As physician and writer Jeremy Faust, M.D., put it this week, there are now two CDCs: one made up of the career public health officers trying to continue the work they’ve been doing for decades and another made up of a small group of people at the top who have mounted what former top CDC official Debra Houry, M.D., called a “hostile takeover.”
Unfortunately, that core leadership group is calling the shots. Pun intended. And that means journalists can no longer trust the CDC as a source for vaccine information.
Faust’s post has a lot of great information and links to get reporters up to speed on where things stand now, but this much is clear: Journalists need another trustworthy source for information on vaccines and infectious disease. Before discussing what that source is, let’s review how we got here.
The first major public indication that the CDC might no longer be a reliable source for vaccine information came last May when U.S. Health & Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. unilaterally removed the Covid-19 vaccine recommendation for children and during pregnancy. He did so without following the standard procedure for changing recommendations and in direct contradiction of the evidence and of major medical societies’ recommendations.
Then, a few months later, Kennedy dismissed the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and quickly replaced them with various allies bearing dubious credentials. The committee’s vote to remove all thimerosal-containing vaccines from the recommended schedule — despite extensive evidence of these vaccines’ safety — made vaccine information from the CDC appear even more suspect, especially when a document about the safety of thimerosal disappeared from the CDC website.
Trust in the CDC’s vaccine information steadily declined through the summer, as documented by KFF. Kennedy added additional members to the committee in mid-September, but by then, the firing of CDC director Susan Monarez, Ph.D., largely over her refusal to rubber-stamp Kennedy’s vaccine-related demands, had even further destroyed trust in the CDC, particularly its vaccine information. Within days, nine former directors of the CDC authored a New York Times op-ed about the dangers of Kennedy’s continued leadership of HHS. While Trump began demanding proof of Covid vaccines’ effectiveness, former CDC director Rochelle Walensky, M.D., publicly said (and wrote) in September that CDC vaccine information was no longer trustworthy, and former officials said the same thing in a Senate hearing that month.
The HHS press conference circus on autism, vaccines and Tylenol in late September — as well as a new and bizarre CDC Priorities statement — have cemented the agency’s status as wholly unreliable for scientific information on vaccines, autism, and pregnancy exposures, at the least.
That leaves public health experts, journalists, health care workers and Americans as a whole with an inability to trust any vaccine or other medical information coming from the CDC. As Drew Altman wrote at KFF, people now simply don’t know whom to trust.
Fortunately, although the dismantling of the CDC has cost the country its oldest, most stalwart resource for vaccine information, there remain many other resources for reliable, trustworthy and evidence-based information on vaccines. As someone who has reported on vaccines for a decade and a half, I have relied on many of these, but I also reached out to my network of longtime vaccine-related sources and asked for their suggestions.
The list below may not be comprehensive, but it’s reliable and untainted by political influence. One of the most important resources is the new, independent recommended immunization schedule of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which is now and going forward independent of the CDC’s schedule.
In addition, the Vaccine Integrity Project at the University of Minnesota’s CIDRAP is attempting to fill the former ACIP’s role of gathering and sifting through information to provide to states that are now attempting to determine their own vaccine policy independent from the CDC. None of these can help with the challenges of infectious disease surveillance that the CDC is neglecting to update, but surveillance may be an area where journalists must rely primarily on their state health departments.
In addition to the list below, check out the World Health Organization’s Vaccine Safety Net list of vaccine safety websites meeting good information practices criteria, available in various languages.
Government sources
- U.S. National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine (including various past reports on safety, adverse effects, COVID vaccines, autism, and thimerosal)
- World Health Organization
- Pan American Health Organization
- European CDC
- The upcoming/developing Australian CDC
- New York City Health Department
- Washington’s King County Health Department
- The Pink Book — the CDC’s 2021 edition of The Epidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases with vaccine information, all freely accessible (Site Index here)
Hospital and research institution sources
- Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) Vaccine Education Center
- Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Vaccine Safety
- Johns Hopkins University’s International Vaccine Access Center at Hopkins
- University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) and their Vaccine Integrity Project
Medical societies
- American Academy of Pediatricians
- The AAP’s recommended immunization schedule
- National Foundation for Infectious Diseases
- American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
- American Public Health Association
- Canadian Public Health Association
- AAP’s FactChecked
- AAP’s Immunization Conversation Guides
- AAP’s map of states’ vaccine coverage
- AAP’s Red Book — an online pediatric infectious disease reference which may require AAP permission for journalists to access
Non-profit and/or advocacy organizations
Note: not all of these are advocacy organizations.
- Immunize.org and their Vaccineinformation.org site
- Historyofvaccines.org
- Voices for Vaccines
- Unbiased Science
- Vaccinate Your Family
- Families Fighting Flu
- Nurses Who Vaccinate
- Gates Foundation
- Gavi
- Shot@Life
Human sources
- Newly formed Expert Vaccine Analysis Team
- NFID Experts
- Immunize.org experts
- AAP Newsroom
- CHOP’s Vaccine Education Center team
- Johns Hopkins vaccine experts
- Katelyn Jetelina’s Your Local Epidemiologist
