Childhood vaccines used in the United States have not contained the preservative thimerosal for decades. Credit: Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters
Vaccine advisers appointed by US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr have recommended against the use of influenza vaccines containing a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal – fulfilling a long-held goal of the anti-vaccine movement.
The vote’s practical effects in the United States are limited, because most US flu vaccine doses are already free of thimerosal, which is only present in multi-dose vials, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And the ingredient was removed from all childhood vaccines in 2001.
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But thimerosal has long been a target of the anti-vaccine movement, despite strong evidence supporting its safety in the low doses found in vaccines. And public-health officials and scientists said that the vote’s symbolic effects are powerful as they struggle to maintain public confidence in vaccines. “We are talking about such a small amount of vaccine” containing thimerosal, says Chrissie Juliano, executive director of Big Cities Health Coalition, an association of US health departments, in Takoma Park, Maryland. “What this does is sow mistrust. It confuses the public.”
“It was an anti-science recommendation,” says Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. “We have the information we need to tell us that thimerosal, at the level contained in vaccines, is a trivial contribution to the mercury that we’re exposed to every day.”
The Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the CDC, did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
Handpicked panel
The decision came today during the first meeting of the newly chosen Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a panel that recommends which vaccines US residents should receive and when. Most US health-insurance programmes, which fund health care for US residents, are required to provide vaccines recommended by the ACIP at no cost. Earlier this month, Kennedy, a vaccine sceptic, fired all 17 members of the committee and appointed 8 new ones, some of whom have expressed scepticism about vaccines.
Before the vote, the committee heard a presentation by Lyn Redwood, a nurse practitioner and president emeritus of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, founded by Kennedy. She advocated for the removal of the ingredient from US vaccines, pointing to various studies to make her case.
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Offit, who is a former member of the ACIP, says that subject-matter experts typically vet presentations before the meeting – a step that was not followed in this case –and probably would have flagged some of the data Redwood presented as inaccurate. A version of Redwood’s slides posted before the meeting contained a reference to a paper that doesn’t exist, according to Reuters. The reference was later removed.
Some members of the committee echoed Redwood’s claims about the safety of thimerosal, but member Cody Meissner, a paediatrics researcher at the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine in Lebanon, New Hampshire, criticized the meeting’s focus on thimerosal. “I’m not quite sure how to respond to this presentation. This is an old issue that has been addressed in the past,” he said. “Of all the issues that ACIP needs to focus on, this is not a big issue,” he added. His was the only dissenting vote on the recommendation against thimerosal-containing vaccines.
Meissner expressed concerns that the ACIP’s recommendation could impact access to vaccines in other countries. “The recommendations that the ACIP makes are followed among many countries around the world,” he noted, and removing thimerosal from all vaccines could increase costs. Multi-dose vials, which are the ones that still contain the ingredient, are generally cheaper and easier to store and use in mass vaccination programs.
