Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, told Breitbart News that the United States should frequently review its childhood vaccine schedule in comparison to peer nations.
On Friday, Trump directed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and acting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Jim O’Neill to conduct a review of vaccine schedules of peer nations like Japan and Denmark, which have fewer childhood vaccines on their schedules than the United States. If other developed countries’ childhood vaccine schedules are found to be superior, Kennedy and O’Neil are directed to align the United States’ schedule with them.
Breitbart News caught up with Oz on the red carpet of the Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday night and asked him how long such a review has been needed and how much it is needed.
“Let me just take a step back and give you a broad argument for why we need to actually double-check all the time. What does a good parent do? They love their kids, they put them in the car seat, but they don’t just hope it works right. They check the car seat, they check the seat belt; is the car made right? I mean, everything to make sure their child is safe,” Oz said. “We should be doing that all the time, and the fact that it hasn’t happened for decades is a problem.”
“So Secretary Kennedy said, ‘We’re gonna go back and check.’ He’s not making the decisions. He’s gonna insist, as he just did this week, that ACIP [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices], the group of scientists who evaluate vaccines, take a serious look at, in this case, Hepatitis B vaccines, and said, ‘Listen, this is not about whether they’re good or not.’ I’ve gotten the Hepatitis B vaccine. I think it’s fantastic. It’s what age you give it to the child.”
“And it does make sense that if the mother’s already had the virus and they’re ill, that you give them the childhood vaccine, but if the mother doesn’t have the virus and doesn’t have any evidence of it in her blood, then why would you give the child the vaccine the [first] day of life? You could probably wait, and you should wait. And that’s what they’re saying. Shared decision making, doctors and patients talking. That’s a good thing.”
Oz stressed that Trump wants to see if other nations have made findings of issues related to vaccines that the United States may have overlooked.
“What the President has now said is he wants to go back and kick the tires one more time to see if other countries may have worked out some issues that we have missed. Why not?” Oz explained. “There are other Western countries that are fantastically capable of looking at vaccine data, and they’ve made very different decisions than we have, and there’s some differences in the law and how it protects manufacturers and other maybe perversions in this system that ought to be addressed. So we’re going to kick the tires.”
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