By Sunita Sohrabji
There are major efforts taking place around the country to remove vaccination requirements for children going to school. To me, that is one of the most frightening ideas that I’ve seen in my lifetime. — Dr. Richard Besser, CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Vaccines
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is no longer a credible source for vaccine information, said pediatrician Dr. Richard Besser, CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
“It is absolutely heartbreaking to me to say. I worked at the CDC for 13 years with dedicated employees. But I do not recommend looking to the CDC for information around vaccines,” stated Besser, speaking at a Feb. 20 American Community Media news briefing.
Last year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replaced them with a panel of his choosing. “The new panel is loaded with anti-vaccine zealots,” noted Besser. He added that few of the new members have public health or vaccination expertise.
Measles Re-Emerge
ACIP Chair Dr. Kirk Milhoan has said that both the polio and the measles vaccines should be optional. Neither are the threats they were several years ago due to better sanitation and other factors, he said on the Jan. 22 episode of the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?”
Measles were declared eradicated in the year 2000, but are making a comeback in the US, due to lower vaccination rates. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s vaccine tracker reports 1099 reported measles cases in just the first two months of 2026. The data includes a major outbreak in South Carolina, with 674 cases, and a smaller outbreak in Utah.
For the full year of 2025, 2213 cases of measles were recorded in the university’s vaccine tracker. The numbers include severe outbreaks in Texas, Utah, South Carolina, and Arizona.
“There are major efforts taking place around the country to remove vaccination requirements for children going to school. To me, that is one of the most frightening ideas that I’ve seen in my lifetime,” said Besser. “What it will mean is that if you’re sending your child to kindergarten and you’ve decided to vaccinate, you don’t know that they’re not going to be sitting next to a child who is unvaccinated, who could potentially give them something quite serious and severe.”
Lawsuits
ACIP was scheduled to meet Feb. 25-27, but that meeting was cancelled. On Jan. 13, the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP) filed a separate lawsuit stating that a CDC memo on vaccine recommendations were not based on scientific evidence and bypassed ACIP recommendations. The lawsuit sought to cancel the February meeting and block changes to the existing vaccine schedule for children.
“Children’s health depends on vaccine recommendations based on rigorous, transparent science,” said AAP President Andrew D. Racine, M.D., Ph.D., FAAP. “Unfortunately, recent decisions by federal officials have abandoned this standard, causing unnecessary confusion for families, compromising access to lifesaving vaccines and weakening community protection.”
The lawsuit seeks to restore the CDC’s immunization schedule to where it stood on April 15, 2025, before Kennedy’s panel kicked in.
Several states’ attorneys general filed a lawsuit Feb. 24 against Kennedy and CDC Acting Director Jay Bhattacharya stating similar concerns.
Credible Recommendations
The American Association of Pediatrics puts out a vaccines schedule each year. In most cases previously, its recommendations matched those of ACIP. This year, however, AAP’s recommendations differ, most prominently on vaccines for Hepatitis A and B, Covid-19, RSV, and measles, mumps, rubella and varicella — MMRV. Besser recommends looking at the AAP schedule rather than relying on the CDC.
Here are excerpts from the Feb. 20 news briefing, edited for brevity:
Dr. Besser, what do you say to parents who are simply unsure of what to believe right now?
What I say is I don’t recommend taking your medical advice from politicians. My advice is if you’re fortunate enough to have a medical provider who you know and trust, ask them what you should do. It’s really challenging to sort through all the noise that’s going on.
One of the challenges, however, is that not everybody has a doctor. And the number of people who have a doctor is actually declining. So we’re going to see issues of health disparities based on that and that alone.
What ACIP did was it moved a number of vaccines from a category of being recommended for all children to a category that they call shared decision-making. I find that strange because every decision I made with a family was shared decision-making.
Everyone should feel that their health is something that they have control over and any decision with a healthcare provider should involve shared decision-making. You have a right to have your questions answered.
Did the pandemic give rise to overall vaccine skepticism, as so many people dutifully took their shots, but got COVID nonetheless?
During COVID-19, CDC was shut off from the public. They weren’t allowed to talk directly And so you had politicians framing every new recommendation as a flip-flop and that ‘public health doesn’t know what they’re doing.’
With any new public health crisis, many of the things experts believe at the beginning will change and their recommendations will change with that. But there was no opportunity to bring the public along and maintain trust during that pandemic.
One of the challenges with vaccines is that they impact your risk of getting a disease. And so with the COVID vaccine, if you get the vaccine, you are far less likely to get severe COVID, to be hospitalized or to die than if you didn’t get the vaccine. But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t people who got the vaccine, who got sick, who got hospitalized and died. It was just a smaller percentage.
Please discuss ACIP Chair Milhoan’s recommendations for making polio vaccinations optional.
As a global community, we have come very close to wiping polio off the face of the planet. The only disease in humans that we have been successful at doing that for is smallpox.
And there’s a global effort to wipe out polio. That effort, I don’t think is going to be successful. One of the big reasons it’s not going to be successful is that here in the United States, we are backing away from the commitment to ensuring that every child in every community has access to the vaccines that can help protect their health.
The idea that polio could come back to our country is just devastating. I visited a polio hospital in India and saw the outcome of what happens in communities that have not had the same access to vaccination. And it’s debilitating.
Please discuss the new recommendations for Hepatitis B vaccinations. Hepatitis, as you know, disproportionately affects South and East Asians, as well as Black people.
The Hepatitis B vaccine to me is pretty miraculous. This is a vaccine that not only reduces hepatitis B infection, it reduces liver cancer and cirrhosis. It is, it is, an anti-cancer vaccine.
ACIP recently removed the recommendation that hepatitis B vaccine be given to newborns. And that is, I think, a very unwise decision. By vaccinating at the newborn period, we pretty much knocked out hepatitis B in America. And so I worry now that we are going to start to see a rise in hepatitis B, but we’re not going to see it probably for decades. We vaccinate against hepatitis B is to prevent the cancers that occur later in life.
