Top CDC vaccine adviser questions need for polio shot, other longstanding recommendations

[lostincalifornia]

Chair of federal panel stresses need to protect individual rights over public health

The chair of a federal vaccine advisory panel charted a new course for the committee in a podcast released Thursday — suggesting the public might want to reconsider the use of polio vaccines, arguing individual freedoms should be a north star of the panel, and pointing to the Covid pandemic as key to his thinking on health policy.

Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist who became chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in December, also downplayed established science on vaccines during an interview for the podcast and suggested policy goals, not new research, were the driving force behind changing recommendations in recent months.

In a wide-ranging interview with the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?”, Milhoan painted a more detailed picture of the committee’s strategy than has been previously known as it moves to weigh recommendations for vaccines given to children and pregnant people.

When asked why the committee had revised existing recommendations, including delaying the age by which some children are immunized for hepatitis B, Milhoan said plainly: “Yeah, because we were concerned about mandates, and mandates have really harmed and increased hesitancy.”

https://www.statnews.com/2026/01/22/vaccine-policy-adviser-kirk-milhoan-individual-rights-trump-public-health/

[Irish_Dem]

1. Back to iron lungs.

My mother was a young nurse during a polio outbreak back in the later 40's.

She never forgot the children in iron lungs. It was horrific to view.
Row after row of young children completely paralyzed.

And she said that healthy young men seemed to be hit the hardest too.
She told me the story of being sent out to the ER to evaluate patients in the waiting room.
To triage them.

A nice looking young man was standing in front of her, talking just fine to her.
Then suddenly he falls to the floor, he is dead.
She never forgot that.

When the polio vaccine came out she was so happy.
I am glad she is not alive to see it no longer recommended.

[Ocelot II]

4. Same here. My mother was also a nurse in the late '40s, and she, too, had stories

of children in iron lungs. Before the first vaccine came out we kids weren't allowed to go swimming in public pools (the polio virus spreads easily in water) or even play at crowded playgrounds. In those days gamma globulin was the only thing that seemed to have any preventative value, so we had to get shots of that, which was a big unpleasant injection in the butt. When the first Salk vaccine came out we got hustled off to the doctor for that shot, and Mom's response to our whining was a lecture about iron lungs. I remember being shown a picture in one of her nursing textbooks of a row of kids in those things.

Make Polio Great Again, I guess.

[womanofthehills]

7. Iron lungs will never return

Ventilators have replaced them. I think there are still a few people who use them at night - but by choice because they used them their whole lives.

[Irish_Dem]

8. Trump is destroying modern medical advances.

We have no idea what our medical care will be like in the future.

[intheflow]

9. Not the point.

[Ocelot II]

10. But wouldn't it be nice if polio vaccines prevented people from having to use ventilators

instead of obsolete iron lungs? The whole point is that once polio vaccination became almost universal, nobody got polio and nobody needed iron lungs or ventilators!

[spanone]

2. Crazy fucks in the CDC

[maxrandb]

3. Polio is caused by contact with fecal matter

Please don't touch any Retrumplicans, and if you do, wash your hands immediately!

[peggysue2]

5. Make Polio Great Again!

The freedumb to die, miserably.

Is there some warehouse where all those old iron lungs are stored?

Better start checking.

[Rebl2]

6. Any doctor

that suggests that should lose their license to practice medicine.

[Ilsa]

11. The doctors who had to treat children with severe communicable diseases

are all gone, retired or dead, except those who have gone overseas with groups like Doctors Without Borders. Dr Yahoo, even with his pediatric cardiology specialty, apparently slept through his microbiology and immunology lectures.

Shame on him.