Preventable Disease Holiday Giving Guide

Let's see where the Advisory Clown Car on Immunization Practices is going this meeting

Merry “vaccines cause autism”-mas to all who celebrate

During the US government shutdown, there was a temporary reprieve from terrible vaccine news. Turns out you can’t screw around with vaccine policy too much when the government isn’t open for screwing around with it. At the CDC, the entire Secretariat for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) was fired during Russell Vought’s epic shutdown reductions in force (RIFs). Although these RIFs have been thankfully reversed, the CDC continues to barely operate.

Now that the US is back open for government business and the ACIP Secretariat is back at work, it’s time to get back to work descheduling vaccines. ACIP is an independent expert panel convened by CDC that reviews evidence about vaccines according to a standardized framework and makes recommendations (determined by voting) about who should take them. These recommendations determine who gets what vaccine, which vaccines insurance companies will reimburse for, and how many vaccine doses manufacturers will make.

This process worked great for determining vaccine policy until last June, when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. fired the actual experts on ACIP and replaced them with a roster of anti-vaxxers and wellness scammers. They immediately began trying to block access to as many vaccines as possible, and succeeded with multi-dose flu vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal as well as the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV) combination vaccine. Since then, Kennedy and all his preventable disease-loving minions are empowered to hunt for bigger game.

Last night, the CDC updated its “vaccines do not cause autism” information page with a statement that this “is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” This statement is patently false for two reasons: you cannot prove a negative with the scientific method and studies around the world involving millions of patients have shown no link between autism and vaccination at any age. But it does not matter. It is bad enough that the CDC is now making openly false claims and presenting it as official health guidance. People will read this and will choose not to vaccinate. People, mostly children, will get sick and die. That’s all terrible. Worse still is that this false claim will be used to justify ACIP recommendations going forward. That is bad, considering all forthcoming ACIP recommendations will be used to block access to as many vaccines as possible.

Just in time for the holiday season, ACIP released their draft agenda for the upcoming meeting scheduled for December 4-5th, 2025. Let’s take a look at which preventable childhood diseases they are going to bring back this time around!

Recap from the last ACIP meeting

The last ACIP meeting didn’t go so well for anyone. Ars Technica described it as “bonkers.” Although ACIP Chair Martin Kulldorff managed to wrangle the panel into voting to deschedule the measles-mumps-rubella-varicella (MMRV) vaccine, they were unable to do much else due to sheer incompetence. ACIP attempted to deschedule the birth dose of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) vaccine and couldn’t develop a coherent recommendation to vote on. They tried to make people get a prescription for COVID vaccines, which ACIP is not even authorized to do, but that vote failed. They voted on a bunch of things about COVID vaccines that ultimately worked out to “we recommend you talk to your doctor.” The proceedings were complete clownery, with turbo cancer talks, Robert Malone having fits of bitter pique about correlates of protection, Retsef Levi fantasizing about people dropping dead en masse after vaccination, Evelyn Griffin proposing impossible clinical trial designs, and Kulldorff trying and failing to keep the extremely perturbed expert liaisons muted whenever they demanded that ACIP proceedings follow established frameworks for evaluating evidence and developing voting recommendations. At one point, he failed so badly at managing the unruly Zoom crowd that someone called Levi an idiot while he was lecturing people about humility and informed consent.

I never tire of this video, because truer words were never spoken. It perfectly illustrates how degraded evidence-based vaccine policy development has become under Kulldorff’s leadership, which demonstrates all the intellectual fortitude of a shambling revenant. Their performance was so pathetic that the now-fired members of the last competent ACIP wrote a scathing paper in Vaccine that quantified just how much buffoonery has impacted functional immunization policymaking.

Unfortunately, this does not suggest that ACIP will continue its ineffective bumbling or has seen the error of its ways as far as lying about vaccination is concerned. Although the ACIP are quacks, they are quite skilled at adapting their anti-vax grift to shifting landscapes. They will improve their ability to exploit normal ACIP procedures. And they will become more effective at carrying out their mission to make as many kids as possible vulnerable to deadly but completely preventable diseases.

Murderboarding the vaccine schedule

I fear ACIP had a productive post-mortem during the shutdown and they are righting their procedural wrongs. If they figure out how to improve processes like developing recommendation language, they may be much more successful getting their recommendations against targeted vaccines to a vote this time around. They also have seemingly changed their strategy. Instead of picking vaccines off one by one, they are going after them all on day 1 of the meeting.

The entire day is devoted to virtually every topic relevant to pulling a whole bunch of different vaccines off the schedule. As the meeting draws closer, more detailed agendas and possibly slides will be posted. However, STAT recently reported that ACIP is likely to use two different approaches to descheduling vaccines: targeting aluminum salt adjuvants and breaking up the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine into monovalent (stand-alone) shots rather than a combination vaccine.

This agenda is filled with opportunities to deal a devastating blow against American herd immunity using both of these approaches. Let’s see how I do at predicting discussion topics in each section:

CDC Vaccine Risk Monitoring Evaluation

This is likely going to be a discussion of how bad ACIP thinks career CDC employees are at monitoring vaccine safety signals and an excuse to dredge up non-existent evidence of adverse events (vaccine side effects) from CDC’s troves of data. No doubt they will lean in on the new language on CDC’s website suggesting that CDC has multiple mechanisms of looking for adverse events, which are how vaccine safety risks are identified. This includes several databases, including the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), which are unverified reports from the public. Anyone can submit to VAERS, so many of the reports are probably not actually describing vaccine injuries. Normally, if a safety signal is detected in VAERS (many reports of adverse events linked to a particular vaccine), a much more detailed investigation is carried out that involves detailed case studies and relies on CDC and FDA’s wealth of vaccine data. Then ACIP will take action based on their standard framework. However, anti-vaxxers love to treat VAERS as if it is overflowing with evidence that vaccines cause massive harm at population scale, including multiple members of the current ACIP. Discussions about CDC Vaccine Risk Monitoring Evaluation will point to VAERS as evidence, then say CDC is not doing enough to identify adverse events. Given the vaccines that will be targeted first, this means they will unearth evidence of febrile seizures caused by the MMR and evidence of autism, ADHD, neurological disorders, and asthma caused by vaccines containing aluminum salt adjuvants.

Vaccine Schedule History

This will go over the prior, actually competent ACIP’s evidence-based recommendations and say that they didn’t do enough to detect safety signals before putting more and more and more vaccines on the childhood schedule. They will suggest that prior ACIP members are conflicted on the basis of being vaccinologists, public health professionals, and clinicians who have developed vaccines, run vaccine clinical trials, and consulted for vaccine manufacturers. They will claim that the CDC’s vaccine schedule was bought and paid for by Big Pharma. They will also probably say there are too many shots and not enough safety data. ACIP will then likely transition to how they plan to rectify “corporate capture” or whatever sinister-sounding term they want to apply to make fake allegations of fraud.

Childhood/Adolescent Immunization Schedule

Here we go. Get ready to compete for fastest country to go from measles elimination to routine epidemics involving thousands of kids, since this is the last stop for the MMR vaccine. They will say that the MMR vaccine causes an increased risk of febrile seizure in children under age 4. This risk can’t be reduced because Tylenol is now the official antipyretic of autism. The only way to reduce the risk is to break up the combination MMR into its monovalent components. They will justify this by saying that they aren’t taking away access to the MMR because people can get separate monovalent M, M, and R vaccines instead. Except that isn’t true, because there are no monovalent M, M, or R vaccines approved by the FDA. This will block access to the first dose of the MMR nationwide. Since the MMRV was already descheduled, this will end MMR vaccination in children when they are most vulnerable to measles, mumps, and rubella.

Vaccine Schedule Considerations

State of the Evidence: always insufficient until it proves Kennedy’s desired outcome

The new CDC website regarding vaccines and autism claims that there is insufficient data about the MMR, because some of the existing studies were performed in other countries where the vaccine schedule differs. They claim we can never really know unless we look at “timing and adjuvants.” The MMR is a live-attenuated vaccine (meaning it is a combination of three live viruses that cause infection, but do not cause disease). Because live-attenuated vaccines actually replicate, they stimulate strong immune responses and do not require an adjuvant to beef up induction of immune memory. Claiming that adjuvants need to be studied for the MMR is yet another example of a situation in which it’s unclear if the authors of this document are grossly ignorant and incompetent about a vaccine that is more than 50 years old or if they are just lying about it.

The new CDC guidance does mention that the MMR does not contain aluminum, but goes on to discuss aluminum salt adjuvants all the same. They claim evidence for both asthma and neurodevelopmental harm that is based on made-up statistical reanalysis of papers that either show no link to harmful outcomes or are at best observations of statistically insignificant trends. As a scientist who specializes in studying pathogenesis (the process of causing disease), I am very curious about their hypothesis regarding a proposed mechanism for what CDC just “admitted” (made up).

Stoked for the mechanistic insights of an obsolete Activist Lawyer Chucky doll

If MMR doesn’t contain aluminum but still causes autism, and aluminum salt adjuvants in completely different inactivated vaccines cause autism and also asthma, what is the common thread that results in autism? These are very different vaccines against very different pathogens. Although I am not an expert in neurodevelopmental disease pathogenesis, in my view it is implausible that such radically different systems would result in the same extremely complex outcome. One hypothesis is that vaccines—any vaccine, regardless of formulation, target, or platform—are just inherently magical autism generators. Another is that this is completely made up. I haven’t tested these rigorously, but since the first hypothesis is dependent on magic, it is unfalsifiable and thus invalid. Therefore, I assess the second hypothesis to be most likely, as well as consistent with the entire evidence base suggesting that the first hypothesis is just an outright lie.

Here also is where nascent ideas about targeting other vaccines begin to incubate. Even if they are successful going after MMR and aluminum salt adjuvants, there are other vaccines on the schedule that will remain unaffected. For example, flu shots and the inactivated poliovirus vaccine, which is approved in a monovalent, non-adjuvanted formulation. The monovalent varicella (chicken pox) vaccine is a live-attenuated vaccine that doesn’t require an adjuvant. There are many tactics that can be applied to these vaccines, but I suspect that a big one may be alleging that the current schedule requires too many shots, too soon after birth.

The ACIP can make plausible-sounding arguments for this by exploiting something called non-specific effects. This is the idea that vaccines elicit non-specific immune and inflammatory responses that impact other vaccines and infection outcomes. Non-specific effects are still a topic of considerable debate, including whether they even occur in a meaningful enough way to have an actual real world effect on vaccination in any way. Anti-vaxxers often claim that non-specific effects make vaccines extra unsafe, because they cause adverse events when too many different vaccines are given in too short of a time period. The only problem is there is no evidence of non-specific effects contributing to bad outcomes from vaccination. But if they start the “too many shots” conversations, we’re going to see some world-class manipulation and cherry-picking to prove that non-specific effects are a thing. We haven’t proven that they don’t exist or aren’t harmful (both of which are impossible using the scientific method), so therefore, they must be yet another vaccine-mediated crime.

Adjuvants and Contaminants

Your turn, aluminum salt adjuvants! Adjuvants are ingredients added to inactivated or protein subunit vaccines to boost immune responses, since some of these vaccines do not elicit a sufficiently strong immune response on their own. Aluminum salt adjuvants have been commonly used in a number of inactivated vaccines for decades and they have a record of being very safe and effective at inducing lasting immunity. ACIP will say that they cause autism and asthma. They will present these chronic diseases, which are completely unrelated to vaccines or vaccine adjuvants, as vaccine injuries. It is irrelevant that they do not have data to support this claim. It will be manufactured from VAERS or other sources. They will say that an alternative exists, because adjuvants are not absolutely required, other adjuvants exist, and vaccines could be reformulated. However, this is the same problem as with the MMR: there are no FDA-approved versions of these vaccines that contain other adjuvants and many of these are not sufficiently immunogenic on their own to be used without an adjuvant. This will end vaccination in children against HBV, hepatitis A virus, human papillomavirus (HPV), Haemophilus influenzae B (Hib), diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, pneumococcal pneumonia, meningococcal meningitis, and poliovirus (in some combination vaccines).

Don’t sleep on contaminants. This is a rich topic for inventing vaccine safety issues out of thin air. They will argue that vaccines are all adulterated with other chemicals, similar to how the last ACIP meeting entertained a turbo cancer session because of DNA that some (contested) papers claim is contaminating Pfizer mRNA vaccines. Here, they will likely bring up an ancient example of how polio vaccines were contaminated with SV40, a monkey virus that can cause cancer. This occurred decades ago at Lederle (a vaccine manufacturer that no longer exists), when manufacturing and cell culture practices were vastly different and less regulated than they are now. Still, we are likely to hear about it as if it happened last week at Merck. They will also probably talk about mercury and heavy metals, live pathogens, and allergens.

All of this will be invented, but it won’t matter. The message will be clear: ACIP has a reason why all vaccines are unsafe. So what if that reason is made up or exaggerated; ACIP can provide a reason, claim it’s “gold-standard science,” and hello preventable disease.

Thought you were safe, HBV birth dose?

It doesn’t appear that votes are scheduled for day one, but that doesn’t give me much comfort. There are votes scheduled for day two, so it is not unlikely that the MMR and aluminum salt adjuvant votes take place just as the meeting wraps on December 5th. But the 5th is mostly going to be a HBV birth dose descheduling-stravaganza.

ACIP recommends babies get their first dose of HBV vaccine at birth, since it can be transmitted from their mothers during delivery, but also can be transmitted through normal household activities. HBV is a very hardy virus that remains infectious for weeks on surfaces. HBV doesn’t make people sick for decades, so many infected people don’t know they have it. In unvaccinated endemic communities, children get it through the course of normal life activities: hygiene, sharing household items, playing with other kids, sports, etc. The birth dose of the HBV vaccine has brought the US within sight of eliminating HBV altogether. Pulling the birth dose or delaying vaccination until age 12 will put kids at risk of a chronic infection that causes eventual liver failure and liver cancer.

They have scheduled a full day of reexamining the HBV vaccine data they spent hours on at the last ACIP meeting before being unable to establish recommendation language. Last time, ACIP panelists made numerous false statements about HBV itself and vaccination: they claimed that the only risk to babies is perinatal transmission (it’s not), that HBV is only sexually transmitted (it’s not), and that merely testing all mothers precludes the need for vaccination until at least age 12 (not all mothers have access to testing and will have even less as our health care capacity declines). ACIP will draw directly from the revised CDC guidance to attack the HBV birth dose this time around, by going after aluminum salts as well as demanding universal maternal HBV testing, which ACIP is not authorized to recommend since their mandate is solely making vaccine recommendations, not actually making access conditional on other diagnostic tests or health services.

If all else fails, they will default to “it’s sexually transmitted, why do babies need it”? I rarely inquire as to the motives and values of the brain trust on the current ACIP, but in this case I must ask why people working for the Jeffrey Epstein child rape administration are so eager to think deeply about how sexually active children might be. The safety data on the HBV vaccine shows that it’s associated with an incredibly low rate of adverse events and is incredibly effective. An honest appraisal of the evidence shows this clearly. This will not be neither honest nor an appraisal; it will be fiction.

Here’s the cherry on top of the HBV discussion. Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana is a hepatologist and is rightfully worried about the availability of the HBV vaccine. He has treated kids who died unnecessarily from HBV hepatocellular carcinoma. He also is the hapless flunky who moved Kennedy out of committee into the most powerful position in health in the US government. This has to really sting:

Cassidy is clearly pissed off about Kennedy breaking virtually every promise that he made prior to confirmation, but not so much he’ll actually do something about it. He has issued some strongly worded statements and tweets rebuking Kennedy. Like so many other important but generally ineffectual men, Cassidy has “concerns” about HBV. Unfortunately, Cassidy’s concerns have been limited to tweeting and complaining rather than taking any meaningful action to right his wrong in putting Kennedy in his current position. Kennedy knows that Cassidy will likely not have the fortitude to take this beyond the realm of grave concern that senior but spineless men often retreat to when they wish to excuse themselves rather than be accountable for their mistakes. So Kennedy decided to show Cassidy what his promises are worth:

Promises made, promises kept

The only thing worse than ending my day with this bullshit autism announcement would be ending it as Bill Cassidy, with the whole world watching as the leathern reptilian eugenicist, whom he is singlehandedly responsible for empowering, mocks him with an asterisk on his own promise. Cassidy was gullible enough to believe that a promise from Kennedy would be kept in the spirit as well as the letter of the promise. Now he reaps his reward as the day that the CDC truly enters its Lysenko era and begins publishing propaganda instead of evidence-based guidance. It must be profoundly humiliating to experience public exposure of your credulity and fecklessness in the form of a footnote in the CDC’s inaugural commitment to being a purely political organization. I am pretty shameless and I’d have a hard time showing up at work after the launch of public health political propaganda that more or less says “what are you going to do about it, pussy?” to every person who goes to the CDC website.

Pardon my sexist language in the framing above, but this is the reality. A Senator just allowed himself to be shamed by a Cabinet-level secretary who has duped him from the start. Cassidy just accepts it. And public health whimpers and begins to die.

I don’t have very much respect for Cassidy. I have responded differently to the call to fight for our country and our democracy. I think our children and our future are worth fighting for. I think America is worth fighting for. And I’m not going to let political considerations that provide some illusion of power dictate my actions. We’ve entered an era where the stakes are thousands or millions of deaths. Now is the time for leadership, bravery, and calling out lies without hedging or equivocation. Now is the time to stand up for public health and the freedom to pursue our dreams free of preventable disease.