Removing The CDC Vaccine Assessment Tool Will Do Harm

My daughter Carly has an annual physical approaching. With infectious diseases on the rise, she asked me to repost CDC’s Adult Vaccine Assessment Tool. But if you click on the link, up comes a 404.

I’d put the valuable self-test on Facebook shortly after the presidential election amid rumors that RFK Jr. could head Health and Human Services, and friends asking me which vaccines they needed to update or get for the first time. I’m not an MD, so posted the assessment tool. Now that it’s gone, Carly and her friends want to know how they can protect themselves. Yet despite the grinning new head of HHS next to his smiling boss on the opening webpage of HHS, with a banner that promises to “Make America Healthy Again,” the tool to choose appropriate vaccines has vanished. With HHS overseeing FDA, NIH, and the CDC, I’m scared.

Which Vaccines Require Boosters?

Influenza incidence and severity are increasing, against a backdrop of novel drifts (small genetic changes) and shifts (larger changes) to the virus, all against a backdrop of novel infection pathways, such as birds to cows to people. So getting flu shots, even if not 100% effective, is a no-brainer, especially for people with respiratory conditions like asthma. But which other vaccines should my daughter and her cohort get? Which shots from childhood require a booster?

Does she need a repeat MMR? Additional hepatitis B shot? Chickenpox? What about DPT with pertussis coming back? Aka whooping cough, pertussis increased in incidence six-fold from the end of 2023 to the end of 2024, according to a surviving CDC webpage that ends with “Vaccination is the best way to prevent pertussis. View the latest data available from CDC.”

But clicking the link to access those data triggers a “404 – File or directory not found.” Why???

Similarly, the Adult Vaccine Assessment Tool webpage that Carly asked me to repost on Facebook now leads to: “The resource you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.”

Searching a different CDC page, Vaccine Information for Adults, links to the Adult Vaccine Assessment Tool. I’d found a way in! Alas, it sent me right back to the 404. All roads, apparently, lead to censorship. Why??? Is this “do no harm”?

Carly, like many young adults, recognizes the need to get as many vaccines as she safely can, with herd immunity dropping as more people refuse vaccination. Access to CDC’s tool would enable individuals to identify personal risk factors that might make a certain vaccine unsafe for them. But the new administration is blocking the information that people require to make informed decisions about vaccination. It actively promotes ignorance.

Of course, Carly is too young to recall many infectious diseases from personal experience – but she knows I can. And she knows that her older sisters had some sicknesses that are now preventable with a simple jab.

Vaccine Memories

My knowledge of vaccines is both personal and professional.

I’m the same age as RFK Jr, and a geneticist and science writer. All 38 editions of the life science textbooks I’ve written have chapters on immunology that clearly define vaccine: “an inactive, disabled, or part of a pathogen that stimulates an immune response. Vaccines range in size from entire pathogens to their macromolecules, such as proteins or nucleic acids.”

So yes, I’ve written a lot about vaccines. But mostly, I remember.

I remember my mother’s joyous comments in my baby book, thanking doctors Salk and Sabin for inventing polio vaccines. A few years later, I had friends whose older siblings had had polio. And the disease returns when vaccination lapses.

I remember my month-long bout with measles only very dimly – but my mother told me I was on the verge of encephalitis.

I remember my little sister, three years later, being held down to get the new measles vaccines, one shot in each arm. I have lifelong protection, but she may need to be revaccinated. This time she’ll be thankful.

I remember my third grade classroom completely emptied by various viral infections.

I remember, vaguely, that by the time the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine came along, I’d already had all three “diseases of childhood.”

I clearly recall the onset of the mumps: we were driving over the Marine Parkway bridge in Brooklyn when I chomped down on a hard potato chip and felt agonizing pain. The mumps left many boys infertile. And it’s one of the diseases that has returned, in the US and UK, because in some individuals vaccine protection wanes after 20 years . Measles is back too, in Texas and New Mexico, due to vaccine refusal. The few individuals who claim to have been vaccinated are going by memory, not tests to detect antibodies to demonstrate the claimed immunity.

Along with the MMR jab came the DPT shot. As a nerd child I devoured Paul de Kruif’s 1926 original Microbe Hunters, so I knew what the initials of the vaccines represented. And the stories behind them.

Pertussis is whooping cough – before the vaccine, parents would frantically push their gasping and honking children into bathrooms misty with running hot showers to help clear their lungs. And tetanus risk arose from rusty nails and animal bites. I had a tetanus booster a few years ago when a dog tried to kill my cat and I intervened.

I didn’t know much about diphtheria growing up because a vaccine had already vanquished it, but this bacterial infection is perhaps the worst of the worst. In the PBS drama Poldark, which takes place in Cornwall in the early 19th century, the people called the infectious disease “putrid throat,” for the stringy gunk that strangled many children.

In Smithsonian magazine’s How Science Conquered Diphtheria, pediatrician Perri Klass, also inspired as a child by Microbe Hunters, quotes Noah Webster, writing in May 1735, about a town in New Hampshire:

“in a wet cold season … appeared a disease among children, commonly called the ‘throat distemper,’ of a most malignant kind, and by far the most fatal ever known in this country. … the disease gradually travelled southward, almost stripping the country of children. Many families lost three and four children—many lost all.”

Everywhere, parents watched their children suffocate from the easily transmitted infection.

Survivors of the “throat distemper” were weakened for life, dying young. Noted Black historian W.E.B. Du Bois wrote vividly of his young son’s death from the strangulation of diphtheria. An article in The Journal of the American Medical Association confirmed his claim that his 2-year-old was unable to get antitoxin – a treatment that preceded the vaccine – from white doctors in Atlanta.

Today, in the US, diphtheria is gone, thanks to a vaccine available since 1914. In the 1940s it was combined into the DPT.

From Smallpox to COVID

Until approval of the first mRNA-based vaccine, against COVID, on August 23, 2021, my favorite vaccine success story was conquering smallpox. I bear the scar of the skin scratch on my upper left arm that immunized me.

English physician Edward Jenner invented vaccination against smallpox in 1796. He noticed that milkmaids who previously had caught cowpox did not get smallpox, and replicated this response to prevent smallpox in others. (The practice of rubbing smallpox lesions into open cuts to provide protection is inoculation, not vaccination. It was done for centuries.)

The World Health Organization launched an intensified plan to eradicate smallpox in 1967. Then for several years, health agencies tracked immunization uptake globally. The last known natural case of smallpox was in Somalia in 1977. And so in 1980, WHO declared smallpox eradicated – the only infectious disease to achieve this distinction.

Vaccines work!!!

The invention of mRNA-based vaccines is so ingenious that it robs me of words, although I’ve done many blog posts on it and was thrilled to add it to my human genetics textbook with McGraw-Hill.

Messenger RNA is a molecule, one of the two types of nucleic acid, that carries the information that tells cells to link amino acids in a certain sequence, producing a protein. (Sorry, politicians, you’re going to have to learn this.) The mRNA in COVID vaccines tells cells to produce the virus’s spike protein. And then immune system cellular sentries detect the spikes and begin the response cascade.

Got that, Mr. Kennedy? The definition of RNA is part of high school science standards. I know that because I helped write them. I wish I could give you a quiz on the basics. Can you distinguish antibody from antigen? T cell from B cell? A spleen from a lymph node? If not, may I suggest a refresher course in biology before judging vaccine efficacy?

My 500th post here at DNA Science, from 2023, was In Celebration of Vaccines – for good reason. But now, a little over a year later, the President has removed the CDC’s Adult Vaccine Assessment Tool. This action is simply incomprehensible to me. Has he mutated the mantra “do no harm” to “do harm?” For that’s precisely what gagging CDC will do.

These days, sometimes I can’t help but wish those vaccines hadn’t enabled me to survive long enough to witness the epidemic of arrogance and ignorance plaguing our once great nation.