Washington: A senior Trump administration health official said on Sunday that the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine was not lethal, clarifying remarks by President Donald Trump as US childhood vaccination rates fell below the threshold needed for herd immunity.
Dr Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services, made the statement after being repeatedly questioned about Trump’s description of the MMR vaccine.
“No, the MMR vaccine is not a lethal vaccine,” Oz told CBS News’ “Face the Nation”.
New figures from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention showed that 92 per cent of the country’s kindergarten pupils received measles vaccination during the last school year.
That rate is below the 95 per cent level considered necessary for herd immunity.
The administration has encouraged Americans to receive the MMR vaccine. Trump, however, said the three vaccines should be administered separately.
“In three separate vaccinations, given at separate times, together there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal,” Trump said in a recorded clip played during the programme.
“And separately, it looks like they are not at all lethal, but just very effective. So the MMR, we want to have separate, separate visits, separate times,” he added.
CBS presenter Margaret Brennan said Trump had twice suggested the combined vaccine might be lethal. She noted that the MMR vaccine was not currently available in the United States as three separate injections.
Merck, its manufacturer, could not offer separate vaccines for another 10 years, Brennan said.
Oz said the administration wanted patients to receive treatments recommended by their doctors. It also wanted parents to retain the right to decide which vaccines their children received.
“The President wants Americans, and he said this many times, to get vaccinated as their doctors recommend, as long as they have a choice in the matter,” Oz said.
He maintained that measles vaccines were offered separately in some other countries, citing Japan. Brennan said Japan had experienced problems after separating the vaccines and that the change had increased costs.
Oz said the federal government would continue paying for vaccines for children from low-income families regardless of how they were administered.
“We’re going to pay for the vaccines no matter what,” he said.
He argued that the wider issue was whether parents had the right to question vaccination recommendations and seek religious or other exemptions from state requirements.
The MMR vaccine protects against three contagious viral diseases. Measles can cause pneumonia, inflammation of the brain and death, particularly among young children and people with weakened immune systems.
(IANS)
