years ago. It’s not that the science has changed. It’s that the people running CDC have changed.”
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The Academy’s hope is that pediatricians and families will follow the Academy’s schedule when deciding how to vaccinate children, Ratner said.
The Academy’s vaccine schedule “is based on the best available vaccine science and knowledge that we have,” Ratner said. “It’s not a schedule that is based on political whims.”
A dozen major medical associations including the Chicago-based American Medical Association have thrown their support behind the American Academy of Pediatrics’ vaccine schedule.
“We need our patients and the public to understand that physicians and health care professionals consider vaccines among the most effective tools that we have for protecting health, and they deserve clear, updated information about the benefits of vaccination,” said Dr. Bobby Mukkamala, president of the American Medical Association at a news conference Monday. He said changes to vaccine recommendations at the federal level were made “without a robust, evidence-based process and no new scientific data to support it.
“It has undermined public trust and put millions of children at unnecessary risk of preventable disease,” Mukkamala said.
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ vaccine schedule comes after the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently moved to remake the childhood vaccination schedule, to recommend children be vaccinated against 11 illnesses, whereas it had previously recommended broad immunization against 17 illnesses.
Notably, the CDC is no longer broadly recommending shots that protect against the flu, rotavirus, COVID-19, meningococcal disease, hepatitis A and hepatitis B, instead leaving it up to parents and doctors whether to give them to individual children. The CDC is still recommending some of those vaccines for children who are high-risk.
Federal officials said the new CDC schedule came after a review of other countries’ vaccine practices and the scientific evidence behind them, conducted at the instruction of President Donald Trump.
“The updated CDC childhood schedule continues to protect children against serious diseases while aligning U.S. guidance with international norms,” a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement Monday. “Many peer nations achieve high vaccination rates without mandates by relying on trust, education, and strong doctor-patient relationships, and HHS will work with states and clinicians to ensure families have clear, accurate information to make their own informed decisions.”
The federal changes don’t affect vaccine recommendations in Illinois, which had already adopted the CDC’s previous immunization schedule, said Dr. Sameer Vohra, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, earlier this month.
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ new vaccine schedule is the group’s latest break with the federal government since Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic, took charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
In July, the American Academy of Pediatrics, along with four other medical groups, sued Kennedy over changes made to COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for children and pregnant women. The Academy and other groups have since filed an amended version of that lawsuit that alleges newly appointed members to a federal vaccine advisory committee lack the credentials and experience to serve in their roles and that the group’s votes should be declared null and void. Kennedy fired and replaced all the members of that advisory committee last year. That lawsuit is ongoing.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement Monday that the American Academy of Pediatrics “is angry that CDC eliminated corporate influence in vaccine recommendations by reconstituting the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices with leading physicians and public health experts and by accepting recommendations from a comprehensive scientific review of U.S. childhood immunization practices conducted under President Trump’s order to examine international best practices in peer developed countries.”
The Academy filed another lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in late December after the department cut nearly $12 million in grants to the organization. The Academy argued that the funding cuts violated the First Amendment and were in retaliation for speaking out against actions by the administration. A federal judge granted the Academy’s request for a preliminary injunction earlier this month to temporarily stop the government from terminating the grants while the Academy’s lawsuit proceeds.
“(The American Academy of Pediatrics) continues with their attempts to hinder this Administration’s work through procedural and legal challenges while trying to preserve a broken status quo,” said a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, of the lawsuits, in a statement. “(The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) remains the scientific body guiding immunization recommendations in this country, and HHS ensures policy is based on rigorous evidence and gold standard science.”