MAHA Propaganda on the Growth of the Childhood Vaccine Schedule
Did you notice how the new MAHA report talked about the Growth of the Childhood Vaccine Schedule?
“Since 1986, for the average child, by one year of age, the number of recommended vaccines on the CDC childhood schedule has increased from 3 injections to 29 injections (including in utero exposures from vaccines administered to the mother). Of course, parents may choose to delay to a later age or forego one or more of these vaccines.”
The MAHA Report
Do you understand why it’s typical anti-vaccine propaganda?
MAHA Propaganda on the Growth of the Childhood Vaccine Schedule
To understand why it is propaganda, think about why they are only including injections and only vaccine injections kids get by one year of age…
That helps them to avoid including the oral polio vaccine doses and the MMR vaccine!
It keeps the count down to three.
And then, not surprisingly, they then inflate the count of injections infants get today!
Infants do not get 29 injections, even if you include all the recommended doses that can be given to their mothers when they are pregnant.
To get to 29 injections, the MAHA folks are including the oral rotavirus vaccines (not an injection!) and are doubling up on the RSV vaccine (either mom or baby get vaccinated, not both). They are also including all the vaccines that infants could get after they are a year old, and they are going with the maximum doses possible.
And since that still only gets you to 28, they must also be including the baby’s vitamin K shot, something they would also have gotten in 1986!
So how many injections do infants really get?
You can see from the immunization schedule above that they can get as few as 17 injections, including RSV, flu, and COVID shots by the time they are 12 months old. Add in three more if mom got Tdap, flu, and COVID.
MAHA Propaganda About European Vaccine Schedules
MAHA is also pushing propaganda about how many vaccines kids get in other countries.
“The number of vaccinations on the American vaccine schedule exceeds the number of vaccinations on many European schedules, including Denmark, which has nearly half as many as the U.S.”
The MAHA Report
While a few European countries give fewer vaccines, most have a very similar immunization schedule as the United States.
In fact, many of these countries give more vaccines by 12 months because they also give meningococcal vaccines to infants!
Even in Denmark, children get more vaccines than MAHA suggests.
“Since 2021, children aged 2 to 6 has been offered a free flu vaccination.
Children get the flu more often and are more contagious than adults. Influenza vaccination will primarily protect the children and their families against infection, but also be instrumental in slowing the spread of influenza in the general population, thus also protecting vulnerable groups against the disease.”
Influenza vaccination
The MAHA report also attacks vaccination requirements for attending school, neglecting to mention that it was these vaccine mandates that helped us finally eliminate measles in the United States after continued outbreaks in the mid-1970s.
And it was the introduction of exemptions to getting vaccinated that were introduced in the Wakefield era that helped us get where we are today.
MAHA Propaganda About Vaccine Clinical Trials
Of course, the MAHA report also talks about placebos and clinical trials…
“Our understanding of vaccine safety and any links to chronic disease would benefit from more rigorous clinical trial designs, including the use of true placebos, larger sample sizes, and longer follow-up periods. Many vaccines on the CDC's childhood schedule involved small participant groups, had no inert placebo-controlled trials, and had limited safety monitoring, some lasting six months or less-raising concerns about the ability to detect rare or long- term adverse effects.”
The MAHA Report
Will anything help the MAHA understanding of vaccine safety?
Of course, we know that vaccines have been well studied:
to show they are not associated with autism
And there are vigorous vaccine safety surveillance systems in place to quickly find potential problems.
“While in the 1960s U.S. healthcare achieved excellent health outcomes for children while spending at a level consistent with other developed nations, today's system far outspends sister nations while delivering far worse outcomes.”
The MAHA Report
If we let them, all these MAHA folks will do is bring us back to the 1960s, when kids were dying with polio, measles, epiglottitis, Hib meningitis, pneumococcal meningitis, and other now vaccine-preventable diseases.
Their anti-vaccine propaganda will scare parents even more, now that the misinformation is coming from the ‘experts’ that are in charge of our public health systems.
References
Influenza vaccination https://en.ssi.dk/vaccination/vaccination-of-risk-groups/influenza
They need to define what an “injection” is.
So DPT counts as one injection for the 1983 schedule (one needle jab). The content is a multivalent vaccine, like MMR is.
But they count an MMR shot at 12 months in the current schedule as “three” vaccine injections, implying it is 3 separate needle jabs.…not so!
(And I haven’t even started to talk about the six in one injection of diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, hepatitis B, and Hib. Is that one injection, or six?….)
By any account (or at least the account of someone who can use their fingers to count, so any average 3 year old) the 1986 schedule amounts to nine “injections”.
This is really shamefully misleading, not to mention right after American children died of measles. The most helpful part of your fact check here I do think relates to the vaccine schedules of other countries- if the anti-vax thesis is that this is all an insidious plot by American pharmaceutical companies, pointing out that other countries (with different healthcare systems, no less!) have very similar vaccine schedules is really helpful to break through the fear.