"There's the procedure that was followed for this whole recommendation, which undoes the extremely careful and thoughtful procedures that the U.S. government has had in place for years when it makes recommendations for public health," said Lipsitch, director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard University. "People around the world look to the U.S. CDC for its recommendations on what are the best practices in public health, and having a secretary of HHS unilaterally make a decision, bypassing the scientific and public health reviews that are always done when these kinds of decisions are made, is a terrible idea and undermines the credibility of of public health in the United States, which is exactly what we don't need to have happen."
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Lipsitch agreed with the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and said pregnant women are at higher risk of complications from severe Covid, and he stated the vaccines were safe and effective for both expectant mothers and newborn infants.
"In the first few years of life, the baby benefits as well as the mother," the physician said. "So this is bad for mothers, it's bad for babies and it's bad for public health."
CDC advisers were set to vote next month on whether to recommend immunization for children six moths and older, or whether to switch to a risk-based strategy, but Kennedy effectively skipped that step and announced his decision.
"This was a turning point to have someone who is not only a single person and, and not actually an expert in vaccines, but who spent their career peddling misinformation and lies about vaccines and happens now to be secretary of Health and Human Services, making a unilateral recommendation and putting the CDC's authority behind it," Lipsitch said. "You note that there was no one from CDC on that on that Twitter video [announcement]. This is not how you make public health recommendations if you're a serious country. This is how you make bad advice and people have to find ways of getting good advice. CDC's website, when I checked it last night, still had its old, good advice up. and and, you know, I looked to the CDC and will continue to look to CDC for advice."
"But when there's this kind of political interference, I think we have to find other sources of good advice, and if this continues and goes into other parts of public health advice," Lipsitch added, "then then people are going to have to find sources such as high-quality state health departments and other countries."
Bolduan, who has frequently questioned Kennedy's positions and decision-making process, said none of this was surprising.
"Well, quite a moment," she said. "We are in something that I think a lot of people feared, especially when they watched Robert F. Kennedy over the years and his confirmation hearings."
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