The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s office in charge of monitoring the safety of vaccines should be separated from other parts of the agency that engage in vaccine promotion, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
The academies said in an Oct. 7 report that the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office (ISO) largely performed well during the COVID-19 pandemic but that it can do better moving forward, including by not emphasizing the benefits of vaccines in messages outlining the results of vaccine safety monitoring.
“Pandemic communications sometimes blurred safety monitoring with vaccine promotion,” Dr. Sonia Hernandez-Diaz, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a member of the academies, told a briefing on the report.
The 253-page report, which was funded by the CDC, concluded that “trust in ISO as a credible source of vaccine risk information is affected by the intersection and interaction with CDC and other governmental efforts to foster vaccination” and that the office “currently lacks the organizational independence and resources to directly disseminate its information to health professionals, policy makers, and the public.”
Experts with the academies, which were created by Congress to provide independent advice to policymakers and others, said the CDC should keep ISO separated from other CDC teams that promote vaccination and that ISO should avoid vaccine policymaking and promotion.
The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.
Overall, the ISO “carried out scientifically robust, timely, and effective monitoring and evaluation of vaccine risks throughout the COVID-19 pandemic,” the academies said in a statement.
That included utilizing multiple vaccine safety systems that led to alerts on conditions being recorded following COVID-19 vaccination, the organization said.
The clearance process for communications “sometimes delayed or constrained the dissemination of risk findings,” according to the report. A notification of an increased risk of post-vaccination heart inflammation was sent in May 2021, several months after U.S. officials learned of cases of the inflammation following vaccination, according to internal documents obtained by The Epoch Times.
The notification, scaled back from a drafted alert, said that the CDC “continues to recommend COVID-19 vaccination for everyone 12 years of age and older, given the greater risk of COVID-19 illness and related, possibly severe complications.”
As well as fixing the perceived lack of independence, ISO can improve going forward by focusing on vaccine risk monitoring and evaluation, consistently providing clear communications that lay audiences can understand, and making sure the public has access to protocols the office uses, according to the new report.
That will help “increase use of vaccines when indicated, and therefore their benefits,” the academies said.