Jason L. Schwartz

Thanks Rich!

Happy to join my friends @heatherhhoward.bsky.social and @celinegounder.com for this conversation!

NEJM Interview: Jason Schwartz on changes to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and approaches to sustaining U.S. vaccination efforts. NEJM Interviews · Episode

In tandem with the print publication of this paper this week, I spoke with the NEJM editors for their weekly podcast. (Including some discussion of recent developments re: ACIP and vaccine policy since its late-June online publication.) open.spotify.com/episode/4uJz...

When it comes to vaccines, how are pediatricians restoring trust? NPR's Pien Huang speaks with pediatrician Alexandra Cvijanovich and Professor Jason L. Schwartz about trying to shore up trust about vaccines.

Joined @npr.org’s All Things Considered for a conversation about all of the turmoil in vaccine policy these days, trust in vaccines, and the critical role of pediatricians now (and always) in vaccine decision-making by parents. www.npr.org/2025/07/07/n...

The CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, empowered by RFK Jr., is just getting started The ACIP, the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel newly empowered by health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is just getting started.

Great wrap-up of this first chapter of the new ACIP era and what it suggests lies ahead. www.statnews.com/2025/06/26/c...

We will not stay silent on vaccines, say leaders of five major U.S. medical associations “We cannot and will not gamble with our patients’ health or the health of our communities,” write the presidents of the AAFP, AAP, ACP, ACOG, and IDSA.

And more spot-on responses from the leaders of the AAFP, AAP, ACOG, IDSA, and ACP. Bravo! www.statnews.com/2025/06/26/v...

Panel picked by RFK Jr. will scrutinize the vaccine schedule for kids The advisory committee makes recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the nation's vaccine schedule. Any changes could affect vaccinations for millions of children.

"They're signaling interest in revisiting long-settled questions around vaccine safety, opening up issues that have been focal points of critics of vaccines for decades," Prof. @jasonlschwartz.bsky.social told NPR.

One gets the sense that a few of these new ACIP members will never look at a vaccine’s safety and effectiveness data and find it to be sufficient to support its widespread use. (Definitely not all of them, but some.)

Free op-ed idea: Today’s ACIP meeting reminds me of that phenomenon in business when a very familiar, once-heralded brand is acquired by new owners, gutted to a shell of its former self, and the only real thing that remains the same is the name. The Sharper Image or Newsweek, e.g. Consumers beware!

Kudos to the AAP for taking this step and for speaking with such clarity. Exactly the kind of approach and focus I outlined in NEJM last week.

Absolutely Essential In Absolutely Essential, Jonathan Moreno explores the field of bioethics as both a creature and a key element of the post–World War II rules-based orde...

My new book, Absolutely Essential, is now available for pre-order on the MIT Press website.

mitpress.mit.edu/978026255337...

And for VFC, that population is overwhelmingly Medicaid-eligible kids. But hard to see where state Medicaid programs could find the extra money if VFC coverage is cut off for one/many vaccines. (Especially in these times...)

Thanks. Agree there’s no single substitute for that piece of ACIP’s role — for ACA coverage requirements or VFC. Next best hope would be for state actions (e.g., insurance regs) to define essential benefits for plans, but that would at best result in a piecemeal, uneven landscape across the country.

Revised Recommendations for Covid-19 Vaccines — U.S. Vaccination Policy under Threat | NEJM A series of recent actions by the Trump administration upend the country’s approach to Covid-19 vaccination and may portend a broader shift in the government’s role in protecting the public health.

Things are very bad for U.S. vaccination policy these days and are only going to get worse. In @nejm.org, I examine the recent news about COVID-19 vaccines and ACIP, what likely lies ahead, and what the medical and public health communities should do to lessen the damage www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

Apparently a reconstituted ACIP will be ready to meet on June 25. In normal times, identifying new members is a months-long process, with add’l steps to comply with the ‘balanced membership’ requirements of FACA. More details in this 2024 ACIP filing - gsa-geo.my.salesforce.com/sfc/p/#t0000...

I’m very eager to hear from the now-former ACIP members—who (without exception?) dutifully followed CDC guidelines by not speaking publicly about ACIP’s work while serving on the committee—regarding what things were like for them, for ACIP, and for CDC since January.

A Half-Century of Prevention — The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices | NEJM In 1964, after a vaccination program against polio, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis began, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices was created to advise the U.S. government on vaccinati...

If people are interested in learning about the ACIP and its decades of contributions to US vaccine policy successes, here’s a short 2014 piece I wrote in NEJM with Adel Mahmoud (timed with its 50th anniversary) www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

RFK Jr. says federal vaccine advisers are beholden to industry. The evidence does not support him A Science investigation finds no sign that members of a key CDC vaccine committee are compromised

A good time to revisit this deep dive by @meredithwadman.bsky.social in March regarding the ACIP conflict-of-interest claims of Kennedy et al www.science.org/content/arti...

Update!

The terms of four ACIP members (including the chair) end on June 30, plus two current vacancies. Another delayed meeting could lead to a very different looking ACIP composition, even without having to terminate any members early.

Still no Federal Register announcement regarding the scheduled June 25-27 ACIP meeting (and no draft agenda posted). More interestingly, specific details re: public comment submission dates (left) were removed from the ACIP website sometime this week (right).

Wow, FDA commissioner calling ACIP a “kangaroo court” and “rubber stamp” here.

Given this week’s events re: COVID vaccines, there’s lots of new interest in ‘shared clinical decision-making’ recommendations—what they are, what they mean, etc. Wrote about them in @jlme-journal.bsky.social several years back. (Message me if you can’t access it) www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Not a lawyer, but I’m not sure about this. While CDC is now silent re: specific guidance for pregnant women, that’s not the same as ‘not recommended’. So the prevailing age-based recs (SCDM for <18, traditional for 19+) would still apply and guarantee no-cost coverage, it seems. (For now, at least.)

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“We are seeing a very familiar playbook, but we are now seeing it from the highest levels of our government’s health agencies rather than the margins of the anti-vaccine conversation.” www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

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