Jason L. Schwartz

Things are very bad for U.S. vaccination policy these days and are only going to get worse. In @nejm.org, I examine the recent news about COVID-19 vaccines and ACIP, what likely lies ahead, and what the medical and public health communities should do to lessen the damage www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

So much for my “Schwartz vaccines” Google alert.

More “reining in of HHS”, as has been reported? Interesting…

Biss’ “On Immunity” — my spring break ‘gift’ for my undergrads in my social history of vaccination course. A decade old now, but still holds up as a really thoughtful reflection on vaccine hesitancy as experienced by parents just trying to navigate this topic amid so much noise and anxiety.

Confirmed www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Spoke with @marketplace.org today about the very uncertain future of vaccine R&D. www.marketplace.org/story/2026/0...

I expect next week’s ACIP meeting to be canceled/rescheduled soon. FACA requires a notice in the Federal Register at least 15 days out (barring an emergency), which didn’t happen. And the public comment/docket process—typically set up weeks ahead—still points to last December’s meeting.

Provided a few thoughts for this look at the RFK-led HHS at the 1-year mark. www.cnn.com/2026/02/13/h...

Trying to imagine my reaction if someone had told me 18 months ago that this would be a slide I’d be showing in class today.

Appears I was a bit more fired up than usual in my analysis here.

Issue is not w/ “shared decision-making” in its common usage in medicine—a very good thing!—but rather its specialized meaning in the context of types of vaccine guidance. A shrug rather than an endorsement. That would be clearer if it still went by one of its older names: “permissive use statement”

I know there's a lot going on in the world to track. Learning about the intricacies of our vaccine supply line shouldn't be one of them - yet here we are. New @newrepublic.com piece: newrepublic.com/article/2053...

Respect the plaintiffs for standing up for process/principle, but _best-case_ outcome here would be HHS being required to temporarily repost old recs that they’d vehemently disavow, while continuing to undermine vaccination in 100 other ways. No silver bullet. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/...

First day of class! Too bad there’s not much to talk about this semester.

Congratulations to YSPH's @jasonlschwartz.bsky.social & @annezinkmd.bsky.social, who have been appointed to the Board of Advisers of the Vaccine Integrity Project, a new initiative launched by the University of Minnesota that provides trusted, science-based information on vaccines.

Important reporting from @HelenBranswell and @jaspar: The US is now a global outlier when it comes to vaccine schedules, recommending fewer vaccines than most of its peers. www.statnews.com/2026/01/09/c...

I’ve been a fan of the Vaccine Integrity Project since its launch last year. Glad to be part of its new Board of Advisers announced today and contribute to its important work going forward. vaxintegrity.cidrap.umn.edu/about-us/boa...

“The concern is this is going to create widespread confusion about when those ‘special-category’ vaccines should be used, which will doubtlessly mean fewer kids will get those vaccines and more kids will get those diseases.” - @jasonlschwartz.bsky.social What parents should know ⬇️ 5/5

Joined @kcbsradio.bsky.social in SF this morning for a long conversation discussing the new vaccine recommendations from HHS/CDC www.audacy.com/podcast/kcbs...

Here’s the new schedule as released by HHS a little while ago.

Stand down (for now). Hearing now that that announcement scheduled for tomorrow has abruptly been delayed until after the holidays.

Yeah I’m hearing bad (worse) things are coming.

The longer the evidence is delayed, “the more it raises questions about what’s really under the hood regarding these allegations," @jasonlschwartz.bsky.social said. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

The FDA says more information about claims that Covid vaccines resulted in death - for children and adults - will be coming "soon." But experts say the delay has been "striking." My latest: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Positive news about COVID vaccines for kids published in MMWR! (Sad to immediately think that CDC employees may have risked their jobs in order to publish it…) www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes...

Joined @ctpublic.bsky.social this morning to talk about the latest developments in vaccine policy—and a fair bit of historical context, too. www.ctpublic.org/show/where-w...

The future is looking bleak for school vaccination requirements, generally, and restrictions on religious exemptions, specifically.

Hopped on BBC World Service for a few minutes this afternoon to talk ACIP/HepB and what it all means. (Begins at 15:10; I wasn’t asked for World Cup analysis…) www.bbc.com/audio/play/w...

This week's ACIP meeting was filled with false and misleading statements that are not supported by evidence. Here's an explanation of that evidence by two experienced science writers, one of whom has a PhD in Immunology from Yale: www.factcheck.org/2025/12/vacc...

A lot of the history and shape of American public health is explained by civil society (professions, health care institutions, philanthropy, even payers) designing policy to circumvent governments they never trusted. Ideal? Not even close. But now, there might be something useful in that DNA.

As if it wasn’t clear long ago, it’s time to accept that the days of relying on the federal gov’t to lead vaccination work is over (for now, at least) and to focus on alternatives as if the longstanding HHS/CDC activities don’t exist. Because they don’t anymore! Time to be proactive, not reactive.

I’ve been watching ACIP meetings since 2006 and have spent a lot of time with their meeting materials going back to 1964. If there’s ever been another outside speaker who’s had 90 uninterrupted minutes to opine—let alone a non-scientist/physician/public-health expert—it’d be news to me.

When I teach about vaccine safety and VAERS (its strengths and limitations), I open the VAERS website and show how we could submit a report right then in a matter of minutes.

Timely: Did Americans vote in 2024 for major changes to vaccine policy? No. Only 3% picked vaccines as a top 3 issue in the election. Our just-published research letter in @jamahealthforum.com jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Standing by this forecast from back in March, even before the ACIP purge happened.

4-5 ACIP members seem fundamentally opposed to the committee’s central purpose throughout its history—to provide population-level recommendations for how vaccines _should_ be used—viewing even a rec. as an impediment to informed consent, etc. So we’ll be doing this over and over for other vaccines.

Oh my, Tracy Beth Hoeg rejects the idea that the risk of an infectious disease for an individual differs depending on national/regional/local epidemiological contexts, health system considerations, etc.

All this talk about the original approval and recommendations for the current HepB vaccines prompted me to dig out those 1986 ACIP meeting minutes, collecting dust in my files for years. Many of the names in the room back then are still active—Schaffner, Gellin, Orenstein, Markowitz, etc.

Imagine doing something at work so troubling that virtually every person alive who ever had your boss’s job spent their Thanksgiving weekend writing something that explained to the world how wrong you are and how harmful—deadly, even—it would be if you weren’t stopped.

12 former commissioners of the FDA came together to write a Perspectives piece for the New England Journal of Medicine; raising our concerns about recent changes to vaccine approval policy at the FDA and its implications for patients and public health.

As always, great, clear, evidence-filled discussions of vaccine science and policy from @pauloffit.bsky.social here. (And now I know why the producers chatted with me about this and then ghosted me — the right choice by a mile!) www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uUR...

pretty obvious shift from following nonpartisan (scientific, medical) authority to following partisan authority. Public health advocates and researchers need to view that as the challenge, rather than rummaging around for the explanation for vaccine hesitancy in this or that community.