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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