The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) needs to up its game when it comes to monitoring vaccine safety and communicating that information to health professionals and the public, according to a new consensus report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM).
NASEM also urged the CDC to better distinguish between the role of its Immunization Safety Office (ISO) in monitoring vaccine risks and the agency’s broader efforts to promote vaccination. The overlap “continues to raise public concerns about the objectivity of risk assessments,” NASEM said in a press release.
“CDC should protect ISO’s independence, keeping the office operationally and administratively insulated from units in CDC that carry out promotion or policymaking activities, such as promoting vaccination,” NASEM concluded.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker, who has been advocating for a more transparent and robust vaccine safety monitoring system for decades, told The Defender the report was “too little, too late,” and “doesn’t go nearly far enough.”
“It is notable,” Hooker said, “that the assessment was headed up by Dr. Kathleen Stratton, who was instrumental in NASEM’s denial of the vaccine-autism link in the early 2000s.” Leaked documents showed that Stratton coordinated with the CDC to deny any links between vaccines and autism.
Hooker said the new NASEM report “is a word salad joke and represents the best efforts of Stratton to continue to lie and h