Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - Health officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced broad changes to childhood vaccine recommendations on Monday, but local medical professionals in New York will not be straying away from the already established childhood vaccination policies in the state.
In a statement released by the New York State Department of Health on Tuesday, the state’s childhood vaccination policies, including school immunization requirements, will remain unchanged at this time, and no changes will be coming to vaccine access, insurance coverage, liability protections or the federal Vaccines for Children (VFC) program.
Dr. Stephen Turkovich, president of the Golisano Children's Hospital of Buffalo, says what the CDC has done is they created, in essence, three different categories of vaccines.
"One are recommended for everybody, one are vaccines that they said you should really sort of talk to your doctor about and have a shared decision making, and some they're saying should only be reserved for those that are high risk," said Turkovich in an interview with WBEN. "They've taken some of the vaccines that have been routine for many, many years for everybody, and sort of move them into those other two categories."
Dr. Turkovich says the schedule for children's vaccines has been long-standing and established for many years based on a number of criteria.
"It's first based upon studies and science to determine what the right dose and the timing is of those. And then that information will go into studies, they're peer reviewed by experts. And then people will look at all of those studies, and another panel of independent experts will come together and then advise the CDC on what the schedule should be. That process was not followed this time, and so when they made the changes, they didn't provide any evidence for why they were doing these changes. They weren't really following the science, unfortunately," Turkovich said.
Regardless of what the CDC says now about children's vaccinations, Dr. Turkovich is telling parents to always have conversations with their pediatrician.
"Ask a lot of questions, understand what the vaccines are for, what the risk and the benefits are. That informed consent is always important and should never, never be changed," Turkovich stated. "But what I would say is the vaccine schedule that was previous was evidence-based, it's been studied. If you look at historically, it really saved countless, thousands, if not millions of lives and hospitalizations. So it's prevented suffering, it's prevented death. It really is the best that we have, and I would recommend to continue to use it."
Over the years, Dr. Turkovich has gotten the sense of a mixed bag with parents being more confused or trusting of the schedule of vaccines for their kids.
"Parents want to do what's best for their child, and they're getting a variety of different messages. Whether they'd be from governmental agencies, social media, TikTok. The amount of misinformation that's on especially TikTok and other social media platforms is just tremendous, so it's very hard to sort of sort through all the information and make the best decision for your child," Turkovich emphasized. "The best person to talk to is your pediatrician. They are armed with the evidence, the science and the facts."
Turkovich also recommends parents to find out more medical information from the American Academy of Pediatrics, a national organization staffed by experts in a variety of different areas, including infectious disease and vaccine science.
"That is where you can get all the information you need about the risks, the benefits of all the vaccines. It also will give you some perspective about how effective some of these vaccines have been," Dr. Turkovich added.
Among the vaccines Dr. Turkovich says have been proven by these national experts to be effective includes the RSV vaccine and flu vaccinations.
"RSV is one of those vaccines that has now been moved to only high risk patients, but the studies have shown - actually it's been confirmed here with looking at where we were two, three years ago before the vaccine and now - the number of children admitted with RSV is down by 80% here at the hospital. That's what the studies actually showed," Turkovich detailed. "The good news is many more children are home and healthy now, and not admitted in the hospital having difficulty breathing and on different breathing machines.
"We're seeing significant, very high rates of the flu. It looks like it's going to be a very severe season. We had over 600 cases a couple weeks ago. Last year was also a severe flu season, 89% of the over 200 children who died last year from the flu were not fully vaccinated, and almost half of them had no underlying medical problems. So I highly recommend that you get your child vaccinated for the flu. It could save their life."
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