\nThere is no research to support such a massive change, but O\u2019Neill endorsed similar remarks made by President Trump. It\u2019s not clear if the message, made in a Monday post on X, should be seen by drugmakers as an official directive from the agency.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nO\u2019Neill gave no reason why he thinks separating the shots and spreading them out over time would be beneficial, but his comments build on the administration\u2019s public skepticism of vaccines.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nThe combination MMR vaccine was licensed in 1971, and monovalent shots were phased out in 2009 due to the success of the combination shot.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nScientists say it wouldn\u2019t make any sense to change that, as there\u2019s no safety issue. Separating the shots would likely decrease adherence to the entire schedule, experts say, and therefore increase disease.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\u201cI think that that would not be met with any enthusiasm by, or acceptance by, either providers or parents who would see their children inoculated with substantially more doses of vaccine,\u201d said William Schaffner, an epidemiologist and professor of public policy at Vanderbilt University.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nIt would also be a massive hurdle for the two companies, Merck and GSK, that make combination measles, mumps and rubella vaccines for the U.S. market.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\u201cThese monovalent vaccines are not even available and I do not envision that vaccine manufacturers are going to want to produce these monovalent vaccines \u2013 particularly if they need to be studied in placebo-controlled trials as the Department of HHS has called for,\u201d said William Moss, a professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University\u2019s Bloomberg School of Public Health.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The idea to separate the shots originates from a paper published in 1998 by discredited British researcher Andrew Wakefield, who claimed that the MMR vaccine was linked to increasing rates of autism.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
His paper was subsequently retracted, and he is no longer able to practice medicine in the U.K.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is no research to support such a massive change, but O\u2019Neill endorsed similar remarks made by President…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":208012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[13897,97,119255,10791,19787,10650],"class_list":{"0":"post-208011","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-cdc","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-health-and-human-services-secretary-robert-f-kennedy-jr","11":"tag-hhs","12":"tag-mmr-vaccine","13":"tag-vaccines"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}