US measles deaths mount while its vaccine panel sits empty

US officials announced three measles-linked deaths last week, including a seven-month-old baby in New York state and a 21-year-old woman in Pennsylvania who died soon after childbirth. Another infant died in Wisconsin, officials said Thursday. New York and Wisconsin both marked their first measles-associated deaths in three decades.

The country's vaccine advisory machinery is stuck. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary, replaced the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices with his own handpicked allies, and a federal judge then halted the committee's work after finding the Trump administration had failed to constitute it properly. "Now, we don't have an ACIP," said Yvonne "Bonnie" Maldonado, a former member and Stanford infectious diseases chief. "That's going to impact disease and deaths in the US."

The CDC is taking nominations for a new committee, but appointments can take months or years, and rewriting recommendations is slow too. Noel Brewer, a former ACIP member at UNC, said it typically ran 12 to 18 months from considering new advice to adopting it. Four former advisers told the Guardian that keeping the same recommendations while cases and deaths surge has left the US unable to respond properly.

Several CDC options that would normally get airtime are going quiet. Babies usually wait until age one for their first MMR shot, but in an outbreak they can be vaccinated at six months, and the second dose can come as soon as four weeks after the first instead of between ages four and six. Edwin Asturias, a former ACIP member at the University of Colorado, blamed the delayed second dose for a "group of susceptibles" now falling ill and dying.

Adolescents and young adults are an unusually large share of those getting sick. "Are you really monitoring how many adults are getting infected? I doubt it," said Paul Offit of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, who sat on the ACIP two decades ago. Pennsylvania officials recently warned that congenital measles, where a baby is infected in the womb, has risen sharply this year. Earlier this year a measles-infected baby died soon after birth.

Former advisers pointed to people born between 1968 and 1989 who may have had only one shot and need a second, and to anyone starting cancer treatment or other immune-suppressing therapy. Brewer said states and counties can act alone, and Maldonado said the CDC's director, Erica Schwartz, drew criticism for weeks of silence during the outbreaks. "We need to get vaccination rates up," Brewer said. "Just get the shot."