Public comment to CDC ACIP meeting, Oct 24, 2024

It’s 2024, where is the progress on vaccine uptake?

Oct 25, 2024

My public comment starts at around 6 hours and 28 minutes into the public meeting, I was the second up on the public comments.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) October 24, 2024 meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) Day 2

Hi, I’m Chloe Humbert and I have no conflicts to report.
So where is the covid vaccine campaign? Where are the ads? Where are the billboards? Why are doctors not required to recommend the vaccines? If a doctor knew somebody had high blood pressure, and they failed to recommend medication, that wouldn’t be okay, yet doctors are remiss in recommending even to patients with known risks.
Too many doctors seem to have been tricked by anti-vax disinformation amplification campaigns that have been aimed at North America. Prime Minister Trudeau recently testified about this in Canada. Not to be confused with the Pentagon’s anti-vax operations which were aimed at Asia, but which probably helped confuse Americans too on the world wide web.
Since when does uptake with vaccination not matter? It’s always mattered. The polio campaign in the U.S. was successful because of a concerted effort to do a door to door campaign that started before the vaccine was even available. Successful vaccine campaigns do not pussyfoot around, high uptake is needed. Evolutionary epidemiologist Rob Wallace submitted a public comment to the FDA vaccine committee in January 2023, saying that yearly vaccination as a simplified course is the wrong approach because it would “further handcuff a public health response already limited by abandonment of nonpharmaceutical interventions”. But of course there are no hands to handcuff, the CDC’s hands have been idle in the response to covid.
At the June 2024 meeting of this committee, Dr. Denise Jamieson described being “really struck with the low proportion of healthcare providers that recommended – and given what we know about influenza and other vaccines – and the critical role that healthcare providers play in recommending vaccines” and the doctor was worried that “if it were not a universal recommendation – that the role of the health care provider in identifying and appropriately counseling those with risk — that would become even more problematic.”
Well we’re there – because restrictions on the spring dose has allowed for some affluent people who are just over 65 to – rightly – get an extra dose before their fancy summer vacations. But meanwhile working class people who are in their early 60s – with cardiac conditions – or diabetes – frontline jobs in retail, food service, or at a crowded DMV, have been prevented from getting that spring dose because of this pointless gatekeeping of safe vaccines just because of cost to big health insurance companies – and when uptake is in the ditch.
Do your job. Get vaccines into arms. It’s 2024, where is the progress on vaccine uptake?