The first of three parts: Project 2025 vs. the CDC.
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In 2023, the Heritage Foundation published a 900-page document titled Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. The introduction states, “The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025.”
Should Donald Trump be elected president, Project 2025 provides a blueprint for government agencies, including those involved in public health.
The authors of Project 2025 argue that public health agencies failed during the COVID-19 pandemic: “COVID-19 exposed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.”
The solution, according to Project 2025, is to eliminate the CDC as a recommending body for all vaccines: “Never again should CDC officials be allowed to say in their official capacity that school children ‘should be’ … vaccinated. Such decisions should be left to parents and medical providers.”
During the 1940s and 1950s, the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) relied on committees that met intermittently to address various vaccine issues. For example, in 1955, the USPHS convened experts to determine who should get Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine.
By the early 1960s, with the licensure of new vaccines, it became evident that these committees needed to meet regularly. In March 1964, the surgeon general created the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which was composed of experts in virology, immunology, microbiology, pediatrics, epidemiology, public health, and preventive medicine. The charge to the ACIP was clear:
The Committee shall concern itself with immunization schedules, dosages and routes of administration and indications and contraindications for the use of these agents. The Committee shall also provide advice [to the CDC] regarding the relative merits and methods for conducting mass immunization programs.
Since 1964, ACIP experts have recommended many safe and effective vaccines.
Prior to these recommendations, every year in the United States polio caused 20,000 cases of paralysis and 1,500 deaths; measles caused 48,000 hospitalizations and 500 deaths; mumps was the most common cause of acquired deafness; rubella (German measles) caused 20,000 cases of congenital birth defects; rotavirus caused 70,000 hospitalizations from severe dehydration; and bacteria such as pneumococcus and Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) caused tens of thousands of cases of pneumonia, sepsis, and meningitis and hundreds of deaths.
Thanks to vaccines, and the clear, strong recommendations by the ACIP and CDC, these diseases have been dramatically reduced or eliminated. Indeed, in a recent report published on August 8, 2024, researchers found that among 117 million children born between 1994 and 2023, CDC-recommended vaccines prevented about 500 million illnesses, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1.13 million deaths.
Begging the question, exactly what problem is Project 2025 trying to fix?
Which brings us to the real goal of Project 2025 — to reduce or eliminate the impact of all government agencies and, by extension, the expertise provided by those agencies.
According to Project 2025, we don’t need experts. We need only rely on the common sense of parents and doctors. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.
COVID-19 vaccines are a perfect example.
In December 2020, Pfizer and Moderna submitted data to the FDA and CDC for authorization and recommendation, respectively, of their COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. Four documents were submitted, each about 200 pages long, and all available to the public online.
Understanding the data contained in these 800 pages, however, required an expertise in virology, immunology, microbiology, statistics, epidemiology, and molecular biology. Most parents don’t have that expertise. Nor do most doctors. They depend on public health agencies such as the FDA and CDC, which collectively have the expertise to understand these data.
Project 2025 is asking us to eliminate that expertise. The public is now the expert.
As it turned out, the American public was right to follow the CDC’s clear, strong recommendation to receive COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, which saved the lives of about 3 million Americans. Those who chose to ignore that recommendation did so at their own peril; about 230,000 people died unnecessarily.
The CDC and its advisory committee of experts have served us well. We shouldn’t be so quick to toss them aside.
Reprinted, with permission, from Paul Offit’s substack Beyond the Noise.
Paul Offit, M.D., is a professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, and author of “Tell Me When It’s Over.”
