Meeting's tone, decisions alarm health experts

[Shots, from A1]

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On Thursday, the committee voted that children under the age of 4 receive the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and the varicella, or chickenpox, vaccine in two separate shots given at the same time, instead of a single dose.

It was a relatively minor change. Many pediatricians already do this in order to reduce the risk of febrile seizures.

But the meeting’s tone and the decisions the committee appeared poised to make profoundly worried many physicians and public health officials.

“The damage isn’t just in today’s specific votes, it’s in legitimizing this framework where these laboratory-based studies and theories based on misrepresented findings are given equal standing with robust population-level safety data,” Dr. Jake Scott, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University School of Medicine, said Friday.

“Now every anti-vax group knows that they can package their claims and scientific-looking slides and cite some weird paper out of context, and then potentially get their concerns mandated into official medical documents.”

The COVID-19 discussion was led by Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at MIT Sloan and the lone member of the committee with no biomedical or clinical degree.

He began the discussion by making clear that the committee would take into account anecdotal evidence and unpublished reports in its decision making, together with rigorously researched data.