The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s office in charge of monitoring the safety of vaccines should be separated from other parts of the agency that engage in vaccine promotion, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
The academies said in an Oct. 7 report that the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office (ISO) largely performed well during the COVID-19 pandemic but that it can do better moving forward, including by not emphasizing the benefits of vaccines in messages outlining the results of vaccine safety monitoring.
“Pandemic communications sometimes blurred safety monitoring with vaccine promotion,” Dr. Sonia Hernandez-Diaz, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a member of the academies, told a briefing on the report….