A high knowledgeable on the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention who was overseeing the method to replace COVID-19 vaccine suggestions resigned on Tuesday.
The resignation, first reported by The Related Press and confirmed by CBS Information, comes only a week after well being secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unilaterally revoked and altered a number of the CDC’s suggestions for COVID-19 vaccines, limiting entry to youngsters and pregnant folks. The resignation additionally comes three weeks earlier than CDC’s consultants and advisors are scheduled to fulfill to publicly consider knowledge and focus on the suggestions for this season—a long-established course of that was disrupted by Kennedy’s announcement.
The departing CDC official, Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, a pediatric infectious illness knowledgeable, was a co-leader of a working group on COVID-19 vaccines who suggested consultants on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). She knowledgeable her ACIP colleagues of her resignation in an electronic mail on Tuesday.
“My profession in public well being and vaccinology began with a deep-seated want to assist essentially the most susceptible members of our inhabitants, and that isn’t one thing I’m able to proceed doing on this function,” Panagiotakopoulos wrote.
Unilateral modifications
Beforehand, the CDC and ACIP really useful COVID-19 vaccines for everybody ages 6 months and up. Consultants have emphasised that pregnant folks particularly ought to get vaccinated, as being pregnant suppresses the immune system and places pregnant folks at excessive danger of extreme COVID-19 and demise. The American Faculty of Obstetricians and Gynecologists states that “COVID-19 an infection throughout being pregnant will be catastrophic.” Additional, dozens of research have discovered that the vaccines are protected and efficient at defending the pregnant particular person, the being pregnant, and newborns.
