Until last week, the future of vaccination for human papillomavirus, or HPV, in the United States seemed clear.
The decision rests, primarily, on the deliberations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a vaccine-advisory committee to the CDC. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, abruptly dismissed all 17 members of ACIP.
A few of the experts I spoke with raised the possibility that this new ACIP might still amend the HPV-vaccine recommendation to a single dose, but with a different rationale: not because the members are swayed by the data on its effectiveness, but because they’d support any option that cleaves a vaccine dose from the immunization schedule. Kennedy, too, seems likely to back such a move.
“Any window to roll back the number of times a child receives a vaccine injection, he’s going to push for,” Alison Buttenheim, a behavioral scientist at Penn Nursing, told me.