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  "description": "Despite approving a major policy shift, the CDC continues to distribute vaccine information it knows is no longer accurate – denying people informed consent.",
  "path": "/the-cdc-is-still-misleading-people/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-08T23:30:43.000Z",
  "site": "https://goodoil.news",
  "tags": [
    "**Maryanne Demasi**",
    "voted to scrap",
    "said",
    "31 January 2025",
    "immune responses",
    "January 2026",
    "MD Reports"
  ],
  "textContent": "**Maryanne Demasi**\n _Maryanne Demasi is an investigative journalist who writes for online media and top-tiered medical journals. For over a decade, she was a TV presenter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)._\n\nLast year, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took a decisive turn on Covid vaccination policy.\n\nIn September, its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted to scrap blanket Covid-19 vaccine recommendations and replace them with **individualised** clinical decision making across all age groups.\n\nAt the same meeting, the committee voted unanimously to strengthen informed consent by overhauling the **Vaccine Information Statement (VIS) –** **the document that underpins patient decision-making at the point of vaccination**.\n\nThe message from ACIP was clear. Patients should be told, in plain language, what is known, what remains uncertain, and how risks and benefits vary between individuals.\n\n“Informed consent is back,” said Deputy Secretary O’Neill at the time, praising ACIP for educating Americans about “important vaccine safety signals”.\n\nThat endorsement should have triggered immediate changes to the information forms used across the country.\n\nBut months later, not a single one of those changes has been made.\n\nThe most recent form, dated 31 January 2025**,** still presents information that no longer reflects CDC policy.\n\nAs a result, people are being misinformed at the point of care and denied one of the most basic rights in medicine – **informed consent**.\n\n### **What ACIP voted to change**\n\nAt the September meeting, the chair of ACIP’s Covid-19 vaccine workgroup, MIT professor Retsef Levi, laid out a detailed framework for what patients should be told before agreeing to vaccination.\n\nACIP identified at least six categories of risk and uncertainty that it agreed must be disclosed clearly and accessibly.\n\nThese included low-quality evidence for vaccine effectiveness; immune effects linked to repeated dosing; documented serious cardiac harms; prolonged post-vaccination syndromes; persistence of vaccine components in the body; and the absence of adequately powered randomised trials in pregnancy.\n\n__Prof Levi outlined changes proposed to VIS forms__\n\nACIP voted that this information should be incorporated into patient-facing materials, and that clinicians should discuss risks, benefits, and uncertainties with patients as part of an individual medical decision – supported, not undermined, by the VIS.\n\n### **What patients are still being told**\n\nDespite those votes, the current VIS continues to frame Covid-19 vaccination as a universal recommendation. It states that the vaccine is “recommended for everyone six months of age and older”, including pregnant and breastfeeding women.\n\nWhat it does _not_ say is that benefit varies sharply by risk group – or that for people who are young, healthy, or previously infected, the balance of benefit is far less favourable.\n\nIt does not tell patients that vaccination is now meant to be an ‘individualised’ clinical decision in consultation with a doctor.\n\nThe document also presents certainty where ACIP has acknowledged uncertainty.\n\nFor example, it does not disclose that evidence for vaccine effectiveness is low quality, that protection against infection is limited and short-lived, or that repeated dosing may alter immune responses in ways that remain poorly understood.\n\nOn safety, the VIS reassures rather than informs.\n\nMyocarditis and pericarditis are described as rare, with a low chance of occurring, without acknowledging fatal cases discussed at ACIP meetings or the unresolved questions around true incidence, prognosis, and long-term outcomes.\n\nThere is no reference to prolonged post-vaccination syndromes described to the committee, and no mention of persistence of vaccine components in organs.\n\nNor is there disclosure that Covid-19 vaccines were not tested in adequately powered randomised trials in pregnancy – despite pregnancy being explicitly included in the recommendation.\n\nTaken together, the VIS does not merely lag behind policy but actively misrepresents the state of evidence.\n\n### **Who does this affect?**\n\nDespite widespread scepticism, Covid-19 vaccines continue to be administered in large numbers.\n\nAs of early January 2026, about **17 per cent of adults** in the United States reported having received the 2025–26 Covid-19 vaccine. Among children, an estimated **seven per cent** were considered up to date.\n\nThat still translates into tens of millions of doses delivered through pharmacies and medical clinics. In late 2025 alone, roughly **18.6 million doses** were administered in retail pharmacies and around **two million** in doctors’ offices.\n\nFor each of those vaccinations, the VIS remains the primary mechanism by which patients are told what they are agreeing to.\n\nWhen that document contradicts current policy and omits acknowledged risks and uncertainties, consent is not informed. People are being misled.\n\n### **An unresolved failure**\n\nResponsibility now sits squarely with the CDC.\n\nThe Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the agency, was asked to explain why the VIS has not been updated, but did not respond by the time of publication.\n\nThe CDC continues to distribute a Vaccine Information Statement that no longer reflects its own approved policy or the concerns raised by its expert advisers.\n\nIs this incompetence – or internal sabotage by career bureaucrats unwilling to implement approved agency policy?\n\nUntil the VIS is corrected, the CDC is presiding over a breakdown in informed consent – allowing misinformation by omission to persist at the point of care.\n\n* * *\n\n#### **Addendum**\n\nThe problem is not limited to Covid vaccines.\n\nEven after ACIP voted to change its guidance on the **routine birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine** , the official Vaccine Information Statement still tells parents the vaccine is given at birth. The current hepatitis B VIS – dated **31 January 2025** – has not been updated to reflect the committee’s decision.\n\nOnce again, outdated government information is being presented as settled policy, undermining informed consent at the point of care.\n\nThis article was originally published by MD Reports.",
  "title": "The CDC Is Still Misleading People",
  "updatedAt": "2026-02-08T23:30:43.000Z"
}