A newly postedagendafor next week’s meeting of the just-appointed group of outside vaccine advisers to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention includes a discussion and vote on thimerosal in flu vaccines, a preservative tied to debunked claims from decades ago of links to autism.
The meeting, scheduled to start Wednesday and run for two days, is the first for a newly installed group of eight Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices members. US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed the previous group of 17 experts last week, claiming that they had conflicts of interest.
A number of the new panelists, though, haveraised concernsfrom the public health world for their positions on vaccines, including serving as expert witnesses in lawsuits against vaccine makers and suggesting without evidence that Covid-19 vaccines kill young people and should immediately be removed from the market.
It’s not clear what the discussion and vote at next week’s meeting on thimerosal in flu vaccines will entail, and the presenter of the information at the meeting is listed on the agenda as “TBD.” A spokesperson for HHS directed questions about the nature of the discussion and vote back to the posted agenda.
Thimerosal is a mercury-based compound used to prevent bacteria and fungus from growing in vaccines, and the CDCsaysdata from multiple studies “show no evidence of harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines.”
Nonetheless, the use of thimerosal in vaccines has declined significantly since the US Food and Drug Administration in 1999 asked vaccine manufacturers to detail plans to remove it; the FDA nowsays“all vaccines routinely recommended for children 6 years of age and younger in the U.S. are available in formulations that do not contain thimerosal.”
The preservative is still used in some multidose vials of seasonal flu vaccines.
Since thimerosal was largely removed from pediatric vaccines, autism rates have continued to rise, which the CDC notes “is the opposite of what would be expected if thimerosal caused autism.”
Thimerosal has long been a focus of Kennedy, who published a book in 2014 called “Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak,” referring to it as “mercury, a known neurotoxin.”
TheCDCpoints out, however, that there are two kinds of mercury – methylmercury and ethylmercury – and high levels of the first can be toxic to people. Thimerosal contains ethylmercury, the agency says, “which is cleared from the human body more quickly than methylmercury, and is therefore less likely to cause any harm.”
The agenda for next week’s meeting also says the advisers will discuss the combination measles, mumps, rubella and varicella vaccine for children younger than 5 and will vote on RSV immunization for pregnant women and children and in the Vaccines for Children program.