...And What Have We Done?

A reflection on the ACIP meeting that felt different

Last night, my husband, Ethan, got our holiday decorations down from the attic. Our garage looked like a factory of blue, silver, red, and green tinsel had vomited all over the place. (We celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas in our household, and I take holiday decor very seriously.)

We asked Alexa—who probably already knew what we wanted—to play holiday music.

The first song? John Lennon’s melancholy “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).”

Once the lyrics hit my ears, I fell apart.

So this is Christmas / And what have you done? / Another year over / And a new one just begun...

What have we done?

I had just sat through two days of the ACIP meeting. I was emotionally rocking back and forth in the fetal position. I am at a loss for words to capture how I felt afterwards. I will just say that this time feels very different.

Over this past year, we’ve tuned in to other ACIP meetings that were bumpy and quite painful. But this one felt... sinister. The mask was off.

We heard a two-hour presentation from an anti-vaccine lawyer whose career is built on suing vaccine manufacturers. If I understood him correctly, he has dozens of active lawsuits pending. How is that not a disqualifying conflict of interest? When Dr. Meissner pushed back, calling his presentation “a terrible, terrible distortion of all the facts,” Siri assured him that his work is “not a very lucrative endeavor.” KFF Health News reports that ICAN, an anti-vaccine organization, paid Siri’s law firm $6 million in 2023 alone—a real Orphan Annie story.

Throughout yesterday’s meeting, we heard more about Denmark than we did about the U.S. healthcare system—an attempt to sell us on retrofitting the Danish approach into a country as comparable to Denmark as a cruise ship is to a kayak. Denmark has universal healthcare, 6 million people, and cradle-to-grave medical records. We have none of that.

I could go on and on about the regurgitated myths I thought we’d left in the past (SIDS, autism, autoimmune issues, oh my!). For that, I direct you to this comprehensive debunk that we at The Evidence Collective put together. I’ll tell you it was a dizzying endeavor—we lost count at 60 falsehoods. We didn’t know how to approach the firehose of misinformation.

But instead, I want to reflect on a few things I noticed. The gestalt…

1. The playbook slipped. There were moments where ACIP members let their intentions show. Like when Retsef Levi asked Aaron Siri how ACIP could help eliminate vaccine mandates. The answer? Have the federal government override state policy. I shouldn’t even put that into the universe.

2. This committee lacks a fundamental grasp of public health. I believe it was Evelyn Griffin who used air quotes when describing the hepatitis B birth dose as a “safety net”—as if that’s a bad thing. As if that’s not precisely what public health is supposed to be. I fear this committee imagines the U.S. as a nation of affluent women who have their prenatal appointments penciled into Moleskine planners with pastel highlighters. The point is: not everyone accesses prenatal care. Talking about increased screening is great and absolutely necessary, but it’s also unrealistic to assume everyone can and will.

3. “We don’t see hepatitis B anymore.” People kept saying this. How rare it is. Do you know why that’s the case? I’ll give you one guess.

4. Political theater—but not for everyone. I know many of us have referred to this meeting as political theater, and I stand by that. The nationally (and internationally) broadcast ACIP is a very intentional platform for spreading soundbites. But I don’t think that’s the motivation for everyone involved. Which brings me to...

5. We are operating on two completely different planets. I don’t say that to be dismissive. What’s clear to me is that both “sides” feel strongly about protecting children. So how do we arrive at such different conclusions? One side focuses on the harms of the pathogens—the diseases vaccines are designed to prevent. The other focuses on the potential (and rare) side effects of vaccines. Our risk calculi are wildly different. For the committee members, this translated to a relentless push for individual choice. I believe it was Siri who said, “We stopped listening to the parents.”

Personal freedom, informed consent, parental choice—these are values I share. They’re also values that are already in place. Parents can refuse vaccines. Informed consent is federally mandated. The birth dose was always a recommendation, not a requirement. What became clear over two days is that we are operating with fundamentally different understandings of what these concepts even mean.

They often frame school entry requirements and pediatricians refusing unvaccinated patients as coercion. But this framing fails to recognize why these policies exist: to protect children. The infant in the waiting room who is too young for her MMR. The child with leukemia who can’t receive live vaccines. The medically fragile kid whose immune system can’t mount a response. These policies maintain our collective shield against diseases we have fought decades to control.

What Dr. Angela Rasmussen called ‘a tenuous grasp on the reality that our life’s work is being decimated’— that’s where I am right now.

How do I explain this feeling?

I usually look forward to the new year. A reset button. A blank slate. But this time, the writing is on the wall. I fear 2026 will be a public health bloodbath.

Throughout the two-day ACIP meeting, I kept reminding myself that beyond the fighting and bickering and absurdity, children’s lives hang in the balance. Our nation’s public health hangs in the balance. I am truly scared.

This time feels different.

Within hours of the vote, the President issued an official memorandum directing HHS and CDC to review the childhood vaccine schedule and “align” it with “peer, developed countries” like Denmark, Japan, and Germany—countries that recommend fewer vaccines. He called the ACIP vote “a very good decision” and posted: “Many parents and scientists have been questioning the efficacy of this ‘schedule,’ as have I!”

The memo frames the United States as “a high outlier” for recommending vaccines against 18 diseases. It does not mention that we are also an outlier in lacking universal healthcare, in having fragmented prenatal care, and in losing infants to follow-up the moment they leave the hospital. As CDC’s hepatitis expert Adam Langer put it during the meeting: “Denmark and, for that matter, virtually all other high-income countries are not really peer nations.”

We are being asked to import policies designed for systems we do not have.

While ACIP does not set policy, it certainly informs it— and more than that, it informs public opinion. We now have a public dizzy with conflicting information: the American Academy of Pediatrics standing firmly behind the birth dose, and federal officials actively undermining it.

So this is Christmas. And what have we done?

The glimmer of hope for me is the fight I, and so many others, have taken up. The physicians who showed up with cracked voices to defend their patients. The liaison members who called out cherry-picked data in real time. The science communicators working through the night to document every falsehood. We are still here. We are still fighting.

But the war is not over. Far from it.

Stay Curious,

Unbiased Science

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