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By Brian Hews
Publisher | Follow X
September 22, 2025
The CDC’s once-respected Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices used to be a staid room full of scientists and physicians poring over data to keep kids safe. Last week, it looked more like a clown car. Members leaned on fringe theories, muttered insults into hot mics, and came within a single vote of making the COVID vaccine prescription-only. With a pandemic still smoldering and kids’ lives literally at stake, this is the best America’s top health committee could do: confusion, chaos, and cowardice.
Let’s call it what it is: idiocy. You don’t weaken vaccine recommendations during a global pandemic unless you want to give the virus another free run. You don’t punt on hepatitis B — a disease that has been nearly eliminated thanks to immunization — unless you’re more interested in pandering to anti-vaxxers than protecting newborns. And you don’t replace seasoned scientists with Kennedy’s hand-picked amateurs and expect public health not to collapse under the weight of their incompetence.
The ramifications here are not abstract. Infants who don’t get hepatitis B shots are at a 90 percent risk of chronic infection if exposed, and one in four of those will die of liver cancer or cirrhosis. Children who miss COVID shots are left exposed to a virus that has already killed more than a million Americans. These aren’t “theories.” These are bodies, these are funerals, these are kids who deserved better than to have their health turned into a political stunt.
And what a stunt it was. A committee led by a business professor with no medical degree declared that “safe and effective” is not “appropriate scientific language.” A nurse from an anti-vaccine lobbying group scolds pediatricians for downplaying side effects like fussiness. Members openly admitting they didn’t understand what they were voting on, then re-doing ballots like confused high schoolers. This is not public health; it’s amateur hour, and it’s going to cost lives.
The worst part? Anti-vaccine groups now know all they have to do is slap a chart into a PowerPoint, cite a “weird paper out of context,” and they can derail decades of scientific progress. The committee just legitimized pseudoscience in the nation’s most crucial vaccine forum. That bell can’t be un-rung.
Parents, doctors, insurers, and the American Academy of Pediatrics are all scrambling to fill the void of leadership left by this CDC disaster. They’ll continue to recommend what the science clearly supports: that kids get protected, that vaccines save lives. But the damage is done. Confidence is shaken. Confusion reigns. And confusion kills.
We should not mince words: this is what happens when idiots are put in charge of life-and-death policy. The ACIP has turned into a political puppet show, and children will pay the price.
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