The acting chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday called for the combination measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to be broken up into three separate shots, a move that would turn back the clock on more than fifty years of vaccine policy.
Acting CDC director Jim O’Neill suggested the MMR be split up in a social media post, just after U.S. President Donald Trump also made a similar argument in his own post. There’s no evidence that the combined MMR, or the childhood vaccination schedule in general, is in any way dangerous to children—a reality that the CDC still acknowledges on its website (for now at least). There is also no evidence that breaking up the MMR would be safer. Rather, it could make it incredibly hard for parents to get their children fully vaccinated—not least because the separate vaccines don’t actually exist in the U.S.
In his post, O’Neill called for vaccine makers to make individual shots for all three diseases—the separate shots were abandoned in the 1970s because the combined MMR was so effective. It’s a stance that O’Neill, also deputy HHS secretary, is standing by.
“Deputy Secretary O’Neill agrees with President Trump that immunizations for measles, mumps, and rubella would be best administered as three separate vaccines,” a HHS spokesperson told Gizmodo, adding that “standalone vaccinations can potentially reduce the risk of side effects and can maximize parental choice in childhood immunizations.”
Logistical hurdles aside, however, there’s simply no good reason why the MMR vaccine should be separated, and doing so could actively endanger children and increase their risk of encountering these diseases.
Why three in one?
Scientists first developed vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella in the 1960s, while the first combination MMR vaccine was developed in 1971. Effective and far easier for parents to access because it required fewer doses to reach full immunity from all three diseases, the shot rapidly became the global gold standard. In 2005, a new vaccine that added protection against varicella (chickenpox) became available as well, the MMRV vaccine, although it is far less commonly used.
Over the decades, the MMR vaccine has prevented countless infections and deaths from all three diseases. Extensive studies have validated its safety and shown that the vaccine’s overall benefits outweigh any potential harms, with serious side effects like anaphylaxis (a severe allergic reaction) seen only very rarely.
An important advantage of the MMR vaccine, which is given to children twice by the age of six, is its convenience. Parents are more able and more likely to vaccinate their children against these diseases because it only requires two doses of one vaccine, as opposed to six doses of three vaccines.
But anti-vaccine advocates have long contended that giving children too many vaccines at once can be dangerous, and have specifically called for combination vaccines like the MMR to be broken up, despite having no new evidence to support their cause.
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