Heath Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announces new steps aimed at identifying and treating complications from vaccines.
Transcript
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The Trump administration has a new effort to further question vaccine safety. NPR health correspondent Rob Stein has the details. Good morning, Rob.
ROB STEIN, BYLINE: Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: So Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been making it harder to get some vaccines. So what is this new initiative about?
STEIN: That’s right. Kennedy has long argued that vaccines cause autism – even though that’s been thoroughly debunked – and other serious complications. So now Kennedy has established a new clinic at the National Institutes of Health that will focus on vaccine complications. Kennedy’s announcement didn’t go into much detail about what that means exactly, but NPR obtained an internal memo that says the clinic will follow people who got vaccinated to identify possible risks and causes of injuries.
The clinic will also look for new ways to care for people who experience problems. And the clinic may review the vaccine schedules the federal government recommends. Kennedy also proposed compensating doctors for reporting complications and requiring electronic medical records to track adverse reactions, and modernizing our government system for collecting reports of problems.
MARTIN: And what’s been the reaction to this?
STEIN: So, Michel, vaccine experts say more research about vaccine safety is always welcome. But many argue that there is already convincing evidence that the benefits of vaccines outweigh any risks, which are very rare. I talked about this with Daniel Salmon. He directs the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins University.
DANIEL SALMON: I’m a big proponent of more science in this space, but it needs to be done well. You don’t want people that are unqualified or outside of their expertise going on fishing expeditions and creating spurious findings. And if you look at a lot of the information that’s come out from this administration, people have raised concerns that it’s inconsistent with the science.
MARTIN: So the worry here – let me make sure I understand. The worry here is that you’ve got possibly unqualified people putting their finger on the scale…
STEIN: Yeah.
MARTIN: …And that this will heighten worries about vaccine risks?
STEIN: Yeah, that’s the worry. That’s the concern, is that some think this may end up skewing the picture about vaccine safety. Dorit Reiss studies vaccine policies at UC Law San Francisco, and let’s listen to what she had to say about this.
DORIT REISS: The actual thing that concerns me here is the idea of incentivizing doctors to report vaccine adverse reaction, which raised to me the concern of gaming the vaccine adverse reaction system. In other words, generating reports of things that aren’t there because of incentive to make vaccine look more dangerous than they are.
STEIN: You know, critics worry that these moves are really aimed at generating more doubt about vaccines at a time when vaccination rates are falling and, you know, vaccine-preventable diseases like measles are resurging.
MARTIN: OK, what about measles? Let’s talk a little bit about that. What is the administration doing about the measles vaccine?
STEIN: Not much, frankly. You know, top health officials have been pretty much silent on the benefits of vaccines. Here’s Dr. Jesse Goodman from Georgetown University. He was a top scientist at the Food and Drug Administration.
JESSE GOODMAN: Right now, we have a crisis with measles outbreaks. We’ve had several deaths. I think it’s great to strengthen vaccine safety, but where is the advocacy for the safety of these children and several adults who’ve died?
STEIN: Same goes for promoting vaccines to protect people against the flu, which has come back early this year.
MARTIN: That is NPR health correspondent Rob Stein. Rob, thank you.
MARTIN: You bet, Michel.
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