Pediatric Infectious Disease Chief Weighs In on Judge Blocking HHS Vaccine Changes

In an interview with Pharmacy Times, Sharon Nachman, MD, chief of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Disease at Stony Brook Children's Hospital in New York, offered her reaction to the federal court ruling blocking the scaled-back childhood vaccine schedule as recommended by the US Department of Health and Human Services, expressing relief and underscoring the serious public health risks the reduced schedule would have created for millions of children across the country.

The modified schedule had reduced coverage from 18 diseases to 11, removing vaccines for hepatitis A and B, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and meningococcal disease. Nachman walked through the clinical consequences of each removal. The hepatitis B vaccine, she explained, is given at birth specifically because infants exposed to maternal hepatitis B infection have a greater than 90% chance of developing chronic infection, a condition that can progress to liver failure, cirrhosis, or liver cancer.

For RSV, she clarified that the removed product was not a traditional vaccine but a monoclonal antibody designed to boost immune response—meaning concerns about vaccines were entirely inapplicable—and that losing it would predestinate young children, particularly those in their first year of life, to infections that frequently result in hospitalization, reactive airway disease, or death.

“By not giving the meningococcal vaccine, we’re telling families it’s OK for your child to get this disease and die—and certainly that's not true.” – Sharon Nachman, MD

Removing hepatitis A protections, she noted, risks reigniting community outbreaks that had become rare precisely because of widespread vaccination. And with meningococcal disease currently circulating on university campuses in both the US and UK, she was unequivocal: declining to vaccinate is effectively accepting that some children will die from a preventable disease.

Nachman also addressed the court’s finding that the reconstitution of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act. She argued that selecting advisers who are already biased against vaccines guarantees biased outcomes, whereas ACIP’s historical strength rested on the careful selection of clinically experienced, data-driven, and unbiased experts.