Cross the MMRV and HBV Vaccines Off the Schedule

Anti-vax ACIP kicks off another two day assault on disease and death prevention

CDC

It’s a big day for the bloodthirsty psychopaths of the MAHA movement, as there’s a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meeting getting started as I write this. At the last ACIP meeting in June, US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s octet of hand-selected anti-vaxxers brought their preventable disease-loving lack of expertise to America’s vaccine recommendations and pulled multi-dose flu vaccines off of pharmacy shelves by voting on “evidence” long-discredited ancient anti-vax lore that the preservative thimerosal is unsafe for children. Never mind that thimerosal has been used for decades with no evidence of harm or that most vaccines are single-dose formulations with no thimerosal or that kids rarely get multi-dose flu vaccines. The preventable disease enthusiasts at ACIP voted thimerosal off the vaccine market and they were just getting warmed up. Now the sickness squad has five new anti-vaxxers and the rest of the vaccine schedule in their sights. Here’s what to expect from day 1.

The parasites of public health have a busy day planned, according to their agenda. After what I imagine will be a bone-chilling välkommen from Principal Vampiric Ghoul ACIP Chair Martin Kulldorff, this swarm of parasites have a packed schedule of laying waste to the CDC’s vaccine schedule for children.

Why is lunch so short? I guess blood meals don’t take very long

It’s probably not terribly difficult for most people to figure out what the outcome will be once this brain trust ignores actual evidence and enacts the outcome Kennedy has demanded (spoiler: they are going to derecommend two vaccines), it’s worth discussing why these two vaccines are being targeted and what is going to come next.

The anticipated votes were posted this morning, and it was as I expected: they are likely going to strike the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV) and hepatitis B virus (HBV) vaccines.

This will invariably result in more measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, viral hepatitis, and liver cancer. And that’s going to be just the beginning of the decimation of the CDC childhood vaccine schedule.

Can I get this loss of measles elimination status with a side of rubella outbreaks?

At the last ACIP meeting, Kulldorff emerged from his crypt to give a surprise 5 minute presentation on the MMRV vaccine. MMRV combines the MMR vaccine with the varicella (chickenpox) vaccine, so it’s really 2 vaccines in one against 4 terrible viruses that primarily affect children. It is a live-attenuated vaccine, meaning that it is 4 live viruses that have been attenuated so that they elicit immune responses without causing disease. The MMR components have been used for more than 50 years. The Enders-Edmonston measles virus strain used in the Merck MMR-II vaccine, for example, is a measles virus that was isolated by virology and vaccinology legend John Enders from an 11-year-old boy named David Edmonston in Boston. Enders won the Nobel prize in 1954 for being the first to culture poliovirus, and he used his pioneering virus cultivation methods to attenuate the virus by serial passage through chicken embryos. Later, another vaccinology king named Maurice Hilleman developed a version of the Enders-Edmonston strain that was even more attenuated, and in 1971, that became the measles component of the modern MMR. The varicella vaccine is slightly newer and was first licensed in the US in 1995 (the year before I got chickenpox as a 17-year-old senior in high school who was too old to get the vaccine when it dropped—it SUCKED). However, it was also developed in the early 1980s and is very safe and effective at preventing establishment of varicella-zoster virus latency, which means it not only prevents chickenpox, it prevents shingles later in life too. Both the MMR and the varicella vaccine require 2 doses, so the MMRV combines two vaccines and makes for 2 shots instead of 4. Its safety and effectiveness is similar to getting the vaccines separately (MMR+V).

In June, Kulldorff noted that there is a slightly increased risk of febrile seizures associated with the first dose in kids under 4. He used that to float a recommendation that no kids under age 4 should get the MMRV vaccine, since they can just get the MMR+V instead. Seems reasonable, right? After all, don’t we want to reduce the risk of febrile seizures to babies as much as possible?

Of course you want to give a vaccine with the best safety profile for who you are giving it to. But how much is this seizure risk? I looked at the meeting materials prepared by a CDC scientist for the meeting, who shared both a rapid systematic review on safety evidence and slides in advance. There is a very, very small risk of febrile seizure for both the first doses of MMR and MMRV, but the risk is 2-fold higher for MMRV. For MMR, this means about 1 febrile seizure per 3000-4000 kids vaccinated and for MMRV this means 2 febrile seizures in the same group of kids. It’s age-dependent and there is no increased risk for the second dose. Most febrile seizures are scary, but usually resolve quickly and do not have lasting effects. They aren’t associated with long-term neurodevelopmental issues, behavior, or cognitive performance. In fact, febrile seizures occur anyway in children any time they have a fever.

This seems reasonable…pull the MMRV vaccine for first doses in kids under 4 who have an elevated risk, right? They can just get the MMR+V and then get either for their booster after age 4. Except that isn’t what ACIP is going to do.

If the recommendation that they will vote on at the end of the day hasn’t changed since June, the ACIP will recommend that MMRV isn’t given to any child under the age of 4. This will decrease access just by virtue of making vaccination less convenient for some parents. Fewer doses of MMRV will be available altogether, and in some places, people might not be able to access the MMR+V. It will reduce MMR and varicella vaccination across the board. And it paves the way for something much worse.

Remember how I said there is also a slightly elevated febrile seizure risk for MMR as well as MMRV? That’s been known for a long time. The risk is very low and it pales in comparison to the risks inherent to getting measles, mumps, and rubella. Measles and rubella, in particular, both are lethal in kids and can cause permanent disability. Measles can cause a deadly neurodegenerative disease called SSPE years after the primary infection. A kid in Los Angeles just died of it. And when pregnant people are infected with rubella virus, their babies are born with congenital rubella syndrome, which causes permanent blindness, deafness, neurological diseases, and intellectual impairment. In the past, ACIP recommended both the MMR and the MMRV vaccines because the risk of a rare but acute febrile seizure in the 7-10 days following the first dose is infinitely more tolerable compared to the horrors of the diseases that the MMR vaccine very effectively prevents.

I think the MMRV is a trial balloon for doing the same thing to the MMR vaccine. Inflating the seriousness of side effects is an anti-vax tale as old as time. Already, mRNA vaccine hater and supply chain expert/non-immunologist Retsef Levi has inquired whether the many, many studies on MMR and MMRV were designed to accurately evaluate whether the second dose also carries risk. He thinks that studies are not measuring “the mechanisms” of safety risks and we need to keep an open mind about the fact that children who had seizures might be suffering from unrecognized “long term” adverse effects. New ACIP member Evelyn Griffin, an anti-vax OB/GYN who is also certified in “functional medicine” AKA snake oil quackery, says that parents who practice “informed dissent” to refuse vaccines demand placebo-controlled trials in order to trust these vaccines. Besides demonstrating their complete ignorance about vaccinology in general or the decades’ worth of data supporting these vaccines safety and effectiveness, they are laying the groundwork to go after the MMR next. If the MMR vaccine is derecommended, there will be no alternative option for protecting children under the age of 4 against measles, mumps, and rubella. Children under the age of 4 are the most at risk for death or disability from these diseases. Measles epidemics will explode. We will begin seeing mumps and rubella epidemics. More and more babies will be born with congenital rubella syndrome, which results in permanent disability.

Since surveillance capacity at CDC is so depleted and none of the promised “radical transparency” promised by Kennedy has occurred, it will take a lot of sick and dead kids before the entire population realizes the scale of disease that ACIP’s actions will inflict upon our children. The question is how many of our children will have to suffer and die before people realize what these monsters have done?

Make America Hepatocarcinogenic Again

For the last week or so, there’s been an awful lot of chatter about the hepatitis B virus (HBV) vaccine and whether or not it should be administered to newborns. For example, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary stopped over at Fox News to tell Martha MacCallum that he is a decided no on HBV in newborns, because HBV is a “sexually transmitted disease.”

It is true that HBV can be sexually transmitted, but that is not the only transmission route. It is also bloodborne, so it can be transmitted by needles (tattoos, piercings, or injected drug use), blood transfusions, blood-derived medical products, organ transplants, and other improperly sterilized medical equipment. You can get it from sharing toothbrushes, nail clippers, razors, etc. Babies also get infected at birth if their mother is infected with it. Often, people do not know they are infected with it, which is one of the most insidious things about chronic viral hepatitis. Because chronic HBV infection doesn’t usually cause symptoms of hepatitis, people often don’t realize they were infected until years or decades later when their livers begin to fail or they develop hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer).

In a way, viral hepatitis is something that is very close to my heart, since I’m not the only person in my family who has studied it. I worked on hepatitis C virus during my postdoctoral training. It’s a fascinating virus and a very common one that kills a lot of people, even though most people don’t think about it much. As many as 3% of the global population are chronically infected with it. It’s one of the leading causes of liver failure and cancer in the world. It would be joined in that status by HBV, except the HBV vaccine has dramatically reduced cases of chronic HBV and liver cancer around the world since the vaccine was developed by Maurice Hilleman and it was licensed in 1981. My uncle is a hepatologist who was an officer in the Public Health Service and later moved to the CDC. He led teams to vaccinate remote communities in Alaska beginning in the early 1980s and knocked out HBV infection and liver cancer in Alaska Native children. There hasn’t been a single case since 1992.

These results have been replicated everywhere that the vaccine has been deployed. After universal infant HBV vaccination began, HBV cases declined precipitously. When ACIP recommended HBV vaccination within 24 hours of birth, the already low number of cases dropped to the verge of eliminating it from the US. This vaccine works really well.

Kulldorff and the ACIP nonetheless have implied that there are terrible risks of vaccinating babies, despite very clear evidence that this protects babies who might get HBV from parents or other people in the household who don’t know that they are infected. The proposed recommendation is to only vaccinate newborns with mothers that test positive for HBsAg or HBV surface antigen (which means infection rather than prior vaccination, since you only have HBsAg if you are actively infected). However, tests aren’t always reliable and can provide false negatives. Babies can get infected by other people in their families through shared household items or exposure to other people’s blood products (for example, on nail clippers or a minor cut on an infected person). Anyone who has ever spent time with an infant knows there’s many opportunities for these types of casual exposures. Let’s say a HBV-infected father who doesn’t know he is infected has a bleeding cuticle or a paper cut and is changing their kid’s diaper and the kid has a diaper rash. That’s an opportunity for transmission that can’t be averted by testing the mother. Why would you not universally vaccinate if you knew the vaccine was extremely safe (which data shows HBV is)?

You wouldn’t. The CDC scientists put together a list of risks and benefits of rescinding the universal newborn HBV vaccination recommendation. The risks include huge increases in HBV cases, lower vaccination rates, and massive increases in costs of care from all those cancer and liver failure cases that will inevitably occur. These will disproportionately affect the most vulnerable people with the least access to health care. The only possible benefit from withdrawing this recommendation is that there will be fewer adverse events, which are extremely rare and generally not severe.

Of course, the general anti-vax ideology of the current ACIP means that this risk-benefit analysis will likely be ignored so they can force this recommendation through. They also have had lengthy discussions of non-specific effects (NSEs) of the HBV vaccine, which is the idea that vaccines have benefits and risks beyond the disease they target. NSEs are not an inherently anti-vax topic of research, and some studies have shown they may have some limited benefits, but they are often intentionally misinterpreted to suggest vaccines don’t work, are unsafe, or are unnecessary.

There’s another issue with the HBV vaccine. It uses an aluminum salt adjuvant. Kennedy has already attempted to make false claims about associations with neurodevelopmental disorders. I anticipate that once they take away the HBV birth dose, they will use this as a basis to manufacture evidence about aluminum salt adjuvant safety while simultaneously claiming these vaccines have to go because the public doesn’t trust them.

Resident ACIP turbo-cancer promoter Robert Malone said that a completely unsupported “loss of trust” in the HBV birth dose (which he calls an “invasive medical procedure”) is justification for derecommending it. The reality is that there is no scientific basis for removing access to the HBV vaccine and putting an entire generation of American babies at risk for liver failure and cancer. Trust was not lost because an incredibly safe and effective vaccine has nearly eliminated a terrible chronic infection from the US. It was lost because many of the members of ACIP, particularly Kulldorff, Levi, Griffin, and Malone, have lied prolifically about the evidence supporting both the MMRV and HBV vaccine. They profit from these lies, in the form of paid speeches, consulting work, expert witness work opposing vaccines, and content creation. They have outrageous COI that continues to be tolerated. And they are lying, with terrible consequences that will result.

America is about to have a lot more sick children. A lot more dead children. And they are just getting warmed up. Kennedy must be removed and our normal public health policy recommendations must be restored. Our lives depend on it.