The acting director of the CDC – Jim O’Neill – has added to the unscientific messaging coming out from the agency on childhood vaccinations by suggesting the MMR vaccine should be separated into three individual shots.
In a social media post that cited comments made by President Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform, O’Neill wrote: “I call on vaccine manufacturers to develop safe monovalent vaccines to replace the combined MMR and ‘break up the MMR shot into three totally separate shots’.”
The acting director is a former tech investor with no medical or scientific background, and also has the position of deputy to Robert F Kennedy Jr at HHS. He was quizzed closely by lawmakers during Congressional hearings that preceded his HHS appointment, where he expressed a strong support for vaccination that now seems to have evaporated.
Trump called for the MMR vaccine – a pillar of childhood immunisation that protects against measles, mumps, and rubella (whooping cough) – to be broken up into three shots given separately in a Truth Social post last month, in which he also propagated the much-contested and derided assertion that acetaminophen use is linked to autism.
A Stat report notes that scientific experts have said that splitting the MMR into three is not feasible, as the individual vaccines are not available in the US, with a delay in protection that could leave children vulnerable to potentially serious diseases.
It’s not clear if O’Neill’s post is simply a sycophantic parroting of Trump’s rhetoric or points to some other programmes at CDC and HHS that are seeking to further amend and restrict childhood vaccinations in the US.
He wrote it just a few hours after signing off on the recent recommendation by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) against the use of MSD/Merck & Co’s combined MMR plus varicella (chickenpox) vaccine ProQuad below the age of four, and reined back support for COVID-19 vaccinations.
Dr Paul Offit, a vaccine scientist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) before being ousted under Kennedy, responded to O’Neill with his own rebuttal on social media.
In it, he points out that the discredited researcher Andrew Wakefield – to whom most of the anti-vaccine rhetoric can be traced back – argued in a paper published in The Lancet in the 1990s that the MMR vaccine caused autism because it was given as a combination.
“There have been 24 retrospective studies looking at children who received the MMR vaccine, compared to children who did not receive the MMR vaccine, [which] found that the chance of getting autism was the same in both groups.
All that will be achieved by splitting the MMR will be to make vaccines less affordable and mean that children will need six shots, instead of two, for no reason, said Offit.
He added: “I can only imagine that the two companies that make MMR vaccines in this country, Merck and [GSK], will refuse to do it, because to do anything less than that […] would be bad for the public’s health and an example of corporate irresponsibility.”
MSD and GSK have both issued statements noting that there are no approved individual measles, mumps, and rubella shots in the US market and that the increased number of injections would raise the risk of missed doses, undermining protections.
