Hands Off Our Vaccines: Support Vaccines for Children, and All Ages

Keep political interference out of public health - submit written public comment to the CDC’s ACIP vaccine committee is open until April 11, 11:59 pm EDT, or register for oral comment

Please join me in making a public comment to the CDC’s vaccine committee before Friday April 11, at 11:59 pm Eastern Daylight time. Registration for oral comments at the virtual meeting is also available. Meeting information is available at: https://www.cdc.gov/acip/meetings/index.html

View the docket and submitted comments on Regulations.gov: https://www.regulations.gov/document/CDC-2025-0017-0001

Submit your comment: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/CDC-2025-0017-0001

My submitted comment is below. Please feel free to borrow any wording or talking points for your own comment. Include a sentence or two about why vaccination is personal and important to you.

The agenda includes discussion of broad range of vaccine topics, including voting items on meningococcal, RSV, and chikungunya vaccines. COVID, influenza, Lyme, pneumococcal, HPV, CMV, and measles vaccines also appear on the agenda for discussion.

If you read this after the deadline, you can still take action by writing your elected officials in support of vaccination.

---

Docket: CDC-2025-0017-0001

April 9, 2025

Public Comment for the April 15-16, 2025 meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices

To the CDC ACIP committee:

I have no conflicts of interest to disclose. As a physician-scientist (MD-PhD) and public health advocate, I am writing to strongly support this committee’s scientific independence and transparency, including continued regular open meetings of advisors who represent science-based medical and public health professionals, as well as patient and public representatives.

Vaccine approval and recommendation must occur without any threat of political interference. It is unacceptable that a recent FDA VRBPAC meeting occurred behind closed doors, without the opportunity for public comment, and without the input of the usual membership of expert advisors.

I support the scientific consensus that routine vaccination with safe and effective FDA-approved and authorized vaccines against a broad spectrum of pathogens saves the lives of both children and adults and improves our quality of life. Public health is being dismantled from every angle, including mass firings of federal public health workers, and cuts to research and program funding. Under the guise of stopping censorship, research on vaccine hesitancy has been cut. Amid a growing measles outbreak where many US communities in rural and underserved areas have MMR vaccination rates that fall well below the threshold for herd immunity, funding to the highly successful and life-saving Vaccines for Children program has been cut. Notably, the Vaccines for Children program just celebrated its 30-year anniversary. We cannot go back to a time when infectious diseases ran rampant, causing unnecessary disease, disability, and death.

I urge members of this committee to speak out at every opportunity in support of our safe and effective vaccines, and I encourage everyone who reads these comments to write their elected officials to let them know that access to vaccines is an essential part of public health and disease prevention. No one will be healthier if safe and effective vaccines are not provided either through health insurance or through free programs for the uninsured/underinsured. All of us are harmed if public vaccine campaigns are dismantled for political reasons.

I will provide a few specific comments on additional items for this meeting’s agenda. For the meeting’s voting items, I urge you to consider simplifying the RSV vaccine recommendations to allow vaccination by age only, and not just for specific risk groups for people between age 50 and 74. Risk factors for severe disease within the 50 to 74 age group are common, and a weak recommendation creates uncertainty among both patients and vaccine providers. Many older adults receive vaccines at a pharmacy rather than at a medical clinic, and pharmacists may not feel comfortable assessing risk factors for patients who may not arrive with medical documentation or who may not have a regular primary care provider and thus may lack a specific high-risk diagnosis despite truly having a high-risk medical condition. Only 37.5% of high-risk adults aged 60-74 years had received an RSV vaccine, based on data as of March 29, 2025, whereas 47% of adults aged 75 and older had received an RSV vaccine. A simple age-based recommendation lowers barriers to vaccination for high-risk groups.

We need updated 2025-2026 COVID vaccines of all FDA-approved and authorized types, including Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines as well as Novavax. All ages should have access to these vaccines at least twice a year. It’s essential that these vaccines should be made available earlier than in previous years, by July or August at the latest and prior to the start of K-12 schools in the fall. Influenza vaccines must be updated for fall 2025 and must be made available for all ages as well.

As a pathologist who specializes in cervical cancer screening, I urge you to strengthen the recommendation for HPV vaccination to encompass all ages that are covered by the current approval (through age 45), without the stipulation for “shared decision-making” for ages 27-45. People my age often missed the opportunity for vaccination due to the timing of release of the initial vaccines, and I am hearing that is often difficult for people in their late 20s through early 40s to get HPV vaccines covered by health insurance. HPV exposure is nearly universal, and there are still far too many children and adults who are not adequately protected against HPV-driven cancers, which can occur in the cervix, throat, anus, and penis.

Please also support development of safe and effective vaccines against CMV and appropriate vaccination recommendations, should such a vaccine be FDA approved within the near future. CMV is a common infection that can cause pregnancy loss, birth defects, and severe infections in immunocompromised people. CMV causes lifelong infection and can reactivate later in life when the immune system is weakened, such as during cancer treatment or bone marrow transplantation.

Thank you to this committee for your ongoing work in support of vaccination.

Sincerely,

Kaitlin Sundling, MD, PhD