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Vaccines for Children Program

FDA CDC COVID-19 vaccines

FDA, CDC, and COVID-19 vaccines — who does what?

This article about the role of the CDC and FDA concerning COVID-19 vaccines was written by Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, Professor of Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law (San Francisco, CA), who is a frequent contributor to this and many other blogs, providing in-depth, and intellectually stimulating, articles about vaccines, medical issues, social policy, and the law.

Professor Reiss writes extensively in law journals about the social and legal policies of vaccination. Additionally, Reiss is also a member of the Parent Advisory Board of Voices for Vaccines, a parent-led organization that supports and advocates for on-time vaccination and the reduction of vaccine-preventable diseases. She is also a member of the Vaccines Working Group on Ethics and Policy.

I write this right after the FDA expert advisory committee, Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), voted unanimously that the benefits of both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccines for children 6 months to 5 years of age outweigh their risks, clearing a smooth path for FDA to grant emergency use authorization (EUA) to these vaccines. I was asked about the division of labor between CDC and FDA on COVID-19 vaccines, and it seems like something worth setting out.

So this is a short post about the relative roles of the FDA and CDC in getting COVID-19 vaccines to people in the USA. It is not a full picture of how vaccines get to us; there is a lot more to that. I am not even going into the full requirement for approving or authorizing a vaccine; just who does what. But this piece of the puzzle can be useful by itself.

For those looking for a full description of the vaccine approval process, I recommend either the Skeptical Raptor’s post on that topic or the description by the Vaccine Education Center of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.  

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Vaccines for Children Program

Vaccines for Children Program – saving thousands of children’s lives

The United States of America is a great country, despite the ignoramus President currently in charge, but one of its contemptible failures is the lack of a comprehensive health care insurance for all citizens. Despite this, there is a ray of shining light that has saved hundreds of thousands of children’s lives – the Vaccines for Children Program, which provides free vaccines to children who otherwise have no access to them.

I was prompted to write this article because when I was reviewing some statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed a lot of unvaccinated children lacked healthcare insurance. This study showed that 17.2% of unvaccinated children were uninsured compared to 2.8% of all children. Looking at the data from another direction, over 7% of uninsured children were unvaccinated compared to only 1.0% of children on Medicaid and 0.8% of children on private health insurance.

The purpose of this article is to describe the Vaccines for Children Program and to give parents an important resource and information on how to make sure that their children are fully vaccinated against dangerous and deadly diseases.Read More »Vaccines for Children Program – saving thousands of children’s lives

It’s simple math – vaccines saved 700,000 children’s lives

In 1994, the Vaccines for Children program (VFC) was created by a Federal budget authorization in direct response to a measles resurgence in the United States that caused tens of thousands of cases and over a hundred deaths, despite the availability of a measles vaccine since 1963. The net effect of the VFC program was that it provided (and continues to provide) vaccines to children whose families or caregivers couldn’t otherwise afford them, such as those who are uninsured or Medicaid eligible. These are vaccines that have saved 700,000 children’s lives.

It was one of America’s great social healthcare programs in the history of the USA. VFC had an immediate and positive effect on the health of America’s children.Read More »It’s simple math – vaccines saved 700,000 children’s lives

HPV cancer vaccine

HPV cancer vaccine rates – Gardasil uptake remains low

As I’ve written before, there are precious few ways to prevent cancer. But one of the best cancer prevention strategies is the HPV vaccine, which can prevent numerous cancers such as cervical, oral, penile and anal, all serious, and all dangerous. Maybe we should just rename Gardasil to “HPV cancer vaccine,” which could make everyone sit up and notice.

The HPV vaccination rate remains depressingly low in the USA. According to recent research, 39.7% of adolescent girls aged 13-17 received all three doses of the vaccine in 2014 up from 37.6% in 2013. HPV vaccination rates among teen boys are much lower than for girls, 21.6% in 2014 up from 13.4% in 2013.

There are probably a lot of reasons for the low HPV cancer vaccine uptake rate, so I thought I’d go through the most “popular” ones, debunking them one by one.

Hopefully, the reader can use this article as a checklist of the tropes and myths of the anti-Gardasil crowd with quick answers to them. Maybe you’ll convince one person to get their son or daughter vaccinated against HPV related cancers.

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HPV vaccine lowers cancer risk

HPV vaccine lowers cancer risk and healthcare costs

If you overlook the plain ignorance of junk medicine pushers on the internet, it’s clear that there’s only a few things that you can do to lower your risk of cancer.  Quitting tobacco is probably the biggest one. But right up there is the fact that the HPV vaccine lowers cancer risk – and as a consequence, lowers health care costs generally.

Despite it’s clear benefit to human health, the HPV cancer preventing vaccine, also known as Gardasil, is under utilized in the USA. There seems to be a lot of reasons why HPV vaccine uptake is low, but the evidence is clear that it is safe, it reduces cancer risk, and it lowers the costs of healthcare.

So, let’s take a look at some of the data.

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Prices of vaccines–an uncomfortable discussion

Injection of FundsSuddenly, there has been a lot of noise about the price of vaccines. Well, there’s always been over-exaggerations and outright misinformation about vaccine prices and profits from the antivaccination gang, and they must be embarrassed by the quality of their arguments. OK, I doubt that. But there is noise out there.

But when the criticism comes from the “pro-vaccine” world, I needed to stand up and see what was being said. In my world of vaccines, I believe that anyone, especially children, who needs vaccines should get them for free. This is true in the USA (which leads the world in this one facet of healthcare), thus, any argument about vaccines costing too much falls rather flat to me. I hate dropping anecdotal data on my readers, but the fact is my health insurance plan, by no means some corporate executive level concierge plan, pays for all vaccines. In fact, I asked for one vaccination out of indication (meaning I was about 10 years too young to receive it), and the insurance company paid for it immediately and without question.

In the USA, the Affordable Care Act (best known as Obamacare) mandates vaccinations for adults and children with no out-of-pocket costs. Medicaid pays for vaccines. Medicare pays for vaccines, though the rules for payment are unnecessarily bureaucratic and confusing, unless the member is in Medicare Advantage. Maybe not as of today, but certainly soon, the cost of vaccines shouldn’t matter to the average rich or poor or middle-class American. And considering the number of lives saved by vaccines, this is an incredible and modern aspect of the USA health care system.Read More »Prices of vaccines–an uncomfortable discussion