Childhood vaccination problems

Axios - The future of American health care may be shaped by a significantly less robust childhood vaccination schedule, especially now that President Trump has embraced rhetoric previously confined to anti-vaccine activists.

Less vaccination opens the door to a lot more infectious disease and its long-term ramifications, public health experts say. And complicating any effort to forecast how this all plays out is that it's not particularly clear which vaccines Trump would drop from the government's recommended list.

Trump, asked by reporters about the review of the childhood vaccination schedule that he ordered last week, said that "we're going to reduce it very substantially."

    He referenced "88 different shots" children now receive when, in reality, it's more like 54 doses by age 18, including annual flu shots.

    In the memo ordering the review, Trump directed health officials to "review best practices from peer, developed countries for core childhood vaccination recommendations."

The obvious question — to me at least — is which vaccines Trump and other health officials are concerned about...

Figuring out if there's a problem with the vaccine schedule depends on which country you're comparing the U.S. with, or even which genre of vaccine concerns you're talking about.

    While the U.S. is certainly on the hefty end of the spectrum, we're not alone there. Countries like Australia have vaccine schedules pretty similar to ours.
    Others, like Denmark — which was singled out by Trump and in discussions by CDC vaccine advisers — vaccinate every citizen against significantly fewer diseases.
    Public health experts point out that Denmark is many times smaller than the U.S. and, unlike us, has a national health system, among other differences.

But where the U.S. stands in relation to other developed nations isn't the only avenue of concern being explored by the administration and its advisers, many of whom lack formal backgrounds in vaccine science.

    Vaccine ingredients and even the FDA's approval processes have also come under fire, which further expands the potential list of vaccine targets.

The other side: "There [are] no problems that are being solved," said Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist and professor at Baylor College of Medicine.

    "They just sit and scour the landscape for any excuse they can to disrupt the childhood immunization and vaccine schedule," he added.

    "So I think you have to be very careful in giving too much credence to their reasons for it. They're all contrived reasons. These are not good-faith actors."