The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it is reestablishing a task force on safer pediatric vaccines, a panel of U.S. health officials tasked with developing recommendations for vaccine development, distribution and surveillance.
According to director of HHS Communications Andrew Nixon, the task force led by Dr. Jay Batacharya of the National Institutes of Health, includes the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Additional members will be announced in the future, he said.
The announcement of the task force comes after a lawsuit from Child Health Defense. This led Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine advocacy group led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The group sued Kennedy last month in a lawsuit.
The task force, which was prepared by Congress in 1986 and issued its last report in 1998, will work closely with the Advisory Committee on Pediatric Vaccines, a group that considers issues related to vaccine injury compensation programs, HHS said. In 2018, Kennedy sued the NIH on behalf of the Informational Consensus Network and obtained dormant task force records. The lawsuit was voluntarily fired for bias.
The task force will submit its first formal report to Congress within two years, and update it every two years thereafter, with recommendations focusing on improving vaccine development, distribution and side effects reporting, saying “there are fewer vaccines on the market today and there will be fewer serious side effects than vaccines currently on the market,” according to the HHS.
The announcement was met with skepticism from vaccine experts who noted that the pediatric vaccine has been extensively researched for safety and efficacy, both before it was approved and after it was on the market.
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an anti-vaccine activist who has the belief that it can withstand these fixed, unchanging science that vaccines are dangerous,” Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the FDA’s external vaccine advisory board, told CNN. “He is now in a position to set up such a task force and will find some way to support his notion that vaccines are doing more harm than good.”
Brenda Goodman contributed to this report.
