A new initiative launched by the the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy will bring together a steering committee tasked with engaging health and policy leaders about vaccines and immunization efforts in the United States.
Dr. Michael Osterholm, Regents Professor and Director of CIDRAP, believes the Vaccine Integrity Project could play critical role in guiding recommendations around vaccines, using science-based information.
"People who care about preventing needless suffering and death from vaccine-preventable diseases have watched the current measles outbreak and health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rhetoric with rising alarm," said Osterholm. "Everyday we seem to see new and disturbing developments occur around vaccines."
Christy Walton, the widow of John T. Walton, who was one of the sons of the Walmart founder Sam Walton, is supporting the Vaccine Integrity Project through an unrestricted gift from Alumbra.
According to Osterholm, the project will consist of an eight-person steering committee who will join leading public health and policy experts in making recommendations in how vaccine utilization remains grounded in science.
"Starting next week, the steering committee will engage professionals across the U.S. vaccine landscape as part of a series of facilitated discussions to gather feedback in how non-governmental organizations may assist with safeguarding vaccine policy and utilization in the United States."
The Vaccine Integrity Project comes as Osterholm warns that the the system the U.S. has relied on to make vaccine recommendations and to review safety and effectiveness data faces threats.
"If there are issues that come up around vaccine data integrity or safety and there is not a federal response that is adequate to address those, we need to have some coordinated across the vaccine enterprise way of responding to that. So what we're looking at now is just how will that look and what are the possible ways of making that happen."
Former FDA commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg is one of the steering committee's co-chairs along with Dr. Harvey Finebrg, past President of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine.
CIDRAP plans to provide updates of the Vaccine Integrity Project as planned sessions are completed.