A top expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that supervised the process to update COVID-19 ACCINE recommendations that were resigned on Tuesday.
The dismissal, reported for the first time by the Associated Press and confirmed by CBS News, only comes a week after the secretary secretary and anti-vaccine lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Unilaterally some of the CDC recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines has withdrawn and changed, limiting access to children and pregnant people. The dismissal also comes three weeks before the experts of CDC and advisers are planned to publicly evaluate data and to discuss the recommendations for this season-a long process that was disturbed by the announcement of Kennedy.
The departing CDC officer, Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, an expert in the field of infectious diseases in children, was the co-leader of a working group on COVID-19 vaccines who advised experts in the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices of the CDC (ACIP). She informed her Acip colleagues about her resignation in an e -mail on Tuesday.
“My career in public health and vaccinology started with a deep -rooted desire to help the most vulnerable members of our population, and that is not something that I can continue to play in this role,” wrote Panagiotakopoulos.
Unilateral changes
Earlier, the CDC and ACIP COVID-19 vaccines advised everyone from 6 months and older. Experts have emphasized that pregnant people in particular must be vaccinated because the pregnancy suppresses the immune system and pregnant people with a high risk of severe COVID-19 and death. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists states that “Covid-19 infection during pregnancy can be catastrophic.” Furthermore, dozens of studies have shown that the vaccines are safe and effective in protecting the pregnant person, pregnancy and newborns.
