The Department of Health and Human Services has launched a broad plan to strengthen the surveillance of vaccine-related injuries, announcing on Thursday a series of moves including enhanced monitoring systems and a new clinic to study people who’ve experienced health problems following an immunization.
Spearheaded by longtime vaccine skeptic and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the initiatives are designed to boost how the federal government “identifies, documents, investigates and responds to health problems reported following vaccination,” the agency said in a statement. The goal is to boost patient outcomes and accumulate “better evidence about potential vaccine-related injuries.”
HHS revealed multiple different initiatives to accomplish that objective. One is the clinic, which the National Institutes of Health opened in Bethesda, Md. on Oct. 5. There, NIH researchers will “investigate potential causes” of health problems following vaccination.
The agency will also reimburse doctors for reporting suspected vaccine-related side effects to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, a move it claimed will help “encourage” more comprehensive documentation.
VAERS itself is being updated, too, with the goal of making the system more “accessible.” HHS will lastly require electronic health records to capture vaccine-related adverse events.
“We must listen to patients and families who report vaccine injuries — not dismiss or gaslight them,” Kennedy said in the statement, adding that he and President Donald Trump are “building a health system that takes [people] seriously, follows the evidence, and uses what we learn to make vaccines safer.”
Some experts aren’t so sure. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert and professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, believes the initiatives will dampen, rather than improve the sentiment surrounding vaccines in the U.S.
“If [Kennedy’s] past record is any indication, he will continue to put out misleading, poorly performed studies that will only further shake parents’ confidence in vaccines,” Offit wrote in an email to BioPharma Dive. “The only trust he will be earning is from anti-vaccine activists who buy into his false notions about vaccine safety.”
HHS didn’t provide additional comment when contacted by BioPharma Dive. News of the pending announcement was first reported by Science last month.
Vaccines are widely credited with wiping out deadly diseases like smallpox, measles and polio and saving millions of lives. Side effects associated with immunizations, meanwhile, are often mild and short-lived. In rare cases those effects can be more severe, though the World Health Organization has noted that a person is more likely to be harmed by a disease than a vaccine.
Still, Kennedy, the founder and former leader of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, has made vaccine safety a prominent part of his agenda as HHS Secretary.
Last year, he overhauled a key committee that influences vaccine policy in the U.S. Before being blocked by the courts, that panel made several recommendations that weakened support for established vaccines. It also uplifted unproven theories about vaccine chemicals as well as debunked links between immunizations and the development of chronic diseases.
Autism has been a top focus for Kennedy, too, despite decades of research disproving any association between the condition and vaccination.
Kennedy’s efforts have seeped into the childhood immunization schedule, a decades-old series of shots used to protect kids from a host of preventable diseases. Though a directive by the HHS to dial back that schedule was also stayed by a legal proceeding, Trump in August signed an executive order reviving it.
Those moves have further eroded confidence in vaccines in the U.S., which has seen a steady decline in immunization rates as well as a surge in cases of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles.
