ACIP: I have several corrections for Lena Sun in today’s WaPo

Here’s what Lena wrote about the old ACIP committee, to try and show they were not just a rubber stamp. But that is exactly what they were:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/06/11/rfk-cdc-vaccine-committee/

But the panel has voted to reverse vaccine recommendations based on safety data showing elevated risks of serious complications, including the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine and a rotavirus vaccine.

The panel also has changed an initial recommendation to use a nasal spray as the preferred way to protect children against the flu, after data showed that method was no longer more effective than shots, said Jamie Loehr, a family physician in New York ousted from the committee.

Here are the facts:

1. The panel has not actually rid the childhood/adult schedule of rotavirus vaccines or COVID vaccines. What happened was that in 1999 one Rotavirus vaccine (oral) was approved but it was rapidly discovered that it caused the large intestine to telescope on itself, termed intussusception, often causing an intestinal blockage, usually requiring surgery in young babies, and causing some deaths. Rotavirus is a viral-caused diarrheal infection that is generally mild and would only rarely kill, due to dehydration when the caregiver is unable to get help.

   Although no one was exactly sure how often intussusception occurred in infants, a NEJM (I think) paper suggested that it was 22 times more common than usual after the Rotarix vaccine was given.

2. Clearly the ACIP could not leave a vaccine on the schedule that was killing babies, just to prevent a common, usually mild diarrhea.

3. Probably the only reason this problem was identified at all was that it happened during the clinical trials, and so intussusception was actually listed on the vaccine label as a side effect. This is what caused patients and doctors to report more cases. Or it might still be missed.

4. The vaccine was quickly removed from circulation in under a year, maybe even 6 months of use.

5. While the ACIP removed the vaccine from the schedule, other companies were encouraged to bring out their brands of rotavirus vaccine, and soon another was licensed in its place. This one too may cause elevated rates of intussusception, but not 22x normal.

6. The joint Janssen/ J and J COVID vaccine (a DNA vaccine that used an adenovirus as the vector to get spike DNA into cells) was taken off the market when blood clots were identified with it. Guess what? The adenovirus platform had previously been shown to cause blood clots! But it was used anyway. (I blogged on this at the time, with citations). Possibly the regulators did not want the fact this was a known, predictable side effect to get out to the public. The astra-zeneca DNA vaccine for COVID using a nother adenovirus vector also caused blood clots. It was produced but never licensed in the S but was widely used in the UK and elsewhere.

7. Retrospectively, it seems J and J was no worse and was probably better, in terms of side effects, than the mRNA vaccines. So people speculate it was removed to clear the decks for Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech’s creation.

8. Possibly the J and J and A-Z vaccines were removed because the military/DARPA were more interested in the RNA platform and did not want to offer alternatives that might be seen as preferable. Or maybe because the RNA vaccines caused effects that were desirable.

9. The WaPo misleads on the nasal spray flu vaccine, FluMist. The problem was not that it was no more effective than shots. The problem was that for several years, observational studies showed that it had no efficacy at all. It had seemed to work before. There may have been a mutation in the seed strain being used to produce it. In any event, it was taken off the market for a few years, and then a new formulation of FluMist returned to the market. If Jamie Loehr, MD, a recent ACIP member was quoted correctly, it just goes to show the ignorance of committee members.

The rubber stampers did exactly what their CDC minders wanted in each case. I think the next committee will come at this with new eyes. But there is still one issue remaining. The CDC minders choose the presentations that the ACIP gets to see and/or review. The members must be free to review ALL the evidence on a vaccine, not just what is cherry-picked or produced for them.