Chalk up a W for Republican Rep. Clay Higgins and an L for GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy, resulting from Food and Drug Administration decisions on Wuhan coronavirus vaccines.
This week, the FDA, under the Department of Health and Human Services, ended blanket emergency use authorizations for these vaccines, reducing availability from 6 months on up in age to those individuals who had a co-morbidity risk. The process starts with an assessment by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, at panel with eight members at present, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, another HHS component.
That panel made news recently when HHS Sec. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. dismissed all members because he felt it had a slavish mentality towards acceptance of widespread and indiscriminate vaccination recommendations. Kennedy prior to his assuming the top position at HHS made his name as a critic of indiscriminate vaccinations, questioning whether the benefits outweighed the harm to individuals although sometimes these featured claims with thin scientific evidence behind them.
In his and other critics’ assertions, there lies an important policy distinction. Government has a vested interest in public health, but that has a natural tension with individual health in that health mandates to the public, such as vaccination demands, can cause harm to individuals or groups of similar individuals. Regardless of whether Kennedy is correct in some of his scientific claims, he has advocated in his denunciations of vaccine policy a view centered on individuals’ health – echoed in the latest guidelines that regular use vaccinations continue and, according to the new approved guidelines, emergency use as well but that individuals are free to choose whether to get vaccinated in consultation with medical professionals – as opposed to the prevailing government-centric ethos that grew stronger and stronger over the decades, and then went into hyperdrive during the Democrat Pres. Joe Biden Administration, that a conception of public health had to take precedence over individuals’ health, with that conception becoming increasingly intolerant and totalitarian in the restrictions it placed on people’s lives in a misbegotten effort to eliminate social risk.
Since he took the helm of HHS, that has been reflected in all of its policy recommendations. And, it only makes sense to end EUA status because what’s the emergency? It was over five years ago that the pandemic kicked off and there has been plenty of time to stop cutting corners as enabled by EUA status.
The eight new members (typically it has had more and replaced on a rotating basis, but Kennedy dismissed both those near leaving and not) put on ACIP to make vaccine decisions include at least a couple of prominent individuals who, during the pandemic, counseled against the one-size-fits-all/heavy-handed/zero-COVID ethos that lay behind vaccine mandates. Instead, they advocated for protective measures for the older elderly and other children and adults with co-morbidities while foisting no additional mandates on individuals or their behaviors. Their approach, at the time equated by the most hyperactive on the political left and in the media as proposed by irresponsible cranks, over time was vindicated as superior to the one the U.S. took in a holistic overview of health, economics, and personal freedoms.
This view is congruent with that of Higgins, one of the most outspoken critics of the draconian coronavirus vaccination policy recommendations of Biden, which led to involuntary firings in government including separation from the military for refusing vaccination, forced vaccinations to attend schools, and mandatory testing for employees and student who couldn’t provide proof of vaccination. His latest critique blasted New Orleans’ Health Department – historically a hotbed of government-centric rather than people-centric medical policy whose former director was a main architect of state coronavirus policy than ended up costing more lives on balance – for following American Academy of Pediatrics advice to give out vaccinations to even the youngest children, despite overwhelming evidence that almost no children down to infants who contract the virus suffer anything more than the mildest symptoms unless they have a co-morbidity. He called for federal government defunding of the agency as a result.
Not that the AAP is known for giving out scientifically sound advice free of politicized taint. Contrary to views of many other countries’ similar organizations and increasingly isolated in its assertion that drugging and mutilation of children is acceptable to fulfill children’s often-transitory desires to be catered to a gender identity divergent with their actual physical sex (an example of when the transitory nature in most instances of this goes horribly wrong). It only has partially climbed down from that ledge but still argues that intense medical interventions are necessary more than rarely.
In any event, the latest HHS guidance aligns itself with Higgins and against New Orleans’ approach. Whether the latter will reissue guidance congruent with HHS, however, is perhaps not something to hold your breath upon while waiting for it.
By contrast, the HHS guidance puts egg on the face of Cassidy. When Kennedy replaced the panel members, Cassidy whined that this went against what he claimed Kennedy told him that he wouldn’t do that, which Kennedy denies. Cassidy was a needed vote for committee forwarding of Kennedy’s nomination to the Senate, and then also voted to confirm him. Cassidy also pouted that ACIP shouldn’t meet because the fewer new members in his estimation didn’t collectively have extensive experience in microbiology, epidemiology or immunology – even though most had vast experience in one or all of these areas and, as noted, promoted superior pandemic policy.
But it did meet and started a process that concluded with the best and most balanced assessment of coronavirus vaccination policy ever. Cassidy apparently has had no comment on this, but he did call again for ACIP not to meet in the wake of Kennedy firing Republican Pres. Donald Trump’s month-old appointee to head the CDC, who resisted the new HHS guidance, preaching that there was too much tumult and questions remaining about events that needed investigating. Four other officials resigned, at least one of which indicated it was over their public health orientation clashing with the individual health view of Kennedy and Trump.
This increasingly makes Cassidy appear aligned with the government-centric health cadre, which indeed may reflect his actual thoughts as Cassidy is a medical doctor who spent most of this career in medicine working for public institutions heavily dependent upon government revenues. Regardless of that, this won’t go down well with the Louisiana voting public, which showed itself skeptical and resistant to the relatively draconian coronavirus policy, and more pronounced among Republicans, that the state tried to implement under Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards which cost lives on the balance, that suffered both political and legal setbacks.
If ACIP meets again in mid-September as planned, this also won’t look good for the Cassidy campaign. He has articulated that his experience at getting things done matters, which should commend him to voters, but that he seems ignored even after nearly a dozen years in office doesn’t bolster that argument. If anything, on this issue he appears to be digging a deeper and deeper hole among GOP voters needed to return him to office.
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