HHS removes flu, COVID, and hepatitis B from the recommended childhood vaccine schedule.

The acting director of the Centers for Disease Control signed a decision memorandum on Monday afternoon accepting a recommendation from the Department of Health and Human Services to reduce the childhood immunization schedule from eighteen diseases to eleven.

Removed: influenza, COVID-19, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and meningococcal meningitis. The framing offered by the Secretary of Health and Human Services was that the new schedule “aligns with international consensus.” It does not align with international consensus. Most peer countries vaccinate against most of these diseases.

This is a deliberate misrepresentation, and a deliberate misrepresentation in a memo signed by an acting agency head is the kind of detail historians underline.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, which is the professional body that certifies the doctors who give the shots, did not concur with the change. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which is the federal body that has set the schedule for forty years, was not the body that produced the change. The change was produced by a comprehensive scientific assessment that has not been published, by reviewers who have not been named, and approved by an acting CDC director whose appointment has been challenged in litigation.

There is, in the schedule, a column for the hepatitis B vaccine, which has historically been administered at birth. Hepatitis B in infants is overwhelmingly transmitted at delivery, from mother to child, and is associated with chronic liver disease and liver cancer in adulthood. Removing it from the schedule does not eliminate the virus. It eliminates the federal recommendation. The vaccine, in practical terms, becomes optional, which means it becomes uneven, which means a generation of American children will, in some statistically reliable fraction, develop a disease that the schedule had eliminated for two decades.

A serious country does not change the childhood immunization schedule by memorandum. It does so by review, by publication, by professional concurrence, and by transparent argument with the medical bodies whose work the schedule reflects. None of those four things happened on January 5.

The vaccines do not stop existing. The schedule does. The next public-health crisis to involve a disease on the removed list will arrive on a timetable that nobody chose, into a country whose pediatricians will be reading a memo and the law alongside it.

Calmly documenting the decline.