An advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted Thursday in favor of adding the Covid vaccine to the really useful immunization schedule for youngsters and adults.
Children 6 months and older, in addition to adults, should get the Covid vaccine, plus boosters, once they are eligible for it, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices said in an unanimous vote.
The CDC’s advisory committee meets every yr to review the vaccination schedule and make updates. The schedule is supposed to assist guide doctors in determining when to manage quite a lot of necessary vaccinations, particularly for youngsters, including vaccinations for polio, measles, whooping cough and tetanus.
The choice to officially add Covid vaccination to the schedule now goes to the CDC. The agency is predicted to log off on the advice, but it surely isn’t required to achieve this.
The really useful immunization schedule isn’t a vaccine mandate. States and native jurisdictions make their very own rules about which vaccines are required for college attendance.
“Moving Covid-19 to the really useful immunization schedule doesn’t impact what vaccines are required for school entrance, if any,” Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said during Thursday’s ACIP meeting. “Local control matters. And we honor that the choice around school entrance for vaccines rests where it did before, which is with the state level, the county level and on the municipal level, if it exists in any respect.”
“This discussion doesn’t change that,” he said.
For instance, the CDC added the HPV vaccine to the really useful schedule in 2006. Since then, only a handful of states and territories have mandated the vaccines for public school attendance. Puerto Rico, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., require HPV vaccines for girls and boys. Virginia requires the shots for women only.
The advisory committee usually makes tweaks to the schedule. Last yr, for instance, a vaccine for dengue was added for youngsters who live in places reminiscent of Puerto Rico and American Samoa where the virus is endemic. The committee can also update which strain-specific vaccine is really useful for certain illnesses, reminiscent of pneumonia.
The immunization schedule is the “gold standard” meant to assist clinicians determine which vaccines they need to recommend and when, said Dr. Julie Morita, executive vp of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Morita can also be a former public health commissioner for Chicago and a former practicing pediatrician.
“I used to look every yr, waiting for this vaccine schedule to be certain that I used to be following one of the best vaccination guidance available,” she said.
The CDC’s really useful vaccination schedule also provides guidance to insurance providers, which are likely to cover vaccines on the list. That can be necessary next yr, when federal funds to cover Covid vaccines are expected to expire, and the burden will shift to the private market.
On Wednesday, the committee voted so as to add Covid vaccines to the Vaccines for Children program, a federal plan that gives free vaccines to children eligible for or covered by Medicaid.
“By adding it to the VFC program,” Morita said, “it now makes these vaccines available to those uninsured and underinsured children.”
Vaccination rates amongst children overall have been dropping dramatically lately, particularly throughout the pandemic.
Covid cases in kids have been declining in recent weeks. In line with the American Academy of Pediatrics, nearly 28,000 cases of Covid in children were reported within the U.S. last week. It was the primary time since early April that the number of latest weekly cases had dropped below 30,000. Kids now represent about 13% of latest Covid cases.
